Northwest Europe: 01*Greenland

About fifty-four million years ago Greenland and Europe began to separate creating the opening that later became the Northeast Atlantic Ocean. The accompanying countless number of volcanic eruptions built up a huge basalt lava plateau covering almost the entire Faroe-Rockall region (an area north and west of Britain and Ireland) together with the southeastern part of Greenland.

Erosion, especially during the recent epoch of alternating glacials and interglacials, sculpted the surface of the plateau into its present-day shape. When the ice began to melt the rising seas eventually flooded most of the plateau except for a few scattered elevations now found in present-day eastern Greenland, northwest Iceland, the Faroe Islands, western Norway, western Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Greenland is geologically part of North America but from the tenth century AD onwards it has been politically and culturally associated with Europe (Norway and Denmark) and is now an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark.

Greenland, the world’s largest island that is not a continent, is positioned between Ellesmere Island (Canada) to the west across the Nares Strait (30 km) and Svalbard (island) to the east across the Greenland Sea (540 km). All the towns and settlements of Greenland are situated along the ice-free coast, with the population being concentrated along the west coast.

The origins of modern Greenland may lie in the Arctic Small Tool tradition (2700-500 BC), a precise, miniature, chipped stone tool technology that settled in Alaska with groups later moving eastwards into Canada and Greenland.

The Saqqaq culture (2500-800 BC) settled on the centre west coast and the Independence-I culture (2400-1300 BC) in the northeast, followed by the Independence II culture (700-80 BC) in the northeast and the Pre-Dorset culture (700-00-200) along the west coast. As Pre-Dorset may have been a continuation of the Independence II; the two cultures can be combined as the Greenlandic Dorset culture (700-00-200).

After AD 200, Greenland was apparently uninhabited until the Late Dorset culture (500-1300) settled on the Greenlandic side of the Nares strait in the northwest. 

Circa 930, during the Late Dorset (700-1300) recolonisation of northeast Greenland after his ship was blown off course while travelling from Norway to Iceland, the Norse explorer Gunnbjorn Ulfsson, sighted Greenland (or some of the islands nearby) but he did not land there.

About 980, Erik Thorvaldsson (c.950-c.1003), also known as Erik the Red, led a group of explorers to the island and established a settlement there. He named it ‘Greenland’ in the hope of attracting settlers to join him when he got home. In the summer of 986, he led twenty-five ships loaded with settlers and landed in an area called Eystribygd, or ‘eastern settlement’. Between 985-1000 Eystribygd became the first and by far the larger of the two main areas of Greenland to be settled by the Norsemen. 

The Thule people, the ancestors of the Inuit, developed in coastal Alaska around AD 1000 and expanded eastwards into Greenland by AD 1200 where they may have interacted with the Norse.