Word: islanded
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...like for Greenland's 56,000 residents. But as the increasingly alarming news of its melting 1.8 million square kilometer (695,000 square mile) ice cap has trickled south and the race for polar resources has officially started, the international community is paying more attention to its largest island. By the end of this summer, some 3,400 scientists from 60 countries were working on the landmass. Both German Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had dropped by to see the melting glaciers for themselves. And singer Björk dedicated a song to Greenland...
...when a Norwegian Danish priest came to what is now the capital city of Nuuk, Greenland remains part of the Danish kingdom. In 1979, its predominantly Inuit population fought for management of domestic affairs, which it was granted, but Copenhagen still handles its foreign relations and supports the island with a whopping $600 million yearly subsidy. Diplomatic relations between territory and crown are very cordial - indeed, some Greenlanders consider themselves lucky to have been colonized by Denmark and not the United States or Canada - but some also feel that the same well-intentioned Danish money that keeps the island...
...those years, environmental and social change have hit Greenland hard and fast. In Nuuk, drying musk ox hides hang over the balconies of the monolithic blocks of public housing that absorb exiles from the quickly emptying outlying villages stationed around the island's rocky fringe. The island's transition to a cash economy has rendered subsistence hunting a less and less viable way to live, and the effects of climate change on sea ice has made hunting seasons shorter and less predictable. Poverty, alcoholism and high suicide rates haunt the population. Alfred Jakobsen, deputy minister of the environment...
...long before Russia planted a metal flag in the sea floor beneath the North Pole last month, Greenland had been eyeing its own potential reserves of oil and gas surrounding the island. Shrimp processing is the biggest contributor to the territory's GDP today, but big oil could offer a much shorter path to self-reliance. In September, Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Denmark's Dong Energy joined the ranks of those who have been looking for oil off Greenland's west coast, and last month the U.S. Geological Survey released an estimate that an area off Greenland's northeast coast...
...nations finding yet another vested interest in their landscape isn't universally thrilling in Greenland, which has been a strategic military outpost for the U.S. and Denmark since the Cold War. Inuit hunters were displaced when the American military set up camp at the Thule Air Base on the island's northwest shore in the 1950s, and Inuit hunters were the first to be exposed when a B-52 carrying hydrogen bombs crashed near the base in 1968. "We are fragile, both in terms of the climate crisis and because of the military buildup in the Arctic," says Aqqaluk Lynge...