Greenland's geography: a rim of rock around a basin of ice

Why the map of Greenland is mostly ice

Statistics Greenland gives the total area in its 2026 yearbook, Greenland in Figures, as 2.2 million square kilometres, of which 1.7 million is covered by the ice sheet. Wikipedia carries more exact figures that disagree at the margin: 2,166,086 square kilometres in all, 1,755,637 of them under ice and 410,449 free of it, which puts 81% under the sheet. Britannica gives the ice more than 1,800,000 square kilometres. The Nordic Council of Ministers says almost 80% of the island is covered by the ice cap and glaciers, and the geography article on Wikipedia gives 84% in its list of natural hazards. None of them states the year of the survey behind its figure.

The same spread appears in the coastline. Statistics Greenland prints 44,087 kilometres in 2026; Britannica prints 39,330 and compares it to the circumference of the Earth at the Equator. Neither source says how its length was measured.

The territory runs 2,670 kilometres from north to south and 1,050 from east to west at its widest, between latitudes 59° and 83° north. Britannica puts two thirds of the island inside the Arctic Circle; Wikipedia puts over 80% of the land mass north of it. The ice-free remainder is large in absolute terms, and the Nordic Council describes it as almost as large as Sweden, with only a very small part arable.

On a Mercator projection, which exaggerates land the further it lies from the Equator, Greenland looks larger than Africa. Britannica gives its real size as roughly that of Saudi Arabia.

What lies under the Greenland ice sheet

The ice averages 1,500 metres thick, according to Britannica, and reaches a maximum of about 3,000. Its surface climbs from sea level at the coast to about 3,200 metres over the east-central interior. Beneath it, most of the rock floor lies at or slightly below current sea level, pushed down by the weight above. The mountains that do stand high are at the edges. Gunnbjørn Fjeld in the Watkins Range on the east coast reaches 3,694 metres, while most of Greenland lies below 1,500 metres.

What the rock would look like without its load is argued over. A survey led by the French scientist Paul-Emile Victor concluded in 1951 that under the ice Greenland is three large islands, separated by narrow straits reaching the sea at Ilulissat Icefjord, at the canyon now called Greenland's Grand Canyon and south of Nordostrundingen. The conclusion is disputed. The Wikipedia geography article states that it is unclear whether the water left in the interior would stand at sea level or above it, and that a lake with one drain is the likelier result.

Features nobody could see from the surface have been found beneath it. A series of canyons runs beneath the ice, cut by flowing water during repeated cycles of melting and new ice. In the north-west an asteroid impact crater larger than Washington, D.C. lies buried under the sheet. It is thought that before the last ice age the land had mountainous edges around a low and probably dry centre, drained to the sea by one large river flowing west past the place where Disko Island now stands.

The rock itself belongs to North America. Britannica describes Greenland as a structural extension of the Canadian Shield, the plateau of hard Precambrian rock across the Canadian north, and a submarine ridge no deeper than 180 metres joins the island physically to that continent. In the Isua greenstone belt of the south-west, rocks have been dated to 3.7 to 3.8 billion years. The Nordic Council's summary of Greenland records both halves: part of the North American continent, and geopolitically part of Europe.

How the ice sheet reaches the sea

Snow falling on the interior is compressed into layers of ice that move outward, from the centre towards the coast, and leave the sheet through outlet glaciers. NOAA's 2024 Arctic Report Card describes hundreds of marine-terminating glaciers ringing the sheet and calving icebergs into the ocean. Along many parts of the coast the ice fronts directly on the sea, and long, deep fjords reach inland on both the east and west sides in branching systems.

Sermeq Kujalleq, which enters Ilulissat Icefjord on the west coast 250 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle. UNESCO's inscription gives it a speed of 40 metres a day and an annual calving of over 46 cubic kilometres of ice, 10% of all the calf ice Greenland produces, and notes that it is still eroding the bed of its fjord. The short description at the top of the same UNESCO page gives the calving as over 35 cubic kilometres. Britannica gives the speed as often 30 metres a day. The glacier has been studied for more than 250 years, and in winter the fjord freezes solid.

UNESCO estimates the oldest ice in the sheet at 250,000 years, and it carries detailed information on the climate from then to around 11,550 years ago, when conditions became more stable.

Meltwater leaves by rivers as well as by icebergs. The Watson River, which flows past Kangerlussuaq into the sea, drains about 12,000 square kilometres of the ice sheet. Its discharge has been measured every hour since 2006, 150 metres from the bridge in Kangerlussuaq and about 25 kilometres from the ice margin, with an uncertainty of 15%. The University of Copenhagen ran the gauge until 2013 and the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland has run it since. For the years before 2006 the flow has been reconstructed back to 1949 from air temperatures measured at Kangerlussuaq and from the discharge of the neighbouring Tasersiaq Lake, gauged since 1975.

How much ice Greenland loses in a year

How the ice budget is kept

The sheet gains mass from snow and loses it through meltwater running off and through solid ice calving into the ocean. The sum over a mass balance year, which runs from 1 September to 31 August, is the ice sheet's mass balance. The Polar Portal, run by Danish research institutions including the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, publishes a daily figure for the surface alone, snowfall minus runoff, and warns that it is a different number: over a whole year the surface balance is always positive, because not all the snow that falls runs off again, while the total includes calving and the melting of glacier tongues in warm seawater. One gigatonne is a billion tonnes, the mass of one cubic kilometre of water.

The Geological Survey runs the Programme for Monitoring of the Greenland Ice Sheet, known as PROMICE, and its network of automatic weather stations on the ice records radiation, wind, snow height, air temperature and the lowering of the surface by melt. Satellite gravity measurement adds the total mass.

What the recent years recorded

NOAA's Arctic Report Card for 2024 gives the balance for the year from 1 September 2023 to 31 August 2024 as a loss of 55 gigatonnes, plus or minus 35, measured by the GRACE-FO satellite mission. The average from 2002 to 2023 was a loss of 266 gigatonnes a year, plus or minus 16. The smaller 2024 figure came from above-average snowfall and below-average melting, driven by persistent summer low pressure over southern Greenland and Iceland, while calving stayed high: 487.3 gigatonnes a year through 13 August 2024, against a 1991 to 2020 mean of 458. In south-east Greenland melt reached far inland that summer, and areas between 2,700 and 3,000 metres saw twice as many melt days as usual. The report counts net annual loss in every year since 1998.

In 2012, satellites showed some melting across 97% of the sheet at midsummer, where in most years about half is affected. In 2021 rain fell on the summit of the ice sheet, and the research station there had no rain gauge to measure it.

Off the east coast, a glacier that had joined a piece of land to the mainland was found to be shrinking in 2002 and had melted away by 2007, leaving an island. It was named Uunartoq Qeqertaq, "warming island".

How the ice and the sea divide Greenland's climate

The coasts have a tundra climate and the interior an ice cap climate. Britannica credits the Gulf Stream with a slight influence in the south-west. Wikipedia gives an average winter temperature of −9 °C in Nuuk against about −27 °C at Iqaluit in Nunavut, Canada, and summer highs in Nuuk averaging around 10 °C, too low for trees. The Nordic Council records an average of −0.7 °C in Nuuk for 2024.

Statistics Greenland published the monthly extremes for five stations in 2025.

In 2025 Kangerlussuaq, whose river gauge stands about 25 kilometres from the ice margin, fell almost 20 degrees lower than Nuuk. Statistics Greenland's record high for the territory is 25.9 °C, on the west coast in July 2013. The record low, −69.6 °C, was measured on the ice cap near its summit on 22 December 1991. The record high at Summit Camp, on the ice, is 2.2 °C.

Precipitation falls away from south to north, from more than 1,900 millimetres a year in the south to about 50 in the north, and Britannica classes large areas as Arctic desert. The far north, Peary Land, carries no ice sheet at all, because the air there is too dry to supply the snow an ice sheet is built from.

What grows is tundra: sedge, cotton grass, around 500 species of flowering plants, ferns and their relatives, and about 950 species of lichen. Dwarf birch, willow and alder survive in sheltered southern valleys, and the one natural forest, in the Qinngua Valley in the far south, runs 15 kilometres and is shielded from the winds off the ice by mountains over 1,500 metres. Britannica puts land fit for agriculture at about 1% of the total area, all in the ice-free south, where the farms of Kujataa were worked by Norse settlers from the 10th to the 15th century and by Inuit farmers from the 1780s, as its history describes.

Why no road links two Greenland towns

Where the towns stand

Every town and settlement in Greenland stands on the coast. Statistics Greenland states in its 2026 yearbook that no roads exist between towns and that travel is by sea or air only; Britannica adds that roads are limited to short stretches within town limits, and that dogsleds and snowmobiles run on the ice-covered coast and inland.

Most people live on the southern part of the west coast. Nuuk had 20,304 inhabitants on 1 January 2026, Sisimiut 5,455 and Ilulissat 5,150, and over 65% of the population lived in the five towns of Nuuk, Sisimiut, Ilulissat, Aasiaat and Qaqortoq. The territory as a whole counted 56,542 people on 1 January 2025. On the east coast, Tasiilaq had 1,811 on 1 January 2026 and Ittoqqortoormiit 329; in the far north-west, Qaanaaq had 588 and Siorapaluk 32. At the other end of the scale, the 2026 tables list Kangerluk with four residents. Statistics Greenland describes a movement from settlements to towns running since the 1960s.

The north-east belongs to no municipality. It forms a national park of 972,000 square kilometres, and Statistics Greenland names its only residents as the Sirius dog sled patrol and the staff of the weather stations; 55 people were registered at stations on 1 January 2026. Sled dogs from the northern and eastern sled districts need a special permit to be moved to the west or south, and dogs from the west and south need one to go the other way, to keep the Greenland sled dog from being cross-bred.

How the land between sea and ice was used

Aasivissuit-Nipisat, inscribed by UNESCO, is a transect in central West Greenland running from the ocean through fjords and inland to the ice sheet, with 4,200 years of evidence of people moving along it with the seasons: large communal winter houses on the coast and hides and drive systems for communal caribou hunts inland. Seven localities mark the route, from Nipisat in the west to Aasivissuit near the ice. An executive order of the Government of Greenland protecting it came into force on 1 February 2018, and its regulations prevent licences for mineral prospecting or exploration within the boundary.

Where Greenland's land runs out in the north

The north coast lies within 800 kilometres of the North Pole, and what counts as its last piece of land has been revised several times. Cape Morris Jesup, at 83°39′N at the tip of the mainland, was discovered by Robert Peary in 1900 and long thought to be the end of the land. In 1969 a Canadian team surveyed Kaffeklubben Island, first recorded in 1900 and first visited in 1921, and found that its tip at 83°39′45″N lies 750 metres further north.

Later claims concern banks of gravel. Uffe Petersen of the Danish Geodetic Institute found Oodaaq Island at 83°40′32.5″N in 1978; it was last confirmed in 1979. In 2003 the explorer Dennis Schmitt and his team found a patch of rocks and boulders 35 metres by 15 at 83°42′N and named it 83-42, and a bathymetric survey in 2022 found that it was probably rock lying on sea ice and not attached to the sea floor. Storms, sea ice and moving water build, shift and destroy the moraine banks along this coast.

To the west, Greenland is separated from Ellesmere Island by 26 kilometres and shares a land border 1.2 kilometres long with Canada on Hans Island. To the south-east, Iceland lies about 320 kilometres away across the Denmark Strait. The territory's other extreme points are an unnamed islet 2.3 kilometres south of Cape Farewell at 59°44′N, Nordvestø in the Carey Islands at 73°10′W, and Nordostrundingen at 11°19′W. At the Kap Morris Jesup weather station in the north, NOAA's 2024 report gives average temperatures for September and December 2023 of 2.2 and 3.4 degrees above normal.