Though a part of the continent of North America, Greenland has been politically and culturally associated with the European kingdoms of Norway and Denmark for more than a millennium, beginning in 986.

Later in the early 17th century, Dano-Norwegian explorers reached Greenland again, finding their earlier settlement extinct and reestablishing a permanent Scandinavian presence on the island.

Since the 19th century, Greenland was seen by the Danish kingdom as one of its ancestral lands and part of its national identity, linked to a thousand-year-old Nordic history, unlike its Caribbean and Asian overseas colonies.

[25] With the melting of the ice due to global warming, its abundance of mineral wealth and its strategic position between Europe, North America and the Arctic zone, Greenland is of interest to great powers.

Interpretation of ice-core and clam-shell data suggests that between AD 800 and 1300 the regions around the fjords of southern Greenland had a relatively mild climate, several degrees Celsius warmer than usual in the North Atlantic[52] with trees and herbaceous plants growing and livestock being farmed.

The Eastern Settlement was probably abandoned in the early to mid-15th century, during this cold period.Theories drawn from archeological excavations at Herjolfsnes in the 1920s suggest that the condition of human bones from this period indicates that the Norse population was malnourished, possibly because of soil erosion resulting from the Norsemen's destruction of natural vegetation in the course of farming, turf-cutting, and wood-cutting.

Malnutrition may also have resulted from widespread deaths from pandemic plague;[57] the decline in temperatures during the Little Ice Age; and armed conflicts with the Skrælings (Norse word for Inuit, meaning "wretches"[51]).

Upon the brothers' return to Portugal, the cartographic information supplied by Corte-Real was incorporated into a new map of the world which was presented to Ercole I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, by Alberto Cantino in 1502.

After the collapse of the Third Reich, Albert Speer briefly considered escaping in a small aeroplane to hide out in Greenland, but changed his mind and decided to surrender to the United States Armed Forces.

The United States tried to construct a subterranean network of secret nuclear missile launch sites in the Greenlandic ice cap, named Project Iceworm.

The Danish government did not become aware of the programme's mission until 1997, when they discovered it while looking, in the declassified documents, for records related to the crash of a nuclear-equipped B-52 bomber near the Thule air base in 1968.

[83] Denmark maintains control of the territory's foreign affairs and defence matters, and upholds an annual block grant of 3.2 billion Danish kroner.

As Greenland begins to collect revenues of its natural resources, however, the said grant will gradually be diminished; this is generally considered to be a step toward the territory's eventual full independence from Denmark.

"[91] In January 2025, Denmark announced it would boost Arctic defence by spending an additional $2 billion, "to improve capabilities for surveillance and maintaining sovereignty in the region".

[106] Ben Keene, the atlas's editor, commented: In the last two or three decades, global warming has reduced the size of glaciers throughout the Arctic and earlier this year, news sources confirmed what climate scientists already knew: water, not rock, lay beneath this ice bridge on the east coast of Greenland.

However, in 1969 a Canadian team surveyed Kaffeklubben Island (latitude 83° 39′ 45″ N), which was first recorded in 1900 and first visited in 1921, and determined that its northernmost point is 750 m north of Cape Morris Jesup.

Between 2012 and 2017, this melting added an average of 0.68 mm per year,[123] equal to 37% of sea level rise from land ice sources (excluding thermal expansion of water from the continual increase in the ocean heat content).

[127][128] Due to this meltwater input, the circulation may even collapse outright with widespread detrimental effects, although research suggests this is likely only if the highest possible warming is sustained for multiple centuries.

[135] The island was part of the very ancient Precambrian continent of Laurentia, the eastern core of which forms the Greenland Shield, while the less exposed coastal strips became a plateau.

[137] The paleontology of East Greenland is specially rich, with some of the early tetrapods such as the Acanthostega and Ichthyostega from the Devonian[138] and unique Triassic animals such as the phytosaur Mystriosuchus alleroq[139] and the dinosaurs Issi saaneq[140] and tracks.

[147] Birds, particularly seabirds, are an important part of Greenland's animal life; they consist of both Palearctic and Nearctic species, breeding populations of auks, puffins, skuas, and kittiwakes are found on steep mountainsides.

[170] On 21 January 1968, a B-52G, with four nuclear bombs aboard as part of Operation Chrome Dome, crashed on the ice of the North Star Bay while attempting an emergency landing at Thule Air Base.

The Greenland Home Rule Government (GHRG) has pursued a tight fiscal policy since the late 1980s, which has helped create surpluses in the public budget and low inflation.

The multi-ethnic population of European-Inuit represent people of Danish, Norwegian and to a lesser degree of Faroese, Icelandic, Dutch (whalers), German[5] and American descent.

[228] In the 1960s and 1970s, at a time when the population was increasing, 4,500 Greenland Inuit women and girls (roughly half of all fertile females) were fitted with intrauterine devices (IUDs) by Danish doctors.

[234] This Kalaallisut word means soul or spirit of a deceased person and describes an artistic figure, usually no more than 20 centimetres (8 in) tall, carved mainly from walrus ivory, with a variety of unusual shapes.

Modern artisans still use indigenous materials such as musk ox and sheep wool, seal fur, shells, soapstone, reindeer antlers or gemstones.

The singer-songwriter Simon Lynge is the first musical artist from Greenland to have an album released across the United Kingdom, and to perform at the UK's Glastonbury Festival.

After the arrival of missionaries in the 18th century, the drum dance (still popular among Canadian Inuit) was banned as pagan and shamanistic and replaced by polyphonic singing of secular and church songs.

Scandinavian, German and Scottish whalers brought the fiddle, accordion and polka (kalattuut) to Greenland, where they are now played in intricate dance steps.