Country · Americas
Greenland
Greenland is a country in North America. Its capital city is Nuuk. About 56 thousand people live there, in an area of 2 166 086 square kilometres.
Picture credit: Thomas Leth-Olsen (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Markus Trienke (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Buiobuione (CC BY-SA 4.0) · patano (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Gordon Leggett (CC BY 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is Greenland?
Greenland lies in North America, on the continent of Americas.
It sits in the northern half of the world, roughly 8 015 km from the equator.
Its coastline is about 44 087 km long.
It has no land neighbours — every border it has is with the sea.
How big is Greenland?
Greenland covers 2 166 086 square kilometres.
That is about 6.1 times the size of Germany.
Who lives in Greenland?
About 56 thousand people live in Greenland.
People here speak Greenlandic.
They pay with the krone (kr.).
On average, people born here can expect to live about 68 years.
The land of Greenland
The land in Greenland sits on average 1 792 metres above sea level — high enough that much of it counts as mountain country.
Its coast runs for about 44 087 km. Walking it end to end, at twenty kilometres a day, would take roughly 2 204 days.
It lies inside the polar circle, which is the single biggest reason its weather is the way it is.
What makes Greenland different?
A dish the country is known for: Kiviak.
Websites from here often end in .gl.
Greenland and the rest of the world
Out of every thousand people alive on Earth, about 0 live in Greenland.
It takes up about 1.6 % of all the land that countries stand on.
A country, or a territory?
Greenland is not an independent country but a territory. It has its own name, its own borders and often its own laws, but another country speaks for it abroad — it holds no seat of its own at the United Nations, for instance.
That is more common than it sounds. There are dozens of such places around the world: some sit far from the country they belong to, some right beside it. A few govern themselves almost completely and hand over only defence and foreign policy; others are held more closely. How much a territory decides for itself is settled case by case, never by one rule.
On this site territories get a page of their own, because children look them up and because other pages link to them. They are left out of the record lists, though: those rank only members of the United Nations, so that a ranking never mixes countries with places belonging to somebody else.
Nature and animals
Of the animals on this site, 6 live wild in Greenland: Polar bear, Arctic fox, Reindeer, Snowy owl, Narwhal and Walrus.
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons under free licences — every credit is on the page itself and in the picture credits.
Questions children ask
What is the capital of Greenland?
The capital of Greenland is Nuuk. It is the city where the country's government works from.
How many people live in Greenland?
About 56 thousand people live in Greenland. (Source: World Bank, 2018.)
How big is Greenland?
Greenland covers 2 166 086 square kilometres. That is about 6.1 times the size of Germany.
Which continent is Greenland in?
Greenland is in Americas, in the part called North America.
Where these numbers come from
Borders and outlines: Natural Earth. Names, capitals, areas, languages and currencies: ISO 3166 data (world-countries). Population: World Bank, 2018. Every derived figure on this page (ranks, density, distance from the equator) is calculated from those values.
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