[Granville-Hough] 27 Nov 2009 - Greenland

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2009 08:04:52 -0800
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Subject: Greenland -27 Nov 2009.

    I was thinking about Greenland in these short days and I wanted to
cover some of the things I learned about it.  First, it is covered by a
huge glacier, and no one knows whether Greenland is a single land or
several big islands.  There a few ice-free peninsulas which jut out into
the ocean, and the ocean breezes in summer have apparently made them
free of the glacial ice.  We were on such a peninsula at Thule, about 20
miles along the ocean and inlets and about 10 miles out to the ice cap,
which rose up like a plateau to the East.  It is the very place that the
historic efforts to reach the North Pole were launched.
	We were there because this was the site of the Ballistic Missile Early
Warning System (BMEWS), a huge radar about the size of a football field
which tracked all space objects and reported them the the Command Center
in Colorado.  More about that later.
    The people are known as Greenlanders, and they speak Greenlandic,
and are taught it in school.  Denmark somehow became the parent country,
and I do not remember how it came about.  The career Danes all have to
learn Greenlandic, and for the remote Eskimo families in hunting groups
around the land, they have to learn Eskimo dialects.  Looking at a map,
I see the capital is Godthaab, and the the total population of the land
is about 60,000.  I flew over Godthaab once on the way to Thule.  The
Eskimo group at New Thule was given credit for 206 people.  There are
said to be six ports for fishing villages open in the summer, far aF=way
to the
the south.  You get from one village to another by sea or dog sled, or
by air.  The only roads are the streets in the few villages. My daughter
Bonny Miller flew over Southern Greenland once on a trip from London and
she reported seeing several tiny villages, probably those mentioned
above, with boats off shore
    One of the things I recall in reading history of Greenland is that
the first Europeans who identified a village at Godthaab found there
were two
groups of people living there, speaking different languages.  They
looked the same, both lived on fish and seals, but were different.  The
Europeans could understand neither language, so the origins of these
people was left open.  Current researchers consider that Greenlandic is
an amalgamation of Eskimo and old Norse, with a basic Eskimo format.
What is now clear is that some Greenlanders have the same Viking yDNA
which I have.  The belief is that the descendants of the Leif Ericson
colony did not all die, but just slowly integrated with the Eskimos to
form the Greenlandic people.  I saw the Eskimos, but I never saw a
Greenlander face to face, so I cannot describe how a Greenlander looked.
    Greenland is a mountainous country, but the ice cap fills in all the
valleys and in most places is about a mile deep.  The mountain peaks are
there, over a mile high, but they are often not visible, as Air Force
pilots have learned.
    At the Thule ice-free peninsula, only 17 plants grew, and none grew
more than four or five inches high.  Most years, these 17 plants would
burst into bloom about the first of August and try to make seed, which
they could do in some years, but not often.  The only plant which I
recognized was the pussy willow, which grew along the ground like a
small milkweed.  In summer, the ground only thawed an inch or so, then
it was solid permafrost, rock-hard ice.  All the plants had to survive
in that 1 inch of thawed soil.
    Thule was an arctic desert, with only two inches of rainfall each
year, except none came as rain.  It was all snow or blowing ice
crystal.  Thule was subject to "phase-storms" of blowing ice particles
from the ice cap.  Sometimes the wind speeds got over 100 knots, and a
person could be tumbled over and over and blown out to sea.  This ever
present danger governed many of our day by day activities.