Discovering Peary Land
An ice sheet covers 80% of the world’s largest island, blanketing it in white. Despite this stark landscape, Eric the Red named the island “Greenland” when he first landed on it over 1,000 years ago (c. 1000 AD). It’s widely believed that the name was an attempt at marketing: to encourage Viking settlers to join him. These settlements were likely never larger than 2,500 people and were abandoned in the 15th century. Even after the Vikings had left, however, the name stuck. But despite Eric the Red’s marketing ploy, Greenland is now the least densely populated territory in the world.
Almost 90% of Greenland’s 60,000 residents are Greenlandic Inuit. While Inuit peoples have inhabited the island off and on for over 4,500 years, the ancestors of most contemporary Greenlanders arrived while the Vikings were there—around 1300 AD. Today, the Inuit call Greenland “Kalaallit Nunaat,” loosely translated to “Land of the Greenlanders.” The origin of the word for Greenlander, “Kalaallit,” is not well understood, however, and its literal meaning has been lost over time. It does not bear a resemblance to the words for green or for land (qorsuk and nuna, respectively). Here, I find a compelling poetic context to set the stage for this photographic exploration: a Viking name that was intentionally false and an Inuit name that is a mystery.
The most remote part of the island is a region called “Peary Land” on the far northeastern tip. These 57,000 km2 are the location of two scientific research stations, but no active settlements. This was not always the case, as the remains of prehistoric villages dating from c. 2400-200 BCE, when the region’s climate was milder, have been found. The landscape of polar deserts and glaciated mountains is cut by deep Arctic fjords. Sparse vegetation sustains caribous, musk oxen, Arctic hares, and lemmings. These, in turn, sustain Arc- tic foxes, polar wolves, and polar bears. Colonies of seabirds, gulls, and geese inhabit the region in the summer, migrating south to avoid the long and dark winters. It is a delicate Arctic ecosystem that is extremely vulnerable to climate change.
I’ve never visited Peary Land, though I would certainly like to. In the meantime, this book considers the remote region through appropriated images from three sources: archival photographs from the first modern expedition to the region, corrupted satellite imagery from Google Earth, and geotagged pictures mined from Flickr. Like Greenland’s name, all three are interestingly misleading or incomplete.