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Greenland covers an enormous area. It is the largest non-continental island in the world, stretching over two million square kilometres. This arctic country is located to the north-east of the American continent, although it is an autonomous territory of a European state: Denmark.

Indeed, Greenland has its own autonomous government, just like the Faroe Isles– archipelago in the northern Atlantic Ocean which is also part of Denmark, which controls the foreign affairs of both of these territories.

Most of Greenland (over 80% of it) is covered by a layer of ice that in some places is over three kilometres thick. However, recent studies have alerted us to the gradual melting of the island, which has been linked to climate change.

The latest of these studies, conducted by the University of Kansas and NASA and recently published in the journal Science, concludes that the amount of ice in the glaciers of Greenland that pours into the waters of the Atlantic Ocean has doubled in just five years; that the mean temperature in the south-eastern part of the island has increased by three degrees centigrade over the last twenty years; and that the melting of the Arctic icecap is contributing to the increase in sea level by half a millimetre a year.