The big chill: Nordic region above the Arctic Circle - Travel Trade Gazette

...But it has always fascinated Europeans keen to discover a land at the top of the world map, and they started to arrive over 1,000 years ago.

There are no roads in Greenland except in the few towns, so we went by boat to see the remains of Brattahlid, a Viking settlement founded in 982.

The warrior Erik the Red came here after being banished from Iceland, and we saw replicas of the first church in North America (Greenland is, geographically, part of that continent) and a Viking long-house.

We saw the ruins of Hvalso church, dating from the 14th century. Located in a tranquil setting, the silence was so penetrating that all I could hear was the honking of geese on the other side of a fjord, over a mile away.

The Vikings disappeared from Greenland around 1500, and no one knows why. One theory is that the climate had become much colder then, having been warm enough for agriculture when they arrived. So is global warming real, or just part of a cycle? I’ll leave that to the scientists.