President Trump wants Greenland, here’s why
President Donald Trump has repeatedly talked about occupying Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark. Why does he desire the ice island so much?
Greenland, a mostly icy island, has coined a mysterious name with an interesting history as part of a centuries-old marketing campaign.
The Danish territory is in the news again after President Donald Trump says Greenland should become part of the United States.
But don’t be confused. This island is not green at all. Greenland is largely covered by a huge ice sheet, as it has been for most of the past few millennia.
The story of Greenland’s name is laced with cunning marketing, climate change, and Vikings. Eric the Red chose this name in hopes of attracting more people to this icy island, and now, as the ice sheet melts, the island is actually becoming (a little) greener.
Greenland’s marketing mechanism
“The origin of Greenland’s name is the result of pure commercial marketing,” Arizona State University geography professor Randall Cerveny said in an email to USA TODAY.
“One of the Icelandic sagas (thousand-year-old preserved historical documents) says that Erik the Red, the Icelandic discoverer of Greenland, “set out to settle the country he had found and called it Greenland, saying that if it had a good name people would be attracted to it.”
According to Discover Iceland, “Eric the Red wanted more people to settle there, so he thought a good-sounding name would make people more likely to move there.”
According to Cerveny, this was around 1000 AD.
However, in the native language of the island, the name of the island is greenlandor “Land of Karaalit.” Cerveny said the Karalit people are an indigenous group of Inuit people who live in the western part of the territory.
Greenland hasn’t always been this cold.
A twist on Greenland’s naming: When it was named, the island probably didn’t have much ice.
For thousands of years, Greenland has been largely covered by ice, but experienced localized greening during the Medieval Warm Period (c. 900-1300 AD), when it was settled by the Vikings.
However, even at the height of the Medieval Warm Period, much of Greenland, as much as 80%, remained covered in ice.
Now, a new study published in 2025 says global warming is rapidly melting Greenland’s ice sheet and replacing it with vegetation.
In fact, parts of Greenland are turning green for the first time since the Vikings arrived about 1,000 years ago, said study co-author Jonathan Calivic, a geoscientist at the University of Leeds in the UK.
And where there was snow and ice just a few decades ago, there is now scrubland along with barren rock and wetlands, a 2024 study reported.
An estimated 11,000 square miles of Greenland’s ice sheets and glaciers have melted over the past 30 years, a study says.
Overall, the total area of ice lost over the past 30 years is slightly larger than the area of Massachusetts and about 1.6% of Greenland’s total ice and glacier area.
Iceland’s name causes confusion
Interestingly, neighboring Iceland was actually named by the Vikings for its ice content, even though Greenland is arguably much more desolate.
One of the Icelandic sagas declares that the name of Iceland comes from Floki Vilgelsson, the first Viking who purposely traveled to and stayed in Iceland around 850 AD.
“According to one of the sagas, Floki, after a long and harsh winter camp, climbed a mountain, saw a huge fjord filled with ice, and named the island after it,” Cerveny told USA TODAY.
These two names actually do not correspond to climatological reality.
For example, Greenland recorded the lowest temperature in the Northern Hemisphere at an unimaginably cold 93.3 degrees Fahrenheit.
It is also covered by a huge ice sheet, about two miles thick in some places. Iceland, on the other hand, despite its glaciers, benefits from warmer ocean currents and is much more livable and “greener” around its populated lowlands.
Do you know how big Greenland is?
Greenland is more than 836,000 square miles, three times the size of Texas, and about 80 percent covered by a huge ice sheet.
Due to the limitations of flat maps, islands appear smaller or larger on paper than they actually are. On some maps, it appears to be as large as Africa.
Why is this? On some maps, especially the standard Mercator projection, Greenland appears larger. This is because Greenland is close to the North Pole. These maps also stretch the polar regions to fit the spherical Earth into a flat surface, making high-latitude land areas appear disproportionately large compared to their actual size.
Contributors: Michelle Del Rey and Stephen J. Beard
