A Larger Than Life Experience
If you are a fan of escaping into nature with no human to bother you as you probe through the flora and the fauna around you, the Northeast Greenland National Park, may just be an ideal spot for a vacation. It not only gives you a reason to visit Greenland, a beautiful country in itself, but it also provides for good tales to take back home from the largest National Park in the world. It has also been declared to be an international biosphere reserve park.
Stretching over an area of 972,000 kilometers, the park is larger than over a hundred countries combined and covers the entire northeastern coastline and the interior parts of that section of Greenland. The large interiors of the park is part of the ice sheets of Greenland, so what you will see is nature surviving in bitter cold, however, there are also ice free parts of the park, located along the coast and also the northern section. The park was originally created in 1974 from the uninhabited area of Tunu in East in Greenland, but it was eventually expanded to the present size it boasts of in 1988 by including the area of Avannaa located on the North in Greenland.
Human population is practically non existent here. The last time it was studied in 1986, the local human population was counted to be only about forty people, although some locations were populated by local tribes to some extent during the summer months. The forty who actually lived constantly in the park were the ones who were responsible for maintaining the cleanliness of the park and also participated at the mining exploration sites. However, many left and the number of humans in the park has thus reduced even more.
The beauty of this national park lies in its untouched animal life. It is estimated that at least five to fifteen thousand musk oxen, walruses and polar bears live inside the park; most of these can be spotted near the costal areas of the park. The place is also a great venue for some bird watching of the rare kind. There are all types of birds that breed here, from the Barnacle Geese to the Pink-footed Geese and the Snowy Owl and Great Northern Diver.
The park is the perfect example for a getaway into the wild and to experience nature in its rarest kind.
May 21 2008 11:17 am | The Park