Qaanaaq

Qaanaaq

Previously known as Thule or New Thule, Qaanaaq is the main town in the northern part of the Avannaata municipality in northwest Greenland. The town is one of the northernmost in the world. Qaanaaq's inhabitants speak the local language, Inuktun, and many of them also speak Kalaallisut and Danish. The town is located at the northern entrance to Inglefield Fjord. The village of Qeqertat lies in the Harvard Islands, just at the head of the fjord. The area around Qaanaaq in northern Greenland was first populated around 2000 B.C. by Paleo-Eskimos who migrated from the Canadian Arctic. They were displaced by the Thule culture, which started following the same migration route approximately 1100 AD. Around 1600, the climatic effects of the Little Ice Age led the semi-nomadic Thule culture in Greenland to split into isolated groups, with the inhabitants of the northwest splitting off as the Inughuit. The 1818 expedition of Sir John Ross made first contact with the nomadic Inuktun in the territory. The town of Qaanaaq was created during the winter of 1953, when the United States extended the Pituffik Space Base and forced the population of Pituffik and Dundas to move 31 km north in four days. The settlement was then moved another 100 km north. A 48.6-kilogram piece of the Cape York meteorite, which was discovered near Thule in the summer of 1955, was named after the town.