The largest island in the world, Greenland straddles the indistinct line separating the North Atlantic Ocean from the Arctic Ocean, dwarfing most of its neighbours, including Newfoundland to the southwest. On Google Earth, Greenland stands out as the largest white spot on the globe this side of Antarctica, like a pristine piece of ragged paper against the rough and rugged blues and greens that surround it. That’s because of the Greenland ice sheet, which covers 80 per cent of the island. The second largest in the world and 110,000 years old, the ice sheet is 2,400 kilometres long and 1,100 kilometres wide. At over two kilometres thick, it’s so heavy that it has compressed the centre of the island into a basin 1,000 feet (approximately 300 metres) below sea level. Were the Greenland ice sheet to melt, sea levels would rise about seven metres or 23 feet, wiping out just about every major city on the planet.

But Greenland is more than just ice. With its new world geography (in recent years there’s been a movement afoot to strip Cape Spear of its designation as the easternmost point of North America because many geologist consider Greenland part of this continent), and old world history (it was settled by Vikings a millennium ago and is still a protectorate of Denmark), you could say Greenland is the biggest piece of Europe in North America. And changes are coming to the island’s politics and economy as surely as they’re coming to its climate. Greenlanders are preparing to write their own ticket on that vast white expanse.

In a 2008 referendum, Greenlanders voted for greater autonomy from Denmark. The new Self-Rule, a more independent version of the previous Home-Rule, came into effect in June 2009 and means that the island is now responsible for its own judicial affairs, policing and natural resources. That wasn’t the only change last year. Prime Minister Hans Enoksen, whose Social Democrat party had formed the government for the past 30 years, called an election to coincide with the new freedom and was promptly turfed out of office. Now, from the capital city of Nuuk, new Prime Minister Kuupik Kleist, along with the other members of his left-wing Inuit Ataqatigiit (Greenlandic for Community of the People) party, is prepared to lead Greenland’s 57,000 inhabitants into the future. Newfoundland and Labrador may be in a position to help them achieve that goal.

Newfoundland and Greenland have much in common. They are islands with a centuries’ old fishing-based economy, whose cultures were tempered in the unforgiving latitudes of the North Atlantic. The Inuit people of northern Labrador share a common ancestry with those of Greenland and their language and culture are strikingly similar. Recent exploration has shown another point of similarity: like Newfoundland, Greenland appears to have vast reservoirs of underwater oil deposits off its coastline. With their newly established control over natural resources, these oil fields are seen by many as Greenland’s ticket to prosperity, a refrain familiar to every Newfoundlander. Finally, the two share similarities of geography as well as geology, lying on a trajectory that strategically arcs between Europe and North America.

This last point is crucial to developments in communications that have occurred over the last year. Until recently, Greenland relied on a satellite network augmented with microwave links for communications, a slow and unreliable system at best. To improve things, TELE Greenland (the country’s state-owned telecom provider) decided to install a submarine fibre optic cable, which would run east to Iceland, where it could link in with the hookup to Europe, and west to Newfoundland to connect to North America.

In September 2009, TELE Greenland’s subsea cable station was opened in Milton on Newfoundland’s Trinity Bay, not very far from Heart’s Content where the first transatlantic telegraph cable came ashore in 1866.

Jeff Howard is a managing partner in Boomer Broadband, the company that was responsible for building the Milton station and coordinating the connection between Greenland and Newfoundland. He explains that it was Newfoundland’s somewhat controversial second fibre optic link to Nova Scotia, laid in the fall of 2007, that attracted Greenland. Newfoundland is physically close to Greenland, but without that fibre optic link it might well have been bypassed. However, Newfoundland had enough capacity, because of the double link, to meet all of Greenland’s broadband needs. And of course the benefits work both ways. Through Greenland and Iceland to Copenhagen, Newfoundland now has the fastest connection to Europe in North America, a connection that no longer has to be funnelled through New York, as was previously the case.