Kaffeklubben Island
— — land where the map gives out.
Not only on a wall.
“A small gravel island a kilometre off the northern coast of Greenland, one of the last permanent points of land before the polar ice. Robert Peary saw it from his sledge in 1900; the Danish geologist Lauge Koch named it Kaffeklubben, the Coffee Club, for the meeting room at Copenhagen's Mineralogical Museum where his colleagues drank theirs. Almost nothing grows there. The sea ice around it does not always leave in summer. from the studio
Kaffeklubben Island, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Kaffeklubben Island lies about a kilometre off Cape Morris Jesup on the northern coast of Peary Land, in northeast Greenland. It is roughly 700 metres long and 300 metres wide, a low gravel ridge no more than four metres above sea level. At about 83 degrees 40 minutes north, it was for many decades considered the northernmost permanent land on Earth. The American explorer Robert Peary spotted it from sledge in 1900; the Danish geologist Lauge Koch first landed on it in 1921 and gave the island its name.
There is no settlement. The nearest permanently inhabited place is the Danish Station Nord weather post, more than 700 kilometres to the south, and the nearest town, Qaanaaq, is 1,100 kilometres west across the ice. A sparse lichen and moss flora holds the gravel ridge together; a single Arctic poppy specimen recorded near the high point in 2008 is the northernmost vascular plant ever documented. No mammal lives there year. The wind off the polar pack runs cold most days even at the height of July.
Sea ice covers the surrounding water for most of the calendar. In recent summers the pack has cleared briefly enough to let Danish and American survey teams land by helicopter, usually in late July or early August. The sun stays up from late April to late August and stays down from late October to mid-February. Mean annual temperature at the nearest weather station is roughly minus seventeen Celsius. Several smaller gravel islets further north have surfaced briefly since the 1990s, though most disappear under storm or pack ice.