Northeast Greenland National Park
— — a country-sized silence under ice.
Not only on a wall.
“The largest national park on Earth, and the only one that covers more ground than most countries. Northeast Greenland National Park runs from the inland ice sheet to the fjord coast of the Greenland Sea, about 972,000 square kilometres of tundra, glacier, and frozen sound. No one lives here year-round. Polar bears, muskoxen, walrus, and the small staff at the Daneborg Sirius patrol station share the country between them. The light, when it comes, is the cold blue of pack ice. — from the studio
Northeast Greenland National Park, 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.
Northeast Greenland National Park covers roughly 972,000 square kilometres of the island's northern and eastern reaches, making it by area the largest national park in the world. Established in 1974 and expanded in 1988, it stretches from the inland ice sheet to the deep fjord coast of the Greenland Sea. There is no permanent civilian population. A small Danish naval patrol, Slædepatruljen Sirius, runs dogsled patrols out of Daneborg, and a handful of weather and research stations operate on the coast.
The park is one of the quietest places left on the planet. Inland, the Greenland ice sheet rises in a vast white dome that absorbs sound; on the coast, sea ice grinds and walrus call, then everything stops. Polar bears, muskoxen, Arctic fox, and walrus are the resident large mammals. The park is a UNESCO Man and the Biosphere reserve and lies almost entirely north of the Arctic Circle, so for months at a time the sun does not set, and for months it does not rise.
The park is closed to ordinary tourism. Access requires a permit from the Government of Greenland and, in practice, is granted only to scientific expeditions, military patrols, and a small number of vetted commercial operations such as ship-based Arctic cruises that touch the coast briefly in summer. There are no roads, no towns, no hotels, no campsites. The brief summer window, roughly July and August, is the only time most of the coast is reachable at all.