The world’s largest national park has almost no residents
Northeast Greenland National Park is Earth’s largest national park and the tenth-largest protected area of any kind—expanded in 1988 after a 1974 founding to swallow vast ice and empty coast. Permanent human population is effectively nil, though about 400 sites see summer use.
The park protects about 972,000 square kilometres of Greenland's interior and northeastern shore, an area bigger than Tanzania though smaller than Egypt, so only 29 nations on Earth are larger. The Danish realm had no national park before this one; it is still Greenland's sole park and the northernmost anywhere. Only nine protected areas are larger, and those consist mostly of ocean. Among second-level subdivisions of any country, only Canada's Qikiqtaaluk Region covers more ground.
Most of the interior is the Greenland Ice Sheet itself, but broad ice-free stretches line the coast and cover Peary Land in the far north. The old ice-sheet research camps Eismitte and North Ice lie within its borders, and in January 1977 the park was named an international biosphere reserve. The 1988 expansion added the northeastern corner of the former county of North Greenland.
Wildlife easily outnumbers people. Some 5,000 to 15,000 musk oxen graze near the coast, reckoned in 1993 to be 40 percent of the world's total, along with polar bears, walrus, Arctic foxes, hares, lemmings and a small but important group of Greenland wolves. Narwhal, beluga and four kinds of seal swim offshore, and breeding birds include barnacle and pink-footed geese, king eiders, gyrfalcons and snowy owls.
In the winter of 2008 only 31 people and about 110 dogs stayed in the region. Besides the Sirius Patrol and the weather station, two soldiers kept the Mestersvig outpost with its 1,800-metre gravel runway, and four staff manned Summit Camp on the ice. In summer, the Zackenberg research station can house more than 20 scientists and crew.
Source: Northeast Greenland National Park
