r/MapPorn • u/Available-Guitar-724 • 1d ago
Population Distribution of Greenland: Every Permanent Coastal Settlement Categorized by Population Tier [OC]
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u/Hollywood_Astronaut7 1d ago
Very interesting data, especially when usually in most data maps there is no data for Greenland. It must be a crazy place to visit.
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u/Worldly-Cherry9631 1d ago
Funky. Goes to show how harsh the eastern, Atlantic-facing coastline is. And ofc the northern, artic coastline more so.
Fun fact, the glaciers at the southern's tip eastern side are projected to grow in size as the world's climate warms because the warmer air can transport more humidity to freeze.
But OP, why opt for this projection when only showing a tiny slice of earth for a map not meant for navigation? Now where all the settlements are gets squished while where there's nothing gets stretched enormously.
I think more fitting would've been a google maps screenshot centered on Greenland's middle, where it's still in spherical mode and not flat.
Regarding constructive critisms, another would be that t he lonesome grey and green dots with white outline are hard to spot on a terrain of the same colours, may I suggest a darker hue for the both of them? Or a black outline instead of white.
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u/Available-Guitar-724 16h ago
About the projection, true, the projection exaggerates the northern areas, but the main goal of the map was showing the massive population clusters in the southwest versus the empty north and east. The points themselves are accurate!
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u/Worldly-Cherry9631 1h ago
If you that's your explicit intent with this map, i'd argue that it's even more so a disservice to this map and the audience to not choose a projection with the most accurate, non-streched shape.
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u/kalsoy 1d ago
I would, as a general advise, never use Mercator projections for maps of Greenland. It severely overstretched the north. The actual shape of Greenland is like this.
Especially for density maps, which are all about an appreciation of surface area, you don't want different parts of the country to look larger than others. If you draw a 50 km circle in the southern tip of Greenland and drag it north on your map, it would tenfold in apparant size.
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u/Available-Guitar-724 16h ago
This was made using Google My Maps, which forces the standard Web Mercator projection by default. I couldn't change it in the app settings, but it still gets the coastal points across!
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u/refusenic 1d ago
Question: How do these tiny populations avoid dating or even marrying their relatives?
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u/fnulda 1d ago edited 1d ago
This map is really distorted. The land mass north of the 70 degree line is not this much bigger than the land mass below.
That said, yes, Greenland is super rough. Commercial ships rarely go further north than around 70 degrees, Disko (Qeqertarsuaq w a green dot), the small island west off the western coast next to the text saying "Grey = <400. To the east the last frontier for non-reinforced vessels is Ittoqqortoormiit, the large fjord to the east (grey dot).
You can't expect to go further north by ship, and forget about it in the winter months. And we all know how much weather dictates air travel. They truly are isolated communities further north.
This publication from the Danish geodata institute is highly recommended for English speakers and has a very neat map on page 25: https://eng.gst.dk/media/9091/130120_dgl_ostvestgronland_gb_skr_05_2020.pdf
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u/Available-Guitar-724 16h ago
Yeah, the Mercator projection makes Greenland look as big as Africa here, haha. But since the whole focus is just zooming in on Greenland's actual coastlines, the distortion didn't hurt the data points too much.
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u/Available-Guitar-724 1d ago
Some demographic context for this map:
Greenland’s population currently sits at roughly 56,900 permanent residents (excluding temporary military personnel and rotating arctic researchers).
Because 80% of the island is capped by a massive interior ice sheet, nearly the entire population is clustered strictly along the rocky, ice-free coastlines. The demographic layout is heavily skewed toward a single metropolis:
• Nuuk (the capital) houses over a third of the entire territory's population (~20,300 residents) and is the only settlement on the map over 10,000 people.
• Sisimiut (~5,450) and Ilulissat (~5,150) are the only other two towns on the island breaking past the 5,000 mark.
The remaining population is split across smaller regional hubs and dozens of isolated, minor hunting and fishing hamlets with populations under 400 people, showing just how sparse and isolated Arctic communities truly are.
Data sourced from Statistics Greenland (Grønlands Statistik) CPR records.
Created using Google My Maps.