Largest island in the world

What to remember

Between the Arctic Ocean and the North Atlantic, northeast of Canada and northwest of Iceland, Greenland covers 2,108,459.47 km² for its main island alone. That makes it the largest island in the world, and also the largest in North America.

What about the continents? The four continental landmasses are not counted as islands.

Politically, the island belongs to the Danish Realm, and the territory also takes in more than a hundred smaller islands. Its only land border, 1.2 km long, runs across Hans Island, an uninhabited rock it shares with Canada. Most of the surface lies under an ice sheet, the second largest on Earth after Antarctica's. In the southwest, the Isua greenstone belt holds rocks dated at 3.7 to 3.8 billion years, among the oldest on the planet. The 56,699 people counted in 2024 live mostly in small coastal settlements, which makes Greenland one of the most sparsely populated territories in the world.