Everyone is talking about Greenland. Here’s what it’s like to visit
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A few months ago, Greenland was quietly getting on with winter, as the territory slid deeper into the darkness that envelops the world’s northerly reaches at this time of year.
But President Donald Trump’s musings about America taking over this island of 56,000 largely Inuit people, halfway between New York and Moscow, has seen Greenland shaken from its frozen Arctic anonymity.
Denmark, for whom Greenland is an autonomous crown dependency, has protested it’s not for sale. Officials in Greenland, meanwhile, have sought to assert the territory’s right to independence.
The conversation continues to intensify. A contentious March 28 visit to a US military installation by Usha Vance, the second lady, accompanied by her husband, Vice President JD Vance, was the latest in a series of events to focus attention on Trump’s ambitions for Greenland.
The visit was originally planned as a cultural exchange, but was shortened following complaints from Greenland Prime Minister Mute B. Egede.
Had the Vances prolonged their scheduled brief visit, they would’ve discovered a ruggedly pristine wildernesses steeped in rich Indigenous culture.
An inhospitable icecap several miles deep covers 80% of Greenland, forcing the Inuit to dwell along the shorelines in brightly painted communities. Here, they spend brutally cold winters hunting seals on ice under the northern lights in near perpetual darkness. Although these days, they can also rely on community stores.
The problem for travelers over the years has been getting to Greenland via time-consuming indirect flights. That’s changing. Late in 2024, the capital Nuuk opened a long-delayed international airport. From June 2025, United Airlines will be operating a twice-weekly direct service from Newark to Nuuk.
Two further international airports are due to open by 2026 — Qaqortoq in South Greenland and more significantly in Ilulissat, the island’s only real tourism hotspot.
‘A whole different mindset’
Accurate clockwork is one matter. But how future astronauts living and working on the lunar surface will experience time is a different question entirely.
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On Earth, our sense of one day is governed by the fact that the planet completes one rotation every 24 hours, giving most locations a consistent cycle of daylight and darkened nights. On the moon, however, the equator receives roughly 14 days of sunlight followed by 14 days of darkness.
“It’s just a very, very different concept” on the moon, Betts said. “And (NASA is) talking about landing astronauts in the very interesting south polar region (of the moon), where you have permanently lit and permanently shadowed areas. So, that’s a whole other set of confusion.”
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“It’ll be challenging” for those astronauts, Betts added. “It’s so different than Earth, and it’s just a whole different mindset.”
That will be true no matter what time is displayed on the astronauts’ watches.
Still, precision timekeeping matters — not just for the sake of scientifically understanding the passage of time on the moon but also for setting up all the infrastructure necessary to carry out missions.
The beauty of creating a time scale from scratch, Gramling said, is that scientists can take everything they have learned about timekeeping on Earth and apply it to a new system on the moon.
And if scientists can get it right on the moon, she added, they can get it right later down the road if NASA fulfills its goal of sending astronauts deeper into the solar system.
“We are very much looking at executing this on the moon, learning what we can learn,” Gramling said, “so that we are prepared to do the same thing on Mars or other future bodies.”
‘A whole different mindset’
Accurate clockwork is one matter. But how future astronauts living and working on the lunar surface will experience time is a different question entirely.
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On Earth, our sense of one day is governed by the fact that the planet completes one rotation every 24 hours, giving most locations a consistent cycle of daylight and darkened nights. On the moon, however, the equator receives roughly 14 days of sunlight followed by 14 days of darkness.
“It’s just a very, very different concept” on the moon, Betts said. “And (NASA is) talking about landing astronauts in the very interesting south polar region (of the moon), where you have permanently lit and permanently shadowed areas. So, that’s a whole other set of confusion.”
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“It’ll be challenging” for those astronauts, Betts added. “It’s so different than Earth, and it’s just a whole different mindset.”
That will be true no matter what time is displayed on the astronauts’ watches.
Still, precision timekeeping matters — not just for the sake of scientifically understanding the passage of time on the moon but also for setting up all the infrastructure necessary to carry out missions.
The beauty of creating a time scale from scratch, Gramling said, is that scientists can take everything they have learned about timekeeping on Earth and apply it to a new system on the moon.
And if scientists can get it right on the moon, she added, they can get it right later down the road if NASA fulfills its goal of sending astronauts deeper into the solar system.
“We are very much looking at executing this on the moon, learning what we can learn,” Gramling said, “so that we are prepared to do the same thing on Mars or other future bodies.”
Lunar clockwork
What scientists know for certain is that they need to get precision timekeeping instruments to the moon.
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Exactly who pays for lunar clocks, which type of clocks will go, and where they’ll be positioned are all questions that remain up in the air, Gramling said.
“We have to work all of this out,” she said. “I don’t think we know yet. I think it will be an amalgamation of several different things.”
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Atomic clocks, Gramling noted, are great for long-term stability, and crystal oscillators have an advantage for short-term stability.
“You never trust one clock,” Gramling added. “And you never trust two clocks.”
Clocks of various types could be placed inside satellites that orbit the moon or perhaps at the precise locations on the lunar surface that astronauts will one day visit.
As for price, an atomic clock worthy of space travel could cost around a few million dollars, according Gramling, with crystal oscillators coming in substantially cheaper.
But, Patla said, you get what you pay for.
“The very cheap oscillators may be off by milliseconds or even 10s of milliseconds,” he added. “And that is important because for navigation purposes — we need to have the clocks synchronized to 10s of nanoseconds.”
A network of clocks on the moon could work in concert to inform the new lunar time scale, just as atomic clocks do for UTC on Earth.
(There will not, Gramling added, be different time zones on the moon. “There have been conversations about creating different zones, with the answer: ‘No,’” she said. “But that could change in the future.”)
Space, time: The continual question
If time moves differently on the peaks of mountains than the shores of the ocean, you can imagine that things get even more bizarre the farther away from Earth you travel.
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To add more complication: Time also passes slower the faster a person or spacecraft is moving, according to Einstein’s theory of special relativity.
Astronauts on the International Space Station, for example, are lucky, said Dr. Bijunath Patla, a theoretical physicist with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, in a phone interview. Though the space station orbits about 200 miles (322 kilometers) above Earth’s surface, it also travels at high speeds — looping the planet 16 times per day — so the effects of relativity somewhat cancel each other out, Patla said. For that reason, astronauts on the orbiting laboratory can easily use Earth time to stay on schedule.
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For other missions — it’s not so simple.
Fortunately, scientists already have decades of experience contending with the complexities.
Spacecraft, for example, are equipped with their own clocks called oscillators, Gramling said.
“They maintain their own time,” Gramling said. “And most of our operations for spacecraft — even spacecraft that are all the way out at Pluto, or the Kuiper Belt, like New Horizons — (rely on) ground stations that are back on Earth. So everything they’re doing has to correlate with UTC.”
But those spacecraft also rely on their own kept time, Gramling said. Vehicles exploring deep into the solar system, for example, have to know — based on their own time scale — when they are approaching a planet in case the spacecraft needs to use that planetary body for navigational purposes, she added.
For 50 years, scientists have also been able to observe atomic clocks that are tucked aboard GPS satellites, which orbit Earth about 12,550 miles (20,200 kilometers) away — or about one-nineteenth the distance between our planet and the moon.
Studying those clocks has given scientists a great starting point to begin extrapolating further as they set out to establish a new time scale for the moon, Patla said.
“We can easily compare (GPS) clocks to clocks on the ground,” Patla said, adding that scientists have found a way to gently slow GPS clocks down, making them tick more in-line with Earth-bound clocks. “Obviously, it’s not as easy as it sounds, but it’s easier than making a mess.”
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