GREEN ISLAND. A village in Albany Coun ty, N. Y., situated on an island in the Hudson River, connected by bridges with Troy and Water vliet (Map: New York, G 3). It has shops of the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company's Railroad, railroad signal works, and important manufactures of knit goods, iron, machinery, lumber, stoves, etc. The village owns and op elates its eleetric-light plant. Population, in 1890, 4463; in 1900, 4770.
The largest island in the world. Its area, not exactly determined, is about 512,000 square miles. The island is 1500 miles in length and, at its broadest part, 690 miles in width. In the extreme south it barely extends below the parallel of latitude 60° N.; the north coast has not been entirely outlined, but Peary discovered that the most northern point of the islands that front this coast of Greenland is in 83° 39', the cairn he built there standing on the most northern known land. Forming the extreme eastern portion of the American Arctic area, Greenland extends north and south between the Arctic and the Atlantic oceans. On the east it fronts the Arctic Ocean, and on the west it is separated from the American Arctic archipelago by the broad areas of Davis Strait and Baffin Bay, and farther north by the narrow waterways of Smith Sound, Kane Basin, and Kennedy and Robeson Channels. The outlines of Greenland could not satisfactorily be indicated till the surveys (1892-1900) of Peary on the northeast and north coasts, and of Nathorst and others on the east coast, had been completed. The coasts still unknown (1903) include the southern part of Melville Bay and portions of the northeast coast as far south as Cape Bismarck; but these unvisited shore-lines are too short materially to change the shape and size of the island as it now appears on the maps.
All the coasts are bordered by .hundreds of islands, most of them small, and are penetrated by deep and narrow fiords, many of them choked with glaciers descending to the sea from the inland ice. A large part of the west coast, par ticularly in the• south, has a belt of low shore lands, free from permanent ice and snow, about 100 miles i-n width in the district of Holstenborg, and 60 miles wide in the district of Godthaab; elsewhere on the west coast the lowland is much narrower. The east shore has the same phe
nomena of deeply dissected coasts and a low shore belt, which, however, is only 6 to 20 miles in width. All the inhabitants live on these low lands near the sea. On many parts of the coasts there is no lowland, hut lofty mountains descend sheer to the sea. The characteristic features of Greenland are the deep fiords, the lofty moun tains, grand and sombre, bordering the sea or separated from it by the low belt, and the great cap of the inland ice and its attendant phe nomena of innumerable glaciers. The mountains terminate the Greenland plateau and the precipi tous face they show- to the sea is from 1500 to 3000 feet in height. Many mountains rise to 5000 or 8000 feet, and Petermann Peak on the east coast to 11,000 feet. The whole interior of the land; or more than three-fifths of the entire surface, is covered with an unbroken ice sheet, be lieved to be from 2000 feet to a mile in thickness, comparatively level, its monotony relieved only near its outer edges by mountains (nunataks) rising above the ice surface. It was once sup posed that the ice cap might surround depres sions of ice-free land, but the journeys of Peary, who crossed the ice cap four times, and of Han sen, who crossed it once, dispelled this idea. Dr. Dtygalski, of Germany, who has made a careful investigation both of the inland ice and of the glaciers of the west coast mountain tracts, be lieves that the great ice cap had its origin in the mountains of the interior and coastal regions, descending from them at first in the form of separate glaciers which gradually coalesced and s.) filled the valleys and smothered height after height till the whole land disappeared. A constant outflow of ice takes place, the ice sheet moving from the interior where it is thickest to the marginal area where it is thin nest. It is believed that the land surface of the interior is covered with mountains, as on the coast, but they are buried under the ice cap. The highest point reached by Peary on the ice cap was more' than 8000 feet above sea-level.