Moving to Greenland
It's been a while since I used this platform to post an update. A lot has changed in the past year. For one, I now live in Nuuk, the capital city of Greenland. Greenland (or Kalaallit Nunaat in Greenlandic) is a self-governing region within the Kingdom of Denmark, having been granted self-government in 2009. It has the lowest population density in the world*, with just ~17,000 people living in the capital city of Nuuk.
Nuuk is a weird and wonderful place to live in. I have already built a strong repertoire of funny anecdotes from trying to navigate my first month of living here - from being asked 'do you have any meat or fish?' before getting in a taxi, to watching icebergs float past my house in the fjord. It was a big step to make this move, and so far it's been absolutely worth it.
I moved here to take up a permanent position at Asiaq Greenland Survey as a remote sensing specialist. It's a small shift from academia, but we still conduct research and write scientific papers just like everyone else. The pace of work is fast here and I am still settling in and figuring everything out, but it is the refreshing change I needed after finishing my PhD. We are currently working on a handful of ESA projects which I have fallen into nicely, and writing proposals for future projects.
Overall, I hope I can kickstart writing these updates again. They were fun to do during my PhD, and it was a pity I lost that in the lead up to handing in my thesis and during my first postdoc. I hope I can report on projects I work on in Asiaq, and talk about life in Greenland generally. Here’s to this platform’s rejuvenation!
This was from a hiking/fishing trip just outside of Nuuk. Fishing here is very easy if you like cod. They say here that if you don’t get any fish after two or three casts then you should move on to the next spot! The fish we caught this day were massive!
Statistics Greenland have unbelievably thorough analytics on Greenland (e.g. their 2019 report)