Qeqertat is a small village in the

Qaanaaq Qaanaaq (), formerly known as New Thule, is the main town in the northern part of the Avannaata municipality in northwestern Greenland. The town has a population of 646 as of 2020. The population was forcibly relocated from its former, traditiona ...

area of the

Avannaata Avannaata (, ) is a municipality of Greenland created on 1 January 2018 from the bulk of the former Qaasuitsup municipality. It encompasses an area of 522,700 km2 and has 10,726 inhabitants. Geography In the south, Avannaata is flanked ...

municipality, in northern

Greenland Greenland is an autonomous territory in the Danish Realm, Kingdom of Denmark. It is by far the largest geographically of three constituent parts of the kingdom; the other two are metropolitan Denmark and the Faroe Islands. Citizens of Greenlan ...

. It is located on the Harvard islands, in the inner

Inglefield Fjord Inglefield Gulf or Inglefield Fjord (; ) is a fjord in northwestern Greenland. To the west, the fjord opens into the Baffin Bay. Administratively it belongs to the Avannaata municipality. Inglefield Gulf was named after English explorer Edward A ...

, approximately east of Qaanaaq. The village had 23 inhabitants in 2020. It is one of the most northern settlements in Greenland and in the world. Qeqertat means "the islands" in the Inuit language. The local economy relies heavily on traditional Inuit hunting for narwhal, seals, and walrus. Qeqertat is also known as a good place for halibut fishing, with the largest and most abundant Greenland halibut found in the fjord nearby. The town has no independent water supply. Instead, the townsfolk must get their water from nearby rivers and lakes, or, in winter, collect sea ice to melt.

Population

The population of Qeqertat has been stable in the last two decades.Statistics Greenland
After registering a decline in the '90s, the population grew to 30 in 2010, before declining again to 23 in 2019. A 70-year-old resident of the village, interviewed by Gretel Ehrlich in her 2021 book ''Unsolaced'', said that the village had a much larger population when she was a child. A 1984 ''

National Geographic ''National Geographic'' (formerly ''The National Geographic Magazine'', sometimes branded as ''Nat Geo'') is an American monthly magazine published by National Geographic Partners. The magazine was founded in 1888 as a scholarly journal, nine ...

'' article stated that the population of the town had recently fallen from 50 to about 20. The town in 1984 consisted of 11 houses, a store, a school and a chapel.

Population

References

Further reading