Glaciers and sub-zero temperatures have long kept most tourists away from Greenland. But as global warming changes the face of the Arctic—picture glaciers splintering into icebergs and long-buried islands revealed from the melted ice—a new crowd of eco-travelers is heading to Greenland and other previously ice-bound countries to see the ice before it’s all gone, the Wall Street Journal reports. They’re called climate tourists, and they’re stuck in the irony of our environmentally troubled times: “Any trip by train, plane or cruise ship pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and potentially contributes to the warming of the planet,” writes the Journal’s Gautnam Naik.

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Not for much longer, perhaps. Air Greenland recently launched its first commercial flight from the U.S. to the self-governing Danish territory, which lures most of its relatively minuscule amount of visitors—55,000 last year—from Denmark. One of the few non-Danes to visit this year: USA Today’s Laura Bly, whose terrific story reveals a beautiful—take a look at her slideshow—and heartbreaking place, a land where climate change and social change are moving at a rapid pace. 

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This afternoon, a restored P-38 airplane that made an emergency landing in Greenland in 1942, and became buried under ice for 50 years, will take off from New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport in an attempt to complete its mission—to fly to England. “Glacier Girl” was part of an eight-plane team flying from the U.S. to England to help with allied defenses during World War II when rough weather over Greenland forced all the planes onto the ice. In the early ‘90s, The Lost Squadron was located and “Glacier Girl” was excavated from under more than 200 feet of ice. 

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The San Francisco Chronicle published its annual geography test today, or as its creator John Flinn calls it, a “geography / travel / interesting factoids-I-found-on-the-Internet quiz.” It’s 50 questions long, including the one in the headline above, and it’s quite challenging. If you’re stumped, the answers are here. 

According to writer John Derbyshire’s recent article in The New Criterion, it’s “An African in Greenland,” Tete-Michel Kpomassie’s story of his experience in Greenland in the late 1950s and 1960s. First published in French, the book was translated into English in 1983. Why did Kpomassie leave his home in a tribal society bordering the Gulf of Guinea to visit Greenland? “After Kpomassie had an unpleasant encounter with a snake, his family elders decided that he was destined to become a priest in a local snake cult,” Derbyshire writes. “This involved living in the deep jungle among pythons. Kpomassie was not keen on the idea. At just this time, at a bookstore in the nearest city, he happened to see Dr. Robert Gessain’s book ‘The Eskimos from Greenland to Alaska.’ Kpomassie was seized with the idea that he should go and live among these folk. By a sustained effort of will, and through many difficulties—it took him six years just to work his way to Europe, two more to get to Greenland—he eventually did so. It is, as it sounds, the strangest travel book ever written.”