They call it Greenland for a reason, when the first Norsemen explored that far west, sometime around 1000 AD, the land they came upon was green, or reasonably so ... thus Greenland, or their equivalent of Greenland. The Norsemen actually inhabited southern Greenland in fairly large settlements for a couple of centuries, using it as a jumping off point to explore further west to what is now Labrador and Newfoundland. There's evidence they may have traveled to Nova Scotia and parts of New England as well.