Hans Island

For half a century, the most good-humored territorial dispute in the world was fought over a barren rock in the high Arctic with flags and bottles of liquor. Canada and Denmark both claimed Hans Island, a knob of limestone in the strait between Ellesmere Island and Greenland. Visiting officials and soldiers from each side would take down the other's flag, plant their own, and leave behind a bottle of Danish schnapps or Canadian whisky, a ritual the press nicknamed the Whisky War. In 2022 the two countries ended it by simply dividing the island in two, giving Canada and Greenland, and thus Denmark, a land border with each other for the first time.

Hans Island, known in Greenlandic and Inuktitut as Tartupaluk, lies near the middle of the Kennedy Channel in Nares Strait, between Ellesmere Island in Canada's Nunavut territory and northwestern Greenland. It is roughly 1.3 square kilometers in area, about 1.2 kilometers across, and rises to cliffs about 168 meters high. The island is uninhabited, mostly bare rock and scree, and locked in sea ice for much of the year. The new boundary follows a natural fault or crevasse across the island for about 1.3 kilometers, splitting it nearly in half, with the western part in Nunavut and the eastern part in Greenland. Inuit hunters have used the island for generations.

The trouble began in 1973, when Canada and Denmark agreed on a maritime boundary through Nares Strait but left a gap around Hans Island, which both claimed. In 1984 a Danish minister landed, raised a flag, and reportedly left a bottle of schnapps, starting decades of mostly symbolic visits by both sides. Talks revived in the 2000s, and on 14 June 2022, Canada's foreign minister Mélanie Joly, Denmark's foreign minister Jeppe Kofod, and Greenland's premier Múte B. Egede signed an agreement in Ottawa dividing the island along the crevasse. The same deal settled the countries' maritime boundaries in the Lincoln Sea and Labrador Sea, and Denmark's parliament ratified it in December 2023.

• Märket
  A bare Baltic skerry split between Sweden and Finland by a zig-zag border drawn around a lighthouse another island split by a land border
• The Arctic
  The circumpolar north, warming four times faster than the world located in
• Canada
  The world's second-largest country, from Atlantic to Pacific to Arctic shared by
• Denmark
  A flat, sea-girt kingdom that anchors Scandinavia to the continent shared by
• Greenland
  The world's largest island, a vast ice-sheet realm in the Arctic shared by