This past week Greenland was big in the news . Of course, Greenland has always been big. Three times the size of Texas, the world's largest island dominates the arctic space between North America and Europe. Its name notwithstanding, 80 percent of Greenland is covered in ice. The name Greenland came about as a case of branding, according to Robert Christian Thomsen, a professor of social sciences at Aalborg University in Denmark. Greenland got its name, he says, from Erik the Red, a Viking who