At One Place

The flag of Greenland

The flag of Greenland
A white band over a red band, with a large disc offset toward the hoist whose upper half is red and lower half white — the reverse of the field behind it.
Ratio 2:3 · current design adopted 1985

Erfalasorput — "our flag" — is a rare piece of genuinely elegant design: the disc inverts the field it sits on, so the red half of the sun sits above the white land and the white half of the iceberg sits below the red sea. It was chosen in 1985 from 555 proposals, and the winner, Thue Christiansen, was a Greenlandic artist and politician. Notably it avoids the Nordic cross entirely, unlike every other flag in the Danish realm including the Faroes'. The red and white are the Danish colours, which was the concession that made adoption possible.

What the colours mean

  • White #FFFFFF The ice cap, and the snow-covered land
  • Red #C8102E The sun, and the ocean; also the Danish Dannebrog red

Flag laws usually specify a Pantone chip, a CMYK mix or just a colour name. Converting any of those to sRGB is lossy, which is why published hex values disagree.

The symbols on it

What What it stands for
The half-and-half disc The sun setting into the sea, and the icebergs rising from it
Ratio
2:3
Current design adopted
1985
Colours
white, red

Common questions

What does the flag of Greenland look like?
A white band over a red band, with a large disc offset toward the hoist whose upper half is red and lower half white — the reverse of the field behind it.
What do the colours of the Greenland flag mean?
White: the ice cap, and the snow-covered land. Red: the sun, and the ocean; also the Danish Dannebrog red.
When was the Greenland flag adopted?
The current design dates from 1985, and its official ratio is 2:3.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)

How these figures are compiled and checked