Beneath Greenland’s Ice Lies a Climate Solution—and a New Geopolitical Battleground

Still, wherever there’s mining activity, there’s imaginable for spills. There’s besides imaginable for a batch of noise: Ships successful peculiar capable the water astir Greenland with a din that tin accent and disorient fishes and marine mammals, similar narwhals, seals, and whales. For vocalizing species, it tin disrupt their communication.

There’s a batch astatine involvement present economically and politically, too: Fishing is Greenland’s predominant industry, accounting for 95 percent of the island’s exports. Rare world mining, then, is the island’s play to diversify its economy, which could assistance it wean disconnected the subsidies it gets from the Danish government. That, successful turn, could assistance it triumph independence.

Thus far, the mining concern has been a spot rocky successful Greenland. In 2021, the authorities banned uranium mining, halting the improvement of a task by the Australian outfit Greenland Minerals, which would person besides produced uncommon earths astatine the site. (Greenland Minerals did not respond to aggregate requests to remark for this story.) The China-linked institution is present suing the Greenland authorities for $11 billion—potentially spooking different would-be prospectors and the investors already disquieted astir the profitability of mining for uncommon earths successful the acold north.

“When we speech to them, they recognize the situation, and they're not afraid,” said Hammeken-Holm. He added that Greenland maintains a dialog with mining outfits astir the challenges, and prospects, of exploration. “It is hard to get backstage concern for these projects, but we are not alone,” helium said. “That's a worldwide situation.”

The increasing demand and geopolitical fervor astir uncommon earths whitethorn good marque Greenland irresistible for mining companies, careless of the logistical challenges. Hammeken-Holm says that a large discovery, similar an particularly affluent deposit of a fixed uncommon world element, mightiness beryllium the other boost the state needs to alteration itself into an indispensable supplier of the captious minerals.

Both Exner-Pirot, of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and Lajeunesse, the nationalist argumentation expert, accidental that Western powers mightiness get to the constituent wherever they intervene aggressively successful the market. Like China’s state-sponsored uncommon earths industry, the US, Canada, Australia, oregon the European Union—which entered into a strategical concern with Greenland successful 2023 to make captious earthy materials—might set unneurotic to warrant a dependable travel of the minerals that marque modern militaries, consumerism, and the vigor modulation possible. Subsidies, for instance, would assistance marque the manufacture much profitable—and palatable for investors. “You'd person to judge that you're purchasing and processing minerals for much than the marketplace price,” Lajeunesse said. “But implicit the agelong term, it's astir processing a information of supply.”

Already a onshore of accelerated climatological change, Greenland could soon turn richer—and much almighty connected the satellite stage. Ton by ton, its disappearing crystal volition uncover much of the mineral solutions to the world’s woes.

Tom Vaillant contributed probe and reporting. This communicative is portion of the Grist bid Unearthed: The Mining Issue, which examines the planetary contention to extract captious minerals for the cleanable vigor transition.