A melting Greenland is easier to exploit — but also more perilous
World leaders surely breathed a sigh of relief at the end of the week when President Donald Trump said the United States would not have to “take” Greenland after all, having instead been granted permission to establish more military bases.
Greenland, mostly covered in ice, does not appear to be an obvious target for Trump, aside from its relative proximity to the United States on a map. He said control of Danish territory, which is 90 percent Inuit and a model of indigenous self-governance, is essential for national security. But even though the president has insisted that climate change is a “hoax,” security experts said, warming temperatures have actually made the island nation more geopolitically desirable.
Melting ice caps are opening up previously inaccessible lands and seas, providing new, albeit dangerous, opportunities. (Never mind that as Greenland’s meltwater flows into the ocean, sea levels could rise as much as 10.6 inches by the end of this century.)
“The fact that it’s more accessible has, in some ways, made it more appealing,” said Sherri Goodman, a senior associate at the Arctic Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School and author of the book 2024. Threat Multiplier: Climate, Military Leadership, and the Struggle for Global Security.
Take the new shipping routes that have emerged as the Arctic sea ice retreats. Already, Russian and Chinese icebreakers have begun crossing the so-called Northern Sea Route along the Russian coastline. It connects ports in Asia to those in Europe and is much shorter than the Suez Canal. This polar route could reduce transport times by almost 40 percent and costs by more than 20 percent. In October, Russia and China signed an agreement to develop the route, sometimes called the Polar Silk Road.
If fossil fuel emissions continue as predicted, most of the Arctic Ocean could be free of summer sea ice by 2050, reshaping global trade. “I think it’s moving faster than we anticipated,” Goodman said. Warming temperatures could create another route, called the Northwest Passage, that runs along Greenland’s coastal waters – which could be of interest to the United States. This region could become navigable for the average tanker within a few decades. However, as the island’s ice deteriorates, more icebergs could litter these waterways, creating dangers for ships.
This could further complicate the already delicate economic situation of Greenland’s rich mineral resources. Geological studies suggest that the island is teeming with numerous rare earth elements like praseodymium used in batteries, terbium that goes into screens, and even neodymium that makes your phone vibrate. Perhaps most importantly for the Trump administration, these minerals are essential for defense purposes, including weapons and navigation systems.
“They are at the heart of almost all electric vehicles, cruise missiles and advanced magnets,” Adam Lajeunesse, a public policy expert at Canada’s St. Francis Xavier University, told Grist last year. “All of these different minerals are absolutely necessary to build almost everything we do in our high-tech environment.”
But Greenland hasn’t been exploited on a large scale for one good reason: it’s difficult – and expensive – to work there. Although companies can already dig along the ice-free southern coasts, the massive amount of ice covering the island makes it logistically difficult to continue operations: There is no railway, for example, to transport materials. Brutal weather can also close an airport for days, making it impossible to deliver essential supplies. And the way rare earth elements are distributed in the ground makes their recovery particularly laborious: for every ton of minerals extracted by an operation, it produces 2,000 tons of toxic waste.
Greenland is a global model of indigenous self-government. Trump’s demands for the island threaten that.
Greenland’s ice is in serious trouble, in part because of a phenomenon called Arctic amplification. As ice disappears in the far north, it exposes more oceans and land, which are darker and absorb more solar energy. This creates a feedback loop in which warming begets more warming. As a result, the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet.
Yes, as climate change destroys more and more of Greenland’s ice, more land will become accessible to mining. But it will also worsen logistical challenges: frozen ground, called permafrost, can thaw and destabilize roads and other infrastructure. Hillsides held together by ice may collapse as melting continues in coming decades. (When the weight of the ice disappears from the island, the land will also rebound dramatically — think of it like removing a bowling ball from a memory foam mattress.) And if you mine land next to a melting glacier, it produces not a gentle trickle of water, but a torrent of liquid and rock.
“It’s an unstable environment,” said Paul Bierman, a geoscientist at the University of Vermont and author of the book When the ice is gone: What a Greenland ice core reveals about Earth’s tumultuous history and perilous future. “If you’re a company and you’re looking at investing tens of millions of dollars in a new port to extract the ore, or building roads through that permafrost to transport the ore with big trucks, that becomes a risk and an expense. »
Mining operations could even accelerate the decline of the water table, due to polluting dust darkening the ice. “I would argue that mining is getting harder, not easier, as the climate changes,” Bierman said. “I think the current administration’s focus on Greenland’s economic resources is horribly misplaced.”
