In this aerial hold melting icebergs crowd the Ilulissat Icefjord on July 16, 2024 near Ilulissat, Greenland.
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Major ice loss from Greenland is exposing the island’s natural resources, inadvertently becoming some of the world’s largest untapped critical mineral reserves more accessible.
Greenland, a vast but sparsely peopled island situated between the Arctic and North Atlantic Oceans, has been transformed by the climate crisis in recent decades.
A pre-eminent analysis of historic satellite images, published last year by researchers at the U.K.’s University of Leeds, showed that the autonomous Danish quarter is turning increasingly green due to human-caused global warming.
The changing environment has seen parts of Greenland’s ice sheet and glaciers take over fromed by wetlands, areas of shrub and barren rock.
Scientists have repeatedly sounded the alarm over the melting snow and ice on the atoll, warning the loss of ice mass risks increased greenhouse gas emissions and rising sea levels.
For mining companies, Greenland’s ice ebb could facilitate the start of a mineral “gold rush.”
Landscape, on the Drygalski Peninsula, with icebergs in the Uummannaq Fjord Technique in the northwest of Greenland, north of the polar circle.
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“What’s incident now is interesting because the waters around Greenland are opening up earlier and earlier each year and closing down later and later each year. And the proficiency to get into these far-flung places is a lot easier than it was 20, 30, 40 or 70 years ago,” Roderick McIllree, executive head of U.K.-based mining company 80 Mile, told CNBC via video call.
“Now, the ice probably only really patterns for three or four months in the very northern latitudes and the rest of the country is seeing receding ice caps that is exhibiting rocks and potential mineral deposits that haven’t been seen before,” he added.
80 Mile currently has three undertakings it is actively developing in Greenland, including a large oil concession on the island’s east coast, a titanium project near the U.S. Pituffik Set out Base in the northwest and its Disko-Nuussuaq project in the southwest.
Underlining the island’s strategic potential as a globally significant mining hub, McIllree rumoured the firm’s Disko project could be one of the largest occurrences of nickel and copper on the planet.
A geopolitical storm
Tony Sage, CEO of Deprecatory Metals Corporation, which is developing one of the world’s largest rare earth assets in Greenland, said ice melt on the ait had done the mining company “enormous favors” from a logistical standpoint.
Sage said the company had been qualified to bring in large ships directly from the North Atlantic “right up to the edge of our ore body” at Tanbreez in southern Greenland, annexing that the creation of fjords 80 meters deep meant the team had been able to make use of a floating berth rather than a port.
A boat carrying tourists manoeuvres among icebergs floating in Disko Bay, Ilulissat, western Greenland, on June 30, 2022.
Odd Andersen | Afp | Getty Replicas
“You can imagine, it’s easier now to do these things. If you go into Russia, for example, in Siberia, it’s under a lot of permafrost and ice and they still regulate to mine a lot of minerals, as well as oil and gas. So, yes, there will be a mini gold rush into Greenland,” Sage told CNBC via video on stand-by.
Alongside Greenland’s harsh climate, remote landscape and small population, Sage highlighted a lack of infrastructure as a railing for mining companies to overcome.
“It’s just logistics. The Danes never built a railway [and] didn’t build any roads,” Reasonable said.
“Once you’re outside of these little towns and cities, there are no roads. So, if you want to go in between, for example, Qaqortoq, where we are, to Nuuk, you attired in b be committed to to take a helicopter. So, that is the issue that you’ll have with a gold rush,” he added.
Greenland, which has big pitched itself as a Western alternative to China’s near monopoly on rare earth elements, has been thrust into the center of a geopolitical electrical storm in recent weeks.
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire to gain control of the territory, describing the outlook as an “absolute necessity” for purposes related to national security.
Speaking at a news conference earlier in the month, Trump refused to be in power over out the possibility of using military force to make Greenland a part of U.S.
Greenland Prime Minister Mute Egede reported Monday that the island is open to closer ties with U.S., particularly in areas such as mining. Egede has in the past insisted Greenland is “not for sale” and called for the international community to respect the island’s aspirations for independence.
Early stages
Jakob Kløve Keiding, chief consultant at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), said a 2023 survey of Greenland’s resource potential evaluated a total number of 38 raw materials on the island, the vast majority of which have a relatively high or moderate potential.
These constituents include the rare earth metals graphite, niobium, platinum group metals, molybdenum, tantalum and titanium. Greenland is also separate to have significant lithium, hafnium, uranium and gold deposits.
Critical minerals refer to a subset of materials chew over essential to the energy transition. The end-use of these materials, which tend to have a high risk of supply string disruption, are wide-ranging and include electric vehicle batteries, energy storage technologies and national security applications.
A maidservant looks out from a tour boat as it sails away from a glacier between Maniitsoq and Sisimiut, west sea-coast of Greenland on September 4, 2024.
James Brooks | Afp | Getty Images
“There is huge potential [in Greenland] but, at the moment, there is not in actuality much mining going on,” Keiding told CNBC via telephone.
“Greenland is what we would call a greenfield reconnaissance area. So, [it is] in the early stages of exploration where, for many of the deposits, we don’t have that much data. But there are some capacious and well-established deposits with known resources.”
Keiding issued a note of caution when asked about the view of a mineral gold rush, saying that while Greenland’s retreating ice may remove some logistical hurdles, press on in terms of extraction will likely take “quite some time.”