President Donald Trump’s desire to claim Greenland for the U.S. has thrust the island’s wealth of natural resources firmly into the spotlight. But while geopolitical chatter can make it sound as though the Danish territory’s precious metals and rare earths are easy pickings, the reality is far more complicated.
Part of Greenland’s appeal, indeed, comes from both the vastness of the territory and the variety of its geological features. Its ancient bedrock dates back four billion years or more, metamorphic rocks were transformed by volcanic activity that has concentrated metal ores in southern Greenland, and sedimentary rocks in northern areas are rich in lead and zinc.
“Almost half the periodic table can be found in a large, underexplored landmass like Greenland with such a complex geological history,” says Diogo Rosa, an economic geologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.
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But most of Greenland’s landmass is locked under ice that can be more than three kilometers thick, and Greenland is just a logistically difficult place to work.
“Greenland’s climate can present challenges, particularly in the north and east,” says Kathryn Goodenough, a principal geologist at the British Geological Survey. The equipment needed for mining, personnel, logistics, export capacity and fuel consumption all present obstacles and, ultimately, Goodenough says, “the potential for higher costs, reduced profitability and higher risks.”
There are no roads, railways or electricity in most of the territory. Trying to tap the ice sheet, which covers 80 percent of Greenland, for minerals is unappealing, given that all the necessary supplies would need to be brought inland by helicopter and there are kilometers of ice overlaying parts of the rock.
“Almost half the periodic table can be found in a large, underexplored landmass like Greenland with such a complex geological history.” —Diogo Rosa, economic geologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland
Still, these hurdles haven’t prevented all exploration. The island hosts a gold mine and another site above the Arctic circle that produces anorthosite, a mineral used to make fiberglass and paints. That mine exports its product mostly via fjord during the part of the year when the waterway isn’t frozen over. And the rare earth elements clustered in southern Greenland, an ice-free area with access to roads, harbors and other crucial infrastructure, are of greater interest to mining companies.
“From a mining business development perspective, there is really no reason yet to speculate what’s under the ice, because there is plenty under the ice-free area that could be further explored,” says Christian Juncher Jørgensen, a senior researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark, who focuses on environmental monitoring at mines in Greenland.
Critical for manufacturing electronics and, most importantly, semiconductor chips, rare earth elements are highly sought after by tech companies. But compared to gold or copper, the market for rare earths is still small and complex, making investment risky for the mining companies that would need to extract them, Rosa says. “There is a mismatch between the evolution of the technology, that is very quick and the lead times of a mining project, which takes decades,” he says.
In other words, perhaps no mining company wants to launch a 10- to 20-year-long exploration and permitting project only to find that tech companies have innovated their way out of needing rare earth elements.
And there is another layer of complexity: Many of Greenland’s rare earths are found inside silicates, unlike most of the world’s other large deposits, which are usually found in carbonate or phosphate minerals—a difference that would require developing new, specialized processing techniques, Rosa says.
Mining permits in Greenland are also subject to a public hearing process and political decision-making, Jørgensen says. In the lead- and zinc-rich northeast, mining can release acidic drainage caused by oxidation of sulfide minerals, which can leach heavy metals from mining waste, contaminating waterways. These minerals are not as common in the south, where rare earth elements are found, Jørgensen says.
But mining operations in southern Greenland have run into other problems involving the radioactive elements uranium and thorium, which can crop up in the same deposits as rare earth elements. For example, mining company Energy Transition Minerals is currently in arbitration with the governments of Greenland and Denmark over uranium limit regulations, which have stalled the development of a mine at a site called Kvanefjeld, near the southern tip of the island, over concerns about human exposure to radiation.
“You have to live up to these standards,” Jørgensen says, “and these standards are equivalent to the highest industrial standards in the best-performing international countries.”
