Since Donald Trump regained the presidency, he has coveted Greenland. Trump has insisted that the U.S. will management the island, at present an autonomous territory of Denmark, and if his overtures are rejected, maybe seize Greenland by drive.
Throughout a latest congressional listening to, senators and skilled witnesses centered on Greenland’s strategic worth and its pure assets: important minerals, fossil fuels and hydropower. Nobody talked about the hazards, lots of them exacerbated by human-induced local weather change, that these longing to own and develop the island will inevitably encounter.
That’s imprudent, as a result of the Arctic’s local weather is altering extra quickly than anyplace on Earth. Such speedy warming additional will increase the already substantial financial and private threat for these dwelling, working and extracting assets on Greenland, and for the remainder of the planet.
Arctic floor temperatures have been rising quicker than the worldwide common.
Arctic Report Card 2024, NOAA Local weather.gov
I’m a geoscientist who research the environmental historical past of Greenland and its ice sheet, together with pure hazards and local weather change. That information is important for understanding the dangers that army and extractive efforts face on Greenland right now and sooner or later.
Greenland: Land of extremes
Greenland is in contrast to the place most individuals stay. The local weather is frigid. For a lot of the yr, sea ice clings to the coast, making it inaccessible.
An ice sheet, as much as 2 miles thick, covers greater than 80% of the island. The inhabitants, about 56,000 individuals, lives alongside the island’s steep, rocky shoreline.
Whereas researching my guide “When the Ice is Gone,” I found how Greenland’s harsh local weather and huge wilderness stymied previous colonial endeavors. Throughout World Warfare II, dozens of U.S. army pilots, disoriented by thick fog and working out of gasoline, crashed onto the ice sheet. An iceberg from Greenland sunk the Titanic in 1912, and 46 years later, one other sunk a Danish vessel particularly designed to fend off ice, killing all 95 aboard.
Now amplified by local weather change, pure hazards make useful resource extraction and army endeavors in Greenland unsure, costly and probably lethal.
Rock on the transfer
Greenland’s coastal panorama is vulnerable to rockslides. The hazard arises as a result of the coast is the place individuals stay and the place rock isn’t hidden below the ice sheet. In some locations, that rock accommodates important minerals, corresponding to gold, in addition to different uncommon metals used for know-how, together with for circuit boards and electrical car batteries.
The unstable slopes mirror how the ice sheet eroded the deep fjords when it was bigger. Now that the ice has melted, nothing buttresses the near-vertical valley partitions, and so, they collapse.
An enormous rockslide, triggered by permafrost soften, tumbled down the fjord wall and into the water at Assapaat, West Greenland.
Kristian Svennevig/GEUS
In 2017, a northwestern Greenland mountainside fell 3,000 ft into the deep waters of the fjord under. Moments later, the wave that rockfall generated (a tsunami) washed over the close by villages of Nuugaatsiaq and Illorsuit. The water, laden with icebergs and sea ice, ripped properties from their foundations as individuals and sled canine ran for his or her lives. By the point it was over, 4 individuals have been useless and each villages lay in smash.
Steep fjord partitions across the island are affected by the scars of previous rockslides. The proof exhibits that at one level within the final 10,000 years, a kind of slides dropped rock adequate to fill 3.2 million Olympic swimming swimming pools into the water under. In 2023, one other rockslide triggered a tsunami that sloshed backwards and forwards for 9 days in a Greenland fjord.
A cellphone video captures the June 2017 tsunami wave coming ashore in northwestern Greenland.
There’s no community of paved roads throughout Greenland. The one possible option to transfer heavy gear, minerals and fossil fuels could be by sea. Docks, mines and buildings inside tens of ft of sea degree could be weak to rockslide-induced tsunamis.
Melting ice will likely be lethal and costly
Human-induced world warming, pushed by fossil gasoline combustion, speeds the melting of Greenland’s ice. That melting is threatening the island’s infrastructure and the existence of native individuals, who over millennia have tailored their transportation and meals methods to the presence of snow and ice. File floods, fed by warmth-induced melting of the ice sheet, have lately swept away bridges that stood for half a century.
Because the local weather warms, permafrost – frozen rock and soil – which underlies the island, thaws. This destabilizes the panorama, weakening steep slopes and damaging important infrastructure.
An excavator tries to save lots of a bridge over the Watson River at Kangerlussuaq, Greenland. A part of the bridge and the machine have been ultimately swept away by the dashing meltwater from the Greenland Ice Sheet throughout a warmth wave in July 2012.
Permafrost soften is already threatening the U.S. army base on Greenland. Because the ice melts and the bottom settles below runways, cracks and craters kind – a hazard for airplanes. Buildings tilt as their foundations settle into the softening soil, together with important radar installations which have scanned the skies for missiles and bombers for the reason that Fifties.
Greenland’s icebergs can threaten oil rigs. Because the warming local weather speeds the stream of Greenland’s glaciers, they calve extra icebergs within the ocean. The issue is worse near Greenland, however some icebergs drift towards Canada, endangering oil rigs there. Ships stand guard, able to tow threatening icebergs away.
An iceberg passes close to an oil drilling rig in japanese Canada.
Geoffrey Whiteway/500px Plus by way of Getty Pictures
Greenland’s authorities banned drilling for fossil fuels in 2021 out of concern for the atmosphere. But, Trump and his allies stay desirous to see exploration resume off the island, regardless of exceptionally excessive prices, lower than stellar outcomes from preliminary drilling, and the ever-present threat of icebergs.
As Greenland’s ice melts and water flows into the ocean, sea degree adjustments, however in ways in which may not be intuitive. Away from the island, sea degree is rising about an inch every six years. However near the ice sheet, it’s the land that’s rising. Step by step freed of the burden of its ice, the rock beneath Greenland, lengthy depressed by the large ice sheet, rebounds. That rise is speedy – greater than 6 ft per century. Quickly, many harbors in Greenland could develop into too shallow for ship visitors.
Streams of meltwater stream over the silt-covered floor of the Greenland Ice Sheet because it melts in summer season warmth close to Kangerlussuaq in western Greenland.
REDA/Common Pictures Group by way of Getty Pictures
Greenland’s difficult previous and future
Historical past clearly exhibits that many previous army and colonial endeavors failed in Greenland as a result of they confirmed little consideration of the island’s harsh local weather and dynamic ice sheet.
Altering local weather drove Norse settlers out of Greenland 700 years in the past. Explorers making an attempt to cross the ice sheet misplaced their lives to the chilly. American bases constructed contained in the ice sheet, corresponding to Camp Century, have been rapidly crushed because the encasing snow deformed.
Up to now, the American focus in Greenland was on short-term positive factors with little regard for the long run. Deserted U.S. army bases from World Warfare II, scattered across the island and in want of cleanup, are one instance. Compelled relocation of Greenlandic Inuit communities in the course of the Chilly Warfare is one other. I imagine that Trump’s calls for right now for American management of the island to use its assets are equally shortsighted.
Piles of rusting gasoline drums sit at an deserted U.S. base from World Warfare II in Ikateq, in japanese Greenland.
Posnov/Second by way of Getty Pictures
Nevertheless, in terms of the planet’s livability, I’ve argued that the best strategic and financial worth of Greenland to the world just isn’t its location or its pure assets, however its ice. That white snow and ice mirror daylight, conserving Earth cool. And the ice sheet, perched on land, retains water out of the ocean. Because it melts, Greenland’s ice sheet will increase world sea degree, as much as about 23 ft when all of the ice is gone.
Local weather-driven sea degree rise is already flooding coastal areas world wide, together with main financial facilities. As that continues, estimates recommend that the harm will whole trillions of {dollars}. Until Greenland’s ice stays frozen, coastal inundation will drive the most important migration that humanity has ever witnessed. Such adjustments are predicted to destabilize the worldwide financial and strategic world order.
These examples present that disregarding the dangers of pure hazards and local weather change in Greenland courts catastrophe, each regionally and globally.