Greenland’s melting ice, unstable fjords vex extraction of oil and minerals Trump covets

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Since Donald Trump regained the U.S. presidency, he has coveted Greenland. Trump has insisted that the U.S. will management the island, presently an autonomous territory of Denmark, and if his overtures are rejected, maybe seize Greenland by power.

During a latest congressional listening to, senators and professional witnesses targeted on Greenland’s strategic worth and its pure assets: important minerals, fossil fuels and hydropower. No one talked about the hazards, many 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 the earth. Such fast 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.

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 crucial for understanding the dangers that navy and extractive efforts face on Greenland at the moment and sooner or later.

A land of extremes

Greenland is in contrast to the place most individuals reside. The local weather is frigid. For a lot of the 12 months, sea ice clings to the coast, making it inaccessible.

An ice sheet, as much as 3 km thick, covers greater than 80% of the island. The inhabitants, about 56,000 folks, lives alongside the island’s steep, rocky shoreline.

While researching my guide “When the Ice is Gone,” I found how Greenland’s harsh local weather and huge wilderness stymied previous colonial endeavours. During World War II, dozens of U.S. navy pilots, disoriented by thick fog and operating 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 navy endeavours in Greenland unsure, costly and doubtlessly lethal.

Rock on the transfer

Greenland’s coastal panorama is susceptible to rockslides. The hazard arises as a result of the coast is the place folks reside and the place rock isn’t hidden underneath the ice sheet. In some locations, that rock incorporates important minerals, corresponding to gold, in addition to different uncommon metals used for know-how, together with for circuit boards and electrical automobile 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.

A massive rockslide, triggered by permafrost melt, tumbled down the fjord wall and into the water at Assapaat, West Greenland.

An enormous rockslide, triggered by permafrost soften, tumbled down the fjord wall and into the water at Assapaat, West Greenland.
| Photo Credit:
Kristian Svennevig/GEUS

In 2017, a northwestern Greenland mountainside fell 3,000 toes 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 houses from their foundations as folks and sled canines ran for his or her lives. By the time it was over, 4 folks had been useless and each villages lay in damage.

Steep fjord partitions across the island are plagued by the scars of previous rockslides. The proof exhibits that at one level within the final 10,000 years, one of these slides dropped rock ample to fill 3.2 million Olympic swimming swimming pools into the water under. In 2023, one other rockslide triggered a tsunami that sloshed again and forth for 9 days in a Greenland fjord.

There’s no community of paved roads throughout Greenland. The solely possible technique to transfer heavy gear, minerals and fossil fuels can be by sea. Docks, mines and buildings inside tens of toes of sea degree can be susceptible to rockslide-induced tsunamis.

Melting ice: lethal and costly

Human-induced international warming, pushed by fossil gasoline combustion, speeds the melting of Greenland’s ice. That melting is threatening the island’s infrastructure and the life of native folks, who over millennia have tailored their transportation and meals techniques to the presence of snow and ice. Record floods, fed by warmth-induced melting of the ice sheet, have lately swept away bridges that stood for half a century.

As 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.

Permafrost soften is already threatening the U.S. navy base on Greenland. As the ice melts and the bottom settles underneath runways, cracks and craters type – 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. As the warming local weather speeds the movement of Greenland’s glaciers, they calve extra icebergs within the ocean. The downside is worse near Greenland, however some icebergs drift towards Canada, endangering oil rigs there. Ships stand guard, able to tow threatening icebergs away.

Greenland’s authorities banned drilling for fossil fuels in 2021 out of concern for the setting. Yet, 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 modifications, however in ways in which won’t be intuitive. Away from the island, sea degree is rising about an inch every six years. But near the ice sheet, it’s the land that’s rising. Gradually freed of the burden of its ice, the rock beneath Greenland, lengthy depressed by the huge ice sheet, rebounds. That rise is fast – greater than 6 toes per century. Soon, many harbours in Greenland might grow to be too shallow for ship visitors.

Challenging previous and future

History clearly exhibits that many previous navy and colonial endeavours failed in Greenland as a result of they confirmed little consideration of the island’s harsh local weather and dynamic ice sheet.

Changing 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, had been rapidly crushed because the encasing snow deformed.

In the previous, the American focus in Greenland was on short-term positive factors with little regard for the longer term. Abandoned U.S. navy bases from World War II, scattered across the island and in want of cleanup, are one instance. Forced relocation of Greenlandic Inuit communities throughout the Cold War is one other. I imagine that Trump’s calls for at the moment for American management of the island to take advantage of its assets are equally shortsighted.

However, relating to the planet’s liveability, 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 the earth cool. And the ice sheet, perched on land, retains water out of the ocean. As it melts, Greenland’s ice sheet will increase international sea degree, as much as about 23 toes when all of the ice is gone.

Climate-driven sea degree rise is already flooding coastal areas all over the world, together with main financial centres. As that continues, estimates recommend that the harm will whole trillions of {dollars}. Unless Greenland’s ice stays frozen, coastal inundation will power the biggest migration that humanity has ever witnessed. Such modifications are predicted to destabilise 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 domestically and globally.

Paul Bierman is fellow of the Gund Institute for Environment, professor of Natural Resources and Environmental Science, University of Vermont. This article is republished from The Conversation.

The Conversation

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