Why acquiring Greenland is more than just a whim of Trump
Country's water, minerals and 'rock flour' could be key resources for the next century
The person who first put a bug in Donald Trump's ear about Greenland — if a 2022 biography is to be believed — was his friend Ronald Lauder, a New York billionaire and heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics fortune.
But it would be wrong to believe that U.S. interest in Greenland originated with idle chatter at the country club, rather than real strategic considerations.
Trump's talk of using force to annex Greenland — which would be an unprovoked act of war against a NATO ally — has been rebuked by Greenlandic, Danish and European leaders. A Fox News team that travelled to Greenland's capital Nuuk reported back to the Trump-friendly show Fox & Friends that "most of the people we spoke with did not support Trump's comments and found them offensive."
It's been widely assumed that the motives driving Washington's interest are Greenland's deepwater harbours on an important shipping route or its strategic location as a gateway to the Northwest Passage and as one end of the so-called "GIUK gap" — through which Russian nuclear submarines must pass to access the wider Atlantic.
Certainly, military considerations motivated the last U.S. attempt at buying Greenland in 1946.
But Trump did not cite a military rationale for wanting Greenland, saying instead that "we need them for economic security."
Independence fears
The military value to the U.S. of acquiring Greenland is much less clear in 2025 than it was in 1946.
Russian nuclear submarines no longer need to traverse the GIUK. They can launch their missiles from closer to home.
And in any case, the U.S. already has a military presence on Greenland, used for early warning, satellite tracking and marine surveillance. The Pentagon simply ignored Denmark's 1957 ban on nuclear weapons on Greenlandic territory. Indeed, an American B-52 bomber carrying four hydrogen bombs crashed in Greenland in 1968.
"The U.S. already has almost unhindered access, and just building on their relationship with Greenland is going to do far more good than talk of acquisition," said Dwayne Menezes, director of the Polar Research and Policy Initiative in London.
The complication, he says, is Greenland's own independence movement. All existing defence agreements involving the U.S. presence in Greenland are between Washington and the Kingdom of Denmark.
"They can't control what's happening between Denmark and Greenland," Menezes said. "Over the long term, the only way to mitigate that risk altogether is by acquiring Greenland."
Menezes also doesn't believe U.S. interest in Greenland is purely military.
And Trump's incoming national security adviser Michael Waltz appeared to confirm as much when asked by Fox News why the administration wanted Greenland.
"This is about critical minerals, this is about natural resources. This is about, as the ice caps pull back, the Chinese are now cranking out icebreakers and are pushing up there."
Resources of the future
While the United States has an abundance of natural resources, it risks coming up short in two vital areas: rare-earth minerals and freshwater.
Greenland's apparent barrenness belies its richness in those two key 21st-century resources.
The U.S. rise to superpower was driven partly by the good fortune of having abundant reserves of oil, which fuelled its industrial growth. The country is still a net exporter of petroleum.
China, Washington's chief strategic rival, had no such luck. It has to import more than two-thirds of its oil, and is now importing more than six times as much as it did in 2000.
But the future may not favour the U.S. as much as the past.
It's China, and not the U.S., that nature blessed with rich deposits of rare-earth elements, a collection of 17 metals such as yttrium and scandium that are increasingly necessary for high-tech applications from cellphones and flat-screen TVs to electric cars.
The rare-earth element neodymium is an essential part of many computer hard drives and defence systems including electronic displays, guidance systems, lasers, radar and sonar.
Three decades ago, the U.S. produced a third of the world's rare-earth elements, and China about 40 per cent. By 2011, China had 97 per cent of world production, and its government was increasingly limiting and controlling exports.
The U.S. has responded by opening new mines and spurring recovery and recycling to reduce dependence on China.
Breaking the dependency
Such efforts have allowed the U.S. to claw back about 20 per cent of the world's annual production of rare-earth elements. But that doesn't change the fact that China has about 44 million tonnes of reserves, compared to fewer than two million in the U.S.
"There's a huge dependency on China," said Menezes. "It offers China the economic leverage, in the midst of a trade war in particular, to restrict supply to the West, thus crippling industries like defence, the green transition. This is where Greenland comes in."
Greenland's known reserves are almost equivalent to those of the entire U.S., and much more may lie beneath its icebound landscape.
"Greenland is believed to be able to meet at least 25 per cent of global rare-earth demand well into the future," he said.
Don't sell to China
The Tanbreez Mine on the southern tip of Greenland was the focus of attention from U.S. officials last year, long before Trump began to muse publicly about annexation.
The site has a large deposit of eudialyte ore, rich in rare-earth elements such as neodymium, cerium, lanthanum and yttrium. It also has gallium, a critical mineral placed under tight export controls by China last month because of its military applications.
Mostly owned by New York-based Critical Metals Corp. since last summer, the mine was reportedly visited twice by State Department officials last year.
Tanbreez CEO Greg Barnes told Reuters he came under heavy American lobbying not to sell the mine to Chinese bidders.
A Chinese company is already the biggest shareholder in a rare-earth minerals project at Kvanefjeld, further up the same network of fjords as Tanbreez.
In November, State Department Undersecretary for Economic Growth, Energy and Environment Jose Fernandez travelled to Greenland for four days of talks with local officials.
He stressed that the Biden administration wanted to do things the nice way.
"Yes, we want to get their critical minerals and use them in our economy, but we don't want to do that at their expense," said Fernandez.
He added, rather ominously as it turned out: "I cannot forecast what the next administration will do, but the business case will not change."
An abundance of freshwater
The melting ice caps referenced by Trump's nominee for national security adviser are another Greenlandic resource the world is increasingly interested in.
Seventy per cent of the world's freshwater is locked up in the Antarctic ice cap. Of the remainder, two-thirds is in Greenland, in a massive ice cap that is turning to liquid at nearly twice the volume of melting in Antarctica.
"We know this because you can weigh the ice sheet from satellites," said Christian Schoof, a professor of Earth, ocean and atmospheric sciences at the University of British Columbia who spent part of last year in Greenland studying ice cap melting.
"The ice sheet is heavy enough that it affects the orbit of satellites going over it. And you can record the change in that acceleration of satellites due to the ice sheet over time, and directly weigh the ice sheet."
"And so we know that 250 cubic kilometres, give or take, is how much the ice sheet loses every year, and that rate has been accelerating."
Were all of Greenland's ice to melt, NASA estimates world sea levels would rise seven metres — bad news for places like Miami-Dade County, where the average elevation is two metres above sea level.
But in the meantime, there are plenty of Americans who could use that water.
Ice melt for sale
"There is a growing demand for freshwater on the world market, and the use of the vast water potential in Greenland may contribute to meeting this demand," the Greenland government announces on its website.
The Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland found 10 locations that were suitable for the commercial exploitation of Greenland's ice and water, and has already issued a number of licenses.
Schoof told CBC News that past projects that attempted to tow Greenlandic ice to irrigate farms in the Middle East "haven't really taken off … but humans are resourceful and inventive, and we face some really significant issues in the future."
For the U.S., those issues include the 22-year-long "megadrought" which has left the western U.S. drier than at any time in the past 1,200 years, and which is already threatening the future of some American cities.
Dust with miraculous qualities
Even the "rock flour" that lies under the ice cap could have great commercial and strategic importance.
Ground into nanoparticles by the crushing weight of the ice, research has revealed it to have almost miraculous properties, says Menezes.
"Scientists have found that Greenlandic glacial flour has a particular nutrient composition that enables it to be regenerative of soil conditions elsewhere," he told CBC News. "It improves agricultural yields. It has direct implications for food security."
Spreading Greenland rock flour on corn fields in Ghana produced a 30 to 50 per cent increase in crop yields. Similar yield gains occurred when it was spread on Danish fields that produce the barley for Carlsberg beer.
With melting ice depositing an estimated one billion tonnes of glacial flour a year, Greenland has the potential to restore depleted soils around the world, while a single tonne of it can capture 250 kilograms of carbon.
The material requires no processing, and there is enough of it simply lying around in Greenland to cover every acre of agricultural land in the world.
"There is great material out there," said Menezes, "that I think deserves attention. It really is — like water — the future."
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