Gold mine in Greenland
Greenland’s rare earth element deposits may be among the world’s largest by volume. But not only that: gold, silver, radioactive metals, oil, and even diamonds, make the largest island in the world a territory full of unexplored riches — but difficult to extract.
The i in Greenland may not just have to do with geopolitical reasons or trade routes. In fact, the largest island on Earth has some of the richest natural resource reserves all over the world.
Among its riches are critical raw materials such as lithium and elements of rare earths (ETR) that are essential for green technologies, in addition to other valuable minerals and metals, and a huge volume of hydrocarbons, including oil and gas.
Three of Greenland’s REE-bearing deposits, deep beneath the ice, may be among the biggest in the world in volume, containing great potential for the manufacture of batteries and electrical components essential to the global energy transition, says the geologist Jonathan Paul, professor of Earth Sciences at the University of London, in an article in .
The size of the potential for hydrocarbons and Greenland’s mineral wealth has stimulated extensive investigation by Denmark and the United States into the commercial and environmental viability of new activities such as mining.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that northeastern mainland Greenland (including ice-covered areas) contains about 31 billion barrels of oil equivalent in hydrocarbons — a volume that is similar to the total proven US crude oil reserves.
But , which is almost twice the size of the United Kingdom, represents less than a fifth of the island’s total surface – raising the possibility that huge reserves of natural resources unexplored are present under the ice.
Greenland’s concentration of natural resource wealth is linked to its immensely varied geological history over the last 4 billion years.
Some of the oldest rocks on Earth can be found here, as well as native iron blocks (not derived from meteorites) the size of trucks.
Also diamond deposits were discovered in the 1970s but have not yet been explored, largely due to logistical challenges of its mining.
From a geological point of view, it is very unusual (and exciting for geologists like Jonathan Paul) for a given region to have passed through the three forms fundamental ways in which natural resources, from oil and gas to REE and precious stones, are generated.
These processes are related to episodes of mountain formation, rifting (crustal relaxation and extension) and volcanic activity.
Greenland has been shaped by many prolonged periods of mountain formation. These compressive forces fragmented its crustallowing gold, precious stones such as rubies and graphite were deposited in faults and fractures.
Graphite is crucial for lithium battery productionbut, according to the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, remains “underexplored”compared to large producers such as China and South Korea.
But the largest proportion of Greenland’s natural resources originate from its rifting periodsincluding, more recently, the formation of the Atlantic Ocean since the beginning of the Jurassic Period, just over 200 million years ago.
Greenland’s continental sedimentary basins, such as the Jameson Land Basin, appear to hold the greater potential for oil and gas reservesanalogous to the hydrocarbon-rich continental shelf of neighboring Norway. However, the prohibitively high costs have limited commercial exploitation.
There is also a growing body of research that suggests there may be potentially extensive petroleum systems encircling the entire coast of Greenland.
Go as lead, copper, iron and zinc They are also present in continental sedimentary basins (mostly ice-free) and have been worked on locally, on a small scale, since 1780.
Hard-to-obtain rare earth elements
Although not as closely related to volcanic activity as neighboring Iceland, which uniquely sits at the intersection of a mid-ocean ridge and a mantle plume, many of Greenland’s critical raw materials owe their existence to its volcanic history.
Rare earths like niobium, tantalum and ytterbium were discovered in layers of igneous rock – similar to the discovery (and subsequent mining) of reserves of silver and zinc in southwest England, which were deposited by hot hydrothermal waters circulating at the edge of large volcanic intrusions.
It is also estimated that Greenland holds sub-glacial reserves of elements such as dysprosium and neodymium enough to satisfy more than 1/4 of expected future global demand, for a total of almost 40 million tons.
These elements are increasingly seen as the most economically important REEs, but hard to getdue to its indispensable role in wind energy, electric motors for clean road transport and magnets in high temperature environments such as nuclear reactors.
The development of deposits such as Kvanefjeldin southern Greenland, not to mention those not yet discovered in the island’s central rocky core, could easily affect the global REE market, due to its relative global scarcity.
It may soon be necessary address an unfortunate dilemma. Should Greenland’s increasingly available resource wealth be enthusiastically extracted in order to sustain and enhance the energy transition?
But doing so will increase the effects of climate change in Greenland and beyond, including degradation of a large part of its landscape pristine and contributing to the rise in sea levels that could flood its coastal villages.
Currently, all mining and resource extraction activities are heavily regulated by the Greenlandic government through comprehensive legal frameworks dating back to the 1970s.
However, pressure to relax these controls and to grant new exploration and exploitation licenses could increase in the face of strong US interest in Greenland’s future.
