Arctic Policy · Greenland

The Environmental Bill for Owning Greenland

The world’s largest island has now lost ice for thirty consecutive years. It also sits on one of the planet’s biggest heavy rare earth deposits, and it has spent two years being publicly claimed by a country that already has a base there. Almost none of the argument has been about the ecology.

By SEVENSEAS Media | Ocean Conservation

In early September the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland closed the books on another melt year, and the figure was roughly 173 billion tonnes of ice gone. That is the thirtieth year in a row that the Greenland ice sheet has lost more than it gained. The last time it finished a year ahead was 1995 to 1996. Thirty years is not a run of bad weather. Thirty years is the standard interval climatologists use to define a climate at all, which is rather the point the researchers were making.

It is an odd season for that number to land in. For most of the past two years Greenland has been in the news for reasons that have nothing to do with mass balance and everything to do with whether the United States can acquire it. The sovereignty argument has been conducted almost entirely in the language of security, minerals and shipping lanes. The ice, the narwhals, the moulting geese and the shrimp that are quietly walking north have barely rated a mention.

So here is the other ledger.

A rock, an ice cap and a very thin edge

Greenland covers 2,166,086 square kilometres, of which the ice sheet takes 1,755,637, or about 81 per cent. That ice holds somewhere near 2.85 million cubic kilometres of frozen freshwater. More than four fifths of the island sits north of the Arctic Circle. The highest ground, Gunnbjørn Fjeld in the eastern mountains, reaches 3,700 metres.

What is left over is the part people and animals actually use: an ice-free coastal fringe of roughly 410,000 square kilometres, bigger than Japan, wrapped around the outside of the ice like a rind. Every town and settlement is on it. There is almost no road network, because the fjords make one impractical, so the coast functions less as a continuous place than as a chain of harbours connected by sea and air.

The geology underneath is old and, for a mining prospectus, unusually interesting. Near Nuuk the Isua belt contains rocks around 3.8 billion years old, among the oldest exposed on Earth. In the south, the Ilímaussaq intrusive complex is an alkaline intrusion that concentrates rare earth elements, and concentrates uranium and thorium alongside them, a detail that turns out to matter enormously later on. In the east there are flood basalts and the layered Skaergaard intrusion, plus a fossil record good enough to have produced Acanthostega and Ichthyostega, two of the Devonian animals usually drafted in to illustrate vertebrates coming ashore.

Fifty-six thousand people

Greenland’s population in 2025 was 56,542. Just under 20,000 of them live in Nuuk. Around 88 per cent were born on the island, and roughly 89 per cent of the population is Kalaallit or otherwise Greenlandic Inuit. Greenlandic has been the sole official language since 2009, the same year the Self-Government Act moved control of mineral resources, among many other things, from Copenhagen to the Greenlandic government, the Naalakkersuisut. Denmark retained foreign affairs, defence, citizenship and monetary policy, and continues to pay a block grant, 4.3 billion kroner in 2024, worth about a third of public revenue.

The rest of the economy is fish. Seafood is more than 90 per cent of exports by value, according to Statistics Greenland. That single sentence explains more about Greenlandic environmental politics than any amount of geopolitical commentary, because a country whose export earnings are one ecosystem tends to take that ecosystem seriously.

It also means that any change in who holds sovereignty is, in practice, a change in who issues fishing quotas, mining licences and drilling permits. That is the environmental stake, stated plainly.

What lives there

Greenland has two terrestrial ecoregions, high Arctic tundra and low Arctic tundra, and a species list that is short by temperate standards and heavily weighted towards the sea. About 500 higher plants, roughly 950 lichens, around 700 insects. Some 269 fish species from more than 80 families in the surrounding waters. The native land mammals fit in a sentence: polar bear, Arctic fox, Arctic hare, muskox, collared lemming, ermine and Arctic wolf, the last four of which occur naturally only in the east, having walked in from Ellesmere Island.

The northeast of the island is not part of any municipality. It is Northeast Greenland National Park, the largest national park on Earth, with a permanent human population you could seat at two tables.

The most striking recent discovery is on the other coast. In 2022 a team led by Kristin Laidre reported in Science that the polar bears of southeast Greenland are a genetically distinct and functionally isolated group, the twentieth recognised polar bear subpopulation and the most genetically isolated anywhere. A few hundred animals. They get sea ice for only about four months a year, from February to late May, and their ice-free period runs more than a hundred days longer than the species is thought able to fast. They survive by hunting from the freshwater ice mélange that pours out of marine-terminating glaciers, a platform that exists all year. The authors were careful about what this means. It is not that polar bears will be fine. It is that a handful of glacier fronts may act as refugia, and that those fronts are rare.

Offshore there are narwhals, bowheads, belugas, walrus, several seal species and seabird colonies on the cliffs. Hold on to the narwhals. They come back.

What the reporting says Washington wants

The short version, drawn from the news record rather than from anyone’s inference: President Trump has pressed since December 2024 for the United States to acquire Greenland, and the pressure escalated sharply over the turn of this year. In January 2026 the White House confirmed it was weighing options including military ones. Trump told Politico that it “may be a choice” between seizing Greenland and preserving NATO. He threatened tariffs of up to 25 per cent on eight European countries that had sent forces to help defend the island, and linked the whole campaign to not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in a message he asked the Norwegian prime minister to circulate.

On 21 January at Davos he reversed course, ruling out force and dropping the tariff threat after talks with the NATO secretary general, and said he still wanted ownership in order to defend the island from Russia and China. Danish and Greenlandic officials said no deal affecting sovereignty had been made or could be. He returned to the subject at the NATO summit in July.

The stated rationale is national security first and critical minerals second. It is worth noting what the same reporting establishes about the other side of the argument. The United States has had military access to Greenland since the 1951 Greenland Defense Agreement and operates Pituffik Space Base under it. A YouGov poll in mid-January found 8 per cent of Americans supported taking Greenland by force, with 73 per cent opposed. Senior Republicans including Mike Johnson, Lisa Murkowski, Roger Wicker and Mitch McConnell criticised the effort, and a bipartisan bill was introduced to bar federal funds for occupying NATO territory. The UK House of Commons Library now maintains a standing briefing on the dispute.

Greenland will not be part of the USA. Jens-Frederik Nielsen, Premier of Greenland, January 2026, quoted by Al Jazeera

Nielsen has also said that forced to choose between Washington and Copenhagen, Greenland chooses Copenhagen, and told NBC News in April that many Greenlanders do not feel safe. The Greenlandic parliament issued a joint cross-party statement rejecting American absorption. Whether or not an acquisition is plausible, and most analysts quoted in the last eighteen months think it is not, the pressure has already changed behaviour on the ground. That is where the environmental consequences start.

The shipping lane that mostly is not there yet

Retreating sea ice is real and the traffic is following it. The Arctic Council’s shipping working group reports that the number of ships entering the Polar Code area rose about 40 per cent between 2013 and 2025. Crude oil tankers were up 396 per cent, bulk carriers 156 per cent, cruise ships 123 per cent. Fishing vessels remain the single largest category, at 40 per cent of all ships.

The trans-Arctic shortcut, though, is a smaller story than the rhetoric suggests. Allianz Commercial counted 23 vessels making the Northern Sea Route transit in 2025, up from 15 the year before, which as one analyst pointed out in August is fewer ships than pass through the Suez Canal on an average day. The window runs roughly August to October. Ice-class hulls, icebreaker escorts and polar insurance are expensive, and there is essentially no salvage capacity if something goes wrong.

None of that makes the ecological effect small, because the animals do not care about tonnage statistics. They care about noise. A controlled exposure study on narwhals in Scoresby Sound in East Greenland, published in Science Advances, found the species is extraordinarily sensitive to ship sound. Foraging buzz rates halved at 12 kilometres from the vessel, the whales stopped foraging altogether at 7 to 8 kilometres, and responses were detectable beyond 40 kilometres, at received levels below the natural background. Narwhals reacted to ship noise alone about as strongly as to seismic airguns. They are a niche specialist with high site fidelity, which is the ecological way of saying they do not have a plan B.

Then there is what ships leave behind. Black carbon from exhaust settles on ice and darkens it, and darker ice absorbs more sunlight and melts faster. SEVENSEAS covered the local end of this problem in ten days of air quality measurements in Ilulissat earlier this issue.

The minerals, and the mines that do not exist yet

The rare earth story in Greenland is mostly the story of one geological complex and two very different projects sitting on it.

Tanbreez, at the southern tip of the island, is described by its owner as one of the world’s largest heavy rare earth deposits, carrying dysprosium, terbium and yttrium, the elements that go into permanent magnets and defence hardware. In April 2026 the Greenland government approved the transfer of the remaining stake to the New York listed Critical Metals Corp, taking it to 92.5 per cent ownership after what one analysis described as an eighteen-month regulatory review. Reuters has reported that US administration officials discussed converting a Defense Production Act grant into an equity stake in the company, which would give Washington a direct interest in the deposit. The company has also floated processing the material in Saudi Arabia, which is a sentence worth reading twice if you have been told this is about supply chains close to home.

Twenty-odd kilometres away sits Kuannersuit, also called Kvanefjeld, on the same Ilímaussaq plateau above the town of Narsaq. It has a comparable rare earth endowment and about 360 parts per million of uranium mixed in with it. In December 2021 the Inatsisartut passed the Uranium Act, banning prospecting, exploration and exploitation where the average uranium content exceeds 100 ppm. The Australian owner, now Energy Transition Minerals, took the governments of Greenland and Denmark to arbitration and sought billions in damages. In March 2026 the tribunal ruled that the licensing question was not arbitrable and that the Danish state could not be a party. Greenland’s law survived.

That contrast is the entire environmental argument in miniature. Greenlanders did not reject mining. They rejected radioactive tailings above a fishing and sheep farming town of about a thousand people, and they did it through their own parliament under powers they acquired in 2009. Any arrangement that moves resource licensing somewhere else is an arrangement that could have gone the other way.

It is also worth deflating the bonanza slightly. Despite decades of exploration and dozens of projects, Greenland had only two operating mines as of last year. Costs are high, infrastructure is thin, there is almost no domestic refining, and the same minerals are cheaper to get elsewhere. Several economists have argued that mining will not move the Greenlandic economy for at least a decade. The geopolitical excitement is running well ahead of the geology.

Jameson Land, where the abstract argument became a barge

Greenland stopped issuing oil and gas licences in 2021, on the stated ground that the environmental price of extraction was too high. Three licences predating the ban survive, held by White Flame Energy, a subsidiary of the British company 80 Mile plc. They cover the Jameson Land Basin in East Greenland.

In March 2026 a US company, Greenland Energy, listed on Nasdaq through a SPAC merger, raised 70 million dollars in April and set out to fund and majority-own the drilling. Its executives have talked publicly about a trillion dollars of crude under Jameson Land, against a Geological Survey estimate of roughly 2.35 billion barrels of oil equivalent. It also signed up Dr Phil’s production company to make a six-part Arctic adventure docuseries about the campaign, a detail included here only because it is true.

On 29 and 30 July a tug towed a barge carrying an excavator and more than a dozen containers into Nerlerit Inaat, about 40 kilometres from the settlement of Ittoqqortoormiit. Greenland’s government said it had not granted permission and issued what it called a strong warning. On 11 August the company postponed drilling to winter 2027, saying the government had told its partner the project needed a more extensive review. One analyst quoted by Global News read the equipment landing as a signal that the work would proceed with or without approval.

Now the ecology of the place. Jameson Land holds the largest and densest muskox population in East Greenland. It is internationally important for moulting pink-footed geese and barnacle geese, which is why the wetland at Heden was designated a Ramsar site in 1988. Moulting geese are flightless for several weeks, so they cannot simply leave a disturbance, and the Danish strategic environmental assessment of the area names the muskoxen and the geese as the fauna most sensitive to exactly that. An earlier baseline study for a proposed molybdenum mine estimated that up to 4,900 moulting pink-footed geese would avoid the affected zone. Drilling is restricted to winter precisely because of this, which is also why the heavy equipment has to arrive by barge in the ice-free summer, which is how a barge came to be sitting in a fjord without a permit.

And the fjord system next door is Scoresby Sound. The narwhals in that noise study are the same population.

The fish are already leaving

Cold-water shrimp and Greenland halibut have historically supplied roughly 90 per cent of fishing export revenue between them. Both are moving. Around 80 per cent of the shrimp biomass now sits north of 66 degrees, a shift under way since the mid-2000s, and the scientific advice for the stock fell from 110,000 tonnes in 2023 to 80,000 tonnes in 2025, with quotas cut to match.

Cod has filled some of the gap. An analysis by Danmarks Nationalbank found the export value of cod products rose about 70 per cent in the first ten months of 2025 against the year before, enough to lift total seafood export value despite the shrimp decline. The bank also warned about setting quotas above biological advice, which Greenland has done: the 2025 East Greenland cod allowance was set at 35,000 tonnes against ICES advice of 23,518.

This is the least glamorous part of the story and probably the most consequential. Climate change is redistributing Greenland’s only real industry northwards, into waters that are also the ones being talked about as shipping corridors and seabed mineral provinces. Deciding who sets those quotas, under what advice, is a bigger environmental question than any single mine.

And the seabed

Deep sea mining has not started in the Arctic, and the reason is instructive. Norway opened around 281,000 square kilometres of the Norwegian and Greenland Seas to seabed minerals, became the first Arctic state to do so, and then suspended licensing until 2029 as part of a budget deal. Companies folded or cut costs by 80 per cent. WWF puts the knowledge base required for science-based decisions on Arctic seabed mining at roughly 1 per cent, and Norway’s own seabed mapping had covered about a tenth of its shelf. The Norwegian Offshore Directorate has since signed a memorandum with GEUS and the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources to build a shared Arctic seabed minerals knowledge centre, which is the sensible order of operations. The United States, meanwhile, finalised revisions to its own deep seabed mining regulations in January 2026, the same month the high seas biodiversity treaty entered into force. Two governance systems moving in different directions over the same water.

The part of Greenland that does not care who owns it

Between the 1986 to 1987 season and this one, the ice sheet has shed something on the order of 6,205 billion tonnes, which by itself has raised global mean sea level by a little over 1.7 centimetres. Copernicus puts Greenland’s share of current global sea level rise at roughly 20 per cent. The whole ice sheet, if it went, is about 7.4 metres of sea level, though that is a process measured in millennia rather than headlines.

There is a counterintuitive local twist. As the ice unloads, the bedrock rebounds, and research published in Nature Communications projects that parts of western and southern Greenland’s own coastline will see relative sea level fall by between one and nearly four metres by 2100. Fjords will shallow. Harbours may end up inland of the water. The island that is contributing most to everyone else’s flooding will be building new navigation hazards for itself.

All that meltwater also goes somewhere. Freshwater input into the North Atlantic dilutes the currents that drive the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, and a weakening AMOC is one of the more consequential open questions in climate science. Greenland’s ice is not a Greenlandic asset. It is a global variable that happens to be stored there.

The ledger

Strip out the theatre and what is left is a fairly ordinary conservation problem with an unusually loud soundtrack. An Arctic coastline with thin infrastructure and no spill response is being opened to more ships, in waters holding a whale species that stops eating when a vessel is eight kilometres away. A Ramsar wetland with the densest muskox population in East Greenland has a drilling programme aimed at it. A rare earth deposit is changing hands in a country whose parliament has already had to defend, in arbitration, its right to say no to the deposit next door. And the ice keeps going, at a rate that has now been negative for as long as climate science defines a climate.

The 56,542 people who live there have been fairly clear about what they want, repeatedly, in their own parliament and in the largest demonstrations in the island’s history. Greenland has already used its self-government powers to ban new oil licences and to block a uranium project it did not want, and it took a multibillion dollar legal fight to defend the second. Those are not the decisions of a place waiting to be told what its resources are for.

Whoever ends up holding the paperwork, the mass balance figures will still be published every September. They will still be negative. That is the part of this story nobody is negotiating over, and it is the only part that is genuinely settled.

If you work on Greenlandic ecology, fisheries or resource governance and want to correct or extend anything here, we would like to hear from you.

SEVENSEAS Media · Conservation Journalism for the Ocean