Greenland in the news for all the wrong reasons

Picture an ice sheet so thick it buries all of Chicago past the top of the Willis Tower—234 square miles by 1577 feet, all gone except for the tip of the tower spire. That’s how much ice melts away from Greenland every year.

And yet, somehow, our global conversation isn’t about how to stop this melting. It’s about what we might gain once the ice is gone. So goes the reporting, Greenland’s rare earth element deposits will become easier to mine as the ice retreats, and easier to export as sea ice clears and new Arctic shipping lanes open. Investors are intrigued. Geopolitical strategists are on high alert.

But the real headline here isn’t rare earth and trade routes. It’s myopia. While no one is openly cheering for Antarctica to melt, we seem oddly comfortable with Greenland’s demise, so focused on what might be gained that we’re overlooking what’s being lost.

Let’s zoom out. Greenland is the world’s largest island, about three times the size of Texas. It’s also home to the world’s largest ice sheet after Antarctica, a massive expanse of land-based ice covering 80 percent of the island and averaging 1.4 miles in thickness. If all this ice melted away, this tri-Texas-sized ice sheet would raise global sea levels by more than 23 feet. As it turns out, Greenland’s ice has been melting at a rate of about 270 billion tons per year since 2002—about one Chicago-sized glacier—and that pace is accelerating as our planet’s temperatures continue to reach record highs.

Why does this melting matter?

First, pouring this much freshwater into the ocean may be slowing down the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a system of ocean currents that circulates water around the Atlantic Ocean. No one knows exactly how much slowing is happening or whether the current might even stop someday, but the risk is real, and the consequences of an AMOC collapse are profound: intensified weather extremes, marine ecosystem loss, and widespread, severe, and potentially permanent climate disruption.

Second, rising seas will displace hundreds of millions of people, particularly in the world’s poorest regions, where building massive seawalls and relocating cities simply aren’t viable options. Even in the US, thousands of square miles of coastline—including large parts of Florida—will simply vanish beneath the waves if Greenland’s melt continues.

And finally, there’s the heat behind the melt. As our planet warms, more and more places are approaching the threshold of habitability—not yet abandoned, but struggling to endure heat that reshapes every hour of daily life. Drought, crop failures and famine will grow more severe. Mass migration will follow, on a scale we haven’t seen before in human history. We are poised to inflict a staggering human, social, environmental, and economic toll on our children and their children for generations to come.

But let’s talk mining again. It’s true that Greenland holds some of the world’s richest concentrations of rare earth elements, which are essential for everything from smartphones to wind turbines. At the moment, though, there are very few active mines on the island, and it has little infrastructure to support commercial-scale development. By 2030, Greenland’s mines might produce only 10,000 tons of rare earth elements annually, contributing roughly three percent to global totals. Meanwhile, the US already produces four times this amount, and many other sources in Africa and the Americas are emerging as faster and potentially more scalable alternatives.

More sobering, though, is this: Even if Greenland’s resources become fully accessible a few decades from now, rare earth elements—while crucial to green technologies—won’t shield us from the accelerating impacts of global warming. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns we are currently on track for nearly 5.5°F (3°C) of warming by 2100 unless emissions fall sharply. At this level, adaptation in many countries—doing things simply to stay alive, like relocating, installing cooling, and finding new sources of drinking water—becomes a permanent emergency, fought with ever-dwindling resources. A 2021 Swiss Re analysis projected that 3°C of warming could erase 18 percent of global GDP annually by century’s end.

This is why the Paris Climate Agreement, signed in 2015, set a goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F) above pre-industrial levels. This figure wasn’t symbolic. It marked a tipping point boundary beyond which cascading failures—like ice loss triggering methane release from thawing permafrost, leading to further warming and more ice loss—begin to compound. Despite years of warnings, we are now approaching or already passing this boundary, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

So what do we do?

First, sure, we will still need to mine. But maybe we can mine locations with fewer planetary-scale conflicts of interest?

Second, getting back to the buried lede, we need to slash emissions. We’ve all heard the talking points on this one.

The third action item may be new to many, but to truly lower the risk of hitting climate tipping points, we need to begin removing legacy carbon dioxide pollution from the earth’s atmosphere at scale as soon as possible. Without this vital step, the world will keep warming for centuries to come—3°C may end up being a mere waystation. We’ve already started this effort, but only barely. Current estimates call for pulling around 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year from our atmosphere by 2050 and storing it safely underground in depleted oil reservoirs, sedimentary basins, and rock formations like basalts, where it becomes permanently mineralized into stone. We can also use crushed minerals in coastal zones—where they react with seawater to draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and slow ocean acidification—embed carbon in durable products like asphalt and concrete, and enrich our soils with carbon-rich biochar. There’s a mining-related revolution on the horizon, and not just for rare earth.

If we’re serious about confronting our global warming crisis with all the necessary tools and strategies, we need to coordinate our international carbon removal policies and investments now. The longer we delay, the more carbon we’ll need to remove and the worse our climate conditions will become. Large-scale carbon removal has technical, logistical, financial and ethical challenges, so now is the time to build public engagement and develop solutions that are feasible, sustainable, effective and fair.

This isn’t our first test, and it won’t be our last. In a warming world, more and more “opportunities” will open up—not because our planet is offering them willingly, but because the stable climate that has nurtured human civilization for the past 12,000 years is starting to destabilize. Greenland is only one example of what we’ll see.

These coming changes aren’t opportunities, though. They’re disasters—signals we are crossing bright red lines. As we move into this next era of human existence, we need to stay grounded in the reality that today’s climate is safe, tomorrow’s will not be. Accordingly, we need to steer toward economic opportunities that will help preserve the climate we have, not profit from its collapse. The Greenland saga, after all, isn’t about what’s under the ice, but everything we’ll lose once the ice is gone.

 

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Notes:

1. In the first paragraph, 270 billion tons of ice translates into approximately 70 cubic miles (or 234 square miles times 1600 feet).
2. In the second paragraph rare earth elements are derived from rare earth mineral deposits. One mines the deposits, not the elements.
3. In the paragraph talking about global temperatures in the year 2100, there are a great many sources that have independently corroborated the IPCC’s findings. The best overall resource is Oxford’s The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal. This report from Climate Analytics estimates temperatures could peak as high as 3.4C (CAT_2024-11-14_GlobalUpdate_COP29.pdf).
4. In the paragraph discussing carbon dioxide removal options, more details about these technologies is everywhere, but a good central resource is Lawrence Livermore’s  report, Roads to Removal – Options for carbon dioxide removal in the US.

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This article was written by the following authors. Their views are personal and do not necessarily represent the views of their institutions.