A 4 billion year history makes Greenland the richest in resources

Greenland is the largest island on the planet with an area of ​​about two million square kilometers, most of which is covered by slow-moving ice that flows into the sea through glaciers. Only about 20% of the island is ice-free, including rugged mountains, fjord-cut cliffs and a few towns with colorful houses.

“Greenland has a very long history,” Kathryn Goodenough, chief geologist at the British Geological Survey, told BBC.

Greenland’s geological development spans nearly 4 billion years. The central basement area is made up of gneiss rock complexes, sedimentary rock belts and metamorphic volcanic rocks, formed during the mountain tectonic period 3.8-1.6 billion years ago.

About 500 million years ago, Goodenough said, Greenland was part of a supercontinent sandwiched between Europe and North America. About 60-65 million years ago, the supercontinent began to split, forming a rift zone and eventually expanding, creating the North Atlantic Ocean. Greenland separated from Europe, drifting west, passing the “hot spot” Iceland – where molten lava rises from deep under the Earth’s crust.

Today, Greenland has everything from Precambrian bedrock to newly formed glacial deposits. The island possesses the richest reserves of natural resources on the planet, including important raw materials such as lithium and rare earths, many valuable metals and minerals, and large amounts of hydrocarbons, including oil and gas.

Three of Greenland’s rare earth mines are likely to be among the world’s largest reserves, promising to contribute significantly to the production of batteries and essential electronic components serving the global clean energy transition.

The US Geological Survey (USGS) estimates that mainland northeast Greenland (including ice-covered areas) contains hydrocarbons equivalent to about 31 billion barrels of oil – equivalent to the entire proven crude oil reserves of the United States. However, Greenland’s ice-free area, which is almost twice the size of England, makes up less than a fifth of the island’s total surface area. This means that there are likely to exist huge undiscovered resource deposits beneath the ice.

Greenland’s concentration of rich natural resources is associated with a turbulent geological history over the past 4 billion years. This place has some of the most ancient rocks on the planet, blocks of native iron (not derived from meteorites) as large as trucks, and kimberlite “pipes” containing diamonds that were discovered in the 1970s but have not been exploited yet, mainly due to logistics difficulties.

According to Jonathan Paul, associate professor of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London, geologically, it is extremely rare for an area to experience all three major mechanisms of natural resource formation – from oil and gas to rare earths and gems – extremely rare. These three mechanisms are related to the stages of mountain tectonics, crustal spreading and volcanic activity.

Greenland formed over many periods mountain tectonics lengthen. These compressive forces rupture the crust, allowing gold, gems and graphite to deposit in fractures and fissures. According to the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, graphite is essential for lithium battery production, but the island has not yet fully exploited it compared to major producers such as China or South Korea.

Much of Greenland’s natural resources originate from time immemorial The Earth’s crust stretchesthe most recent example being the formation of the Atlantic Ocean in the early Jurassic period, more than 200 million years ago. Greenland’s onshore sedimentary basins, such as the Jameson Land basin, have great oil and gas potential, as does Norway’s hydrocarbon-rich continental shelf. However, high costs have limited commercial exploration.

A growing number of studies show the potential for large-scale oil and gas systems surrounding the entire sea off Greenland. Metals such as lead, copper, iron, and zinc are also present in onshore sedimentary basins (barely covered by ice), and have been locally mined on a small scale since 1780.

In addition, many of Greenland’s key raw materials also originate from volcanic activity. Rare earth elements such as niobium, tantalum and ytterbium have been discovered in igneous rock layers in a similar way to silver and zinc mines in southwest England, which were formed by warm hydrothermal waters circulating through the margins of large magma intrusions.

Greenland is also predicted to have huge reserves of dysprosium and neodymium under the ice, enough to meet more than a quarter of future world demand – a total of nearly 40 million tons. They are difficult to exploit but are considered economically important rare earth elements due to their essential role in wind energy, electric motors for clean transportation, and magnets in high-temperature environments such as nuclear reactors. Exploitation of known rare earth deposits such as Kvanefjeld in southern Greenland, not to mention undiscovered mines in the island’s central rock core, could affect global markets.

However, climate change is creating a mining paradox in Greenland. A warmer climate means changing ecosystems, melting ice caps, rising sea levels and disruption of ocean currents. But this also causes many sea routes in the Arctic region to gradually open up, making it easier to transport important minerals for green energy technology, bringing hope to slow climate change.

Currently, all resource exploitation activities are strictly managed by the Greenland government through a comprehensive legal framework since the 1970s. However, pressure to relax these controls and grant new licenses for exploration and exploitation activities may increase in the context of the US showing special interest in the future of the island.