Perché è quasi impossibile estrarre le risorse naturali della Groenlandia – Il paesaggio naturale del paese rende il compito estremamente difficile

https://theweek.com/world-news/greenland-natural-resources-impossible-mine

di ByGollie

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13 commenti

  1. CountFew6186 on

    Someone please tell this to my country’s president, so maybe his short attention span will turn elsewhere for a while.

  2. ByGollie on

    > #Why Greenland’s natural resources are nearly impossible to mine
    >
    > **The country’s natural landscape makes the task extremely difficult**
    >
    > President Donald Trump has renewed his efforts to take over Greenland, and tapping into the Danish territory’s natural resources is a key part of the strategy. But even if Trump were to somehow make Greenland a U.S. territory (something Denmark vehemently opposes), experts say the island’s harsh climate and environment make mining Greenland’s natural resources an unachievable goal.
    > What natural resources does Greenland have?
    >
    > Greenland has significant supplies of rare earth elements. These 17 metals, with “exotic-sounding names like terbium and neodymium, are vital for many everyday technologies,” said the BBC. Household items like televisions and smartphones would “not work without them.” Trump wants to tap into Greenland’s supply of rare earth minerals as part of an effort to overtake China, the country that currently “controls the world’s supply,” said Tony Sage, the CEO of Critical Metals, to the BBC.
    >
    > But rare earth minerals are not Greenland’s only natural resource. Many “occurrences of graphite and graphite schist are reported from many localities on the island,” said Reuters. Other minerals commonly found in the territory include diamonds, gold, nickel, titanium, tungsten, zinc and more, according to Greenland’s Mineral Resources Authority.
    >
    >
    > The island’s frigid, Arctic climate serves as the main culprit for challenging mining. Most of Greenland’s natural resources are “located in remote areas above the Arctic Circle, where there is a mile-thick polar ice sheet and darkness reigns much of the year,” said CNN. While people may understandably think neighboring Iceland is blanketed by ice, Greenland actually has the harsher climate; about “80% of Greenland is covered with ice,” and mining the “Arctic can be five to 10 times more expensive than doing it elsewhere on the planet.”
    >
    > As a result, most of the efforts to mine Greenland’s minerals “generally haven’t advanced beyond the exploratory stage,” said The Associated Press. And beyond the weather playing a major factor, the remote areas where many of these elements are located also present a problem. Even in southern Greenland, where the island is “populated, there are few roads and no railways, so any mining venture would have to create these accessibilities,” said Diogo Rosa, an economic geology researcher with the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, to the AP. There is also the question of power, as many of these remote areas don’t have consistent electricity.
    >
    > As of now, Greenland only has one fully operational mine, which produces anorthosite and is “located deep inside a fjord system with no road access,” said Business Insider. All of the mine’s supplies, including the crew, “arrives by ship during the ice-free months or by helicopter when the fjord freezes over for months on end.” And there may not be another operational mine for a while; on average it “takes 16 years to develop a mine, right from the first idea to the actual mine,” Naaja Nathanielsen, Greenland’s minister responsible for natural resources, said to Business Insider.
    >
    > It is clear that the “Trump administration might want to dominate the Arctic, not least to gain relative power over Russia and China,” Lukas Slothuus, a postdoctoral research fellow at the U.K.’s University of Sussex, said at The Conversation. But given the challenges with mining, any “natural resource extraction is unlikely to feature centrally.” If foreign powers did find a way to mine in Greenland, this would “reverberate in Copenhagen, as Greenland has a mining profit-sharing agreement with Denmark.”

    TL;DR – Ice

  3. Stannis_Loyalist on

    Trump decided to invade Venezuela without consulting the very oil companies he wanted to invest there. He found out after the fact that the “heaviness” of Venezuelan oil is one of the biggest reasons it is so difficult and expensive to get, and the infrastructure problems have made it even harder.

    You really think he is using his brain for anything but golfing?

  4. DoktorGuro on

    To be fair those resources will remain there until there is technology to mine them.

  5. Baset-tissoult28 on

    Same. Took Maduro down only to understand can’t get the oil out. Too dangerous and unstable..

  6. deliosenvy on

    But it’s not for now. Same with the argument of the shipping lanes.. It’s what will become available with global warming.

  7. WhoAteMySoup on

    I don’t think this has much to do with natural resources at all, but, if we are talking about it, the harsh climate and ice are going to be much less of a problem in the future with global warming.

  8. Smartimess on

    Trump does not want minerals. His wish it to own this land, maybe even rename it into Trumplandia or some bs.

    He is an old school colonizer. His entire personality is that of a rapist, so his foreign policy is matching his desire for power over his victims.

  9. Capital_Resident_872 on

    This is also why they would absolutely shred the island and its people if they got it.

    They will do anything to get these resources, no matter how much of the environment is destroyed.

  10. pastreaver on

    This is why you should give it to us Americans, Europe has a defeatist attitude…

    You’ll NVR be able to do anything if your constantly claim things are “too hard”

    This is why Americans were the first on the moon, why we won both world wars, why we are the number one super power… We don’t give up

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