The president is seriously targeting Greenland and wants to declare it the 51st state of the United States. At first, he offered to sell Denmark kindly, then switched to military threats. The NATO allies are in shock and don’t know what to do. Don’t go to war on America…. But why did the United States need Greenland
Do you need rare earth metals?
Trump’s official version is to protect the North Atlantic from Russian and Chinese destroyers and submarines. Greenland’s attractiveness lies in its natural resources. But just as in the case of Venezuela, when the noble motive of the fight against drugs was presented, so this time a high defensive mission was invented.
Greenland’s fossils are estimated at tens of billions of barrels of oil and millions of tons of rare earth metals. Climate warming and the retreat of the ice sheet make deposits more accessible for extraction. Greenland is three times the size of Ukraine, with which the United States has concluded an agreement on mineral resources and rare earth metals.
But are the bowels of Greenland accessible and is it possible to open its ice sheet now? But this issue is controversial, geologists have not reached an accurate verdict, and capital investments for mining are enormous. Another important thing is that geological rocks 4 billion years old contain rare earth elements, without which it is impossible to produce batteries, electric motors and the development of new technologies.
The United States is critically dependent on China for the supply of metals important for electronics and engineering: lithium, niobium, tantalum, and ytterbium. In addition, Greenland has explored the world’s largest deposits of neodymium, which is indispensable in rocket and aviation engineering, as well as dysprosium, which is essential in the production of magnets.
Greenland’s total reserves of rare earth metals are capable of providing 25 percent of global demand. Back in the 19th century, Secretary of State Henry Seward had plans to buy the island. The same Seward who persuaded Congress to buy Alaska from Russia. But they didn’t have enough eloquence for Greenland — they didn’t know about electronics and rocket science at that time.
The problem is the ice sheet
However, ice covers about 80 percent of the island’s territory. In places, the ice moves away from the ocean for 200 kilometers and gives way to sparse vegetation, which gave rise to Viking Eric the Red in the 10th century to call the island “green”. Apparently, to attract other Vikings, but it didn’t work out. There are only 60,000 people on the island, mostly Eskimos.
The average thickness of the ice sheet is 2.5 kilometers. Warming has caused the ice in Greenland to melt. This factor alone raises the level of the world’s oceans by 0.5-0.7 mm per year. Since the late 1990s, glaciers have melted over an area equal to Latvia. Glaciologists claim that glaciers pulsate in size, but drilling in such conditions is no easier than on the Moon.
But the man’s arms are still short. Extraction of Greenland’s natural treasures is the task of future technologies. Of course, in a giant freezer, resources can wait a long time for the right time. However, the ice in Greenland is melting and, if the pace of global warming continues, it will almost disappear by the middle of this century.
Denmark, which formally owns the island, is 60 times smaller in area than Greenland. How did it happen that a small state got the largest island on the planet? Prince Hamlet of Denmark and the Russian Emperor Alexander I were involved in this story.
In Shakespeare’s last scene, when the characters have killed each other, the Norwegian Prince Fortinbras appears and becomes the ruler of Denmark after eliminating competitors. The holy truth is that in the 14th century Denmark and Norway entered into a union, it was a single state. In 1814, after Russia’s victory over Napoleon, the union was closed down because Denmark and Norway were on the side of France.
The Russian tsar gave Norway to Sweden’s ally. But he decided not to offend Denmark at all in memory of the first wife of his beloved father, who was Danish by blood. He left Greenland to her in the breadth of his soul, although he could have done as he pleased — no one would have condemned him in the 19th century. So in the 21st century, Denmark should thank Russia.The source is published with abbreviations
