It probably is pretty good for datacenters. You would save a ton on cooling cost. And CO2 footprint as a result. Not that current US cares about that but the rest of the world does.
And you don't have to own a country to put datacenters there. Simply investing there will bring jobs and money for the inhabitants, will make profit for the investor, it's a win win.
Forcibly taking it over will make a lot of enemies and disruption to trade. It will make less profit overall, especially once the population starts destroying your company assets, connection lines etc. Not to mention all the second tier effects in global lost trust from trading partners.
But Trump just looks at that big map and goes "This will be MINE". Is it really about more than that?
The cooling would be a bonus, but you also can't ignore all the negatives. No power, limited roads, no deep harbour, no skilled support staff, no fiber, no backup fiber, latency, geopolitical uncertainty, thawing permafrost etc
I'd bet the biggest compute in the country is on the US base already...
I'm not sure that you would. You might think that cooler ambient temperatures mean less cooling required, but it's really a matter of rapid heat transfer away from chips, which is why electronics in satellites need active cooling, despite the temperature of space being near absolute zero.
Yes, you'd still need a full forced air cooling system (especially with modern datacentre densities), so the only gain would be from the there being a higher temperature gradient for your heat exchangers to work with.
There's no way that by itself would make enough of a difference to justify building a dc there, given all the other negatives that others have mentioned.
That data center likely still uses liquid to liquid heat exchangers with a chilled water loop and cooling towers to reject heat outside, but I could be wrong. Piping refrigerant around a massive building costs way more than chilled water, same goes for filling up the system, glycol and water is cheaper than refrigerant.
That's inevitable, really, given the way power densities have been increasing. I wouldn't be surprised if people weren't also experimenting with high pressure Helium and similar technologies.
It's certainly a far cry from opening some windows and stringing a few fans together in the hope that the chilly outside air will be enough to keep things cool!
Before we go down that path, datacenters full of oil tubs seems to be a trend in some spaces. Very good cooling power, low-tech heat extraction (small pumps to make the oil move, car radiators with big simple plumbing... do the trick well).
If you want to save a ton on cooling costs, wouldn't it be just easier to build those data centers in Alaska? Or if they don't have to be in America, there are lots of options in Northern Europe with better infrastructure than Greenland.
But of course you're right, really it's mostly about map-painting.
There's a theory I heard somewhere recently that part of the reason Trump is so interested in Greenland is due to his lack of understanding of maps.
The Mercator projection (which is how most 2D maps are displayed) makes Greenland appear to be the size of North America. It's large, to be sure (around 25% bigger than Alaska), but it's certainly not continent sized.
Obviously thats no justification for his actions, but found the explanation at least a bit amusing given his other odd misunderstandings (eg thinking people seeking asylum are from an insane asylum, thinking wind mills somehow affect whales, etc. The list goes on and on...)
I don't think the environment being cool is a factor in current data center designs is it? Otherwise, the northern US or Alaska would be candidates. Instead, a lot of the data center boom is in states like Texas or the south.
I think some interviewer with Trump did actually ask him the question you posed and he said something to the effect of "ownership is important" for him _personally_ not necessarily for the _US_ which is the a ridiculous thing to hear from a leader of a country.
> I don't think the environment being cool is a factor in current data center designs is it? Otherwise, the northern US or Alaska would be candidates. Instead, a lot of the data center boom is in states like Texas or the south.
It is increasingly becoming so. And some designs work well. I only read a post about the internet archive's smart use of the server heat a couple days ago, I can't find it back now. And indeed, good point. Alaska would be great for that too.
And the US is kinda an exception, the rest of the world is watching emissions but the US is trying to screw the world up for everyone else. Including themselves but Trump followers seem to view all the disasters as an 'act of god'. I remember those poor school kids in the flooding in texas last year and there being more 'thoughts and prayers' than actual help or prevention.
I know Ireland is popular for datacenters in part because of the climate there (in another big part all the tax breaks but ok).
And yes you can cool them with renewable energy. Most datacenters are. But it also means that renewable energy can't be used for something else.
>I think some interviewer with Trump did actually ask him the question you posed and he said something to the effect of "ownership is important" for him _personally_ not necessarily for the _US_
Does he actually know the difference between "mine" and "the US'" though? I was under the assumption that since the US is his, anything important for him is also important for the US, and vice versa.
Not to mention the energy needed. Greenland does not even have a national grid. Lots of untapped hydro but that's not something you build in a fortnight.
Right, there is potential for energy everywhere, some location specific (hydro, geothermal, solar, wind), and some less so (nuclear, coal, gas). The quickest (shortest lead time) solution is to do what xAI did and use on-site natural gas generators.
It's interesting that at some point datacenters in space also become viable, which sounds absurd, but since the need for FLOPS and power is immediate, space and Greenland have to be far down the list of places to choose to build. Right now you build where the lead time for power capacity of some sort is shortest.
> 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.
It is not "taking over" or "annexing". It is invading. A military ally, at that.
And it is not "tapping into [...] natural resources". It is plundering their natural resources.
None of these hypotheticals are consensual. There is no plan for a freely agreed-upon bilateral agreement. This is about invading and pillaging a foreign land. Whether it is Greenland, Canada, or any other country.
the end strategy is controlling trade between europe and china. the NW passage and eventually the arctic ocean will be opening.
the US shares its current control with russia for these new trade routes, but it wants to be able to unilaterally decide what china can do at sea. thus it needs control that isnt shared with russia or europe.
its the same thing with panama, the US needs to recapture control to ensure that china cannot ship through without US permission
Whatever the U.S. feels it needs to do in that regard can be accomplished with the current arrangement. It doesn’t need to invade or unilaterally annex or violate international law.
Nobody is talking about how less than 1% of the Epstein files have been released weeks past the deadline after Venezuela, ICE in Minneapolis and Greenland.
They don't care. No one is punishing them for not complying with releasing all of the Epstein files, and no one is going to punish them for anything in those files. Jeffrey Epstein was the first and likely last person to suffer any consequence beyond reputational harm.
There are numerous reasons why the US will probably go to war with Iran at some point (it's part of the "Axis of Evil" after all) but distracting from Epstein isn't one of them.
Europe going forward is going to be treated the way the US treats and has always treated Latin American and African and Middle Eastern countries. That you see a conspiracy in further coercion of a non-consensual empire indicates how sheltered and "white identity" oriented you are.
Apparently the Lauder billionaire mentioned it because he has a mineral water bottling plant and some other insignificant business there. But Trump liked the idea so it’s basically all this is for some spring water.
More consequentially it’s an attempt to destroy NATO so Putin can have his way with Europe.
Considering how quickly he moved past taking Canada I almost feel like he didn't want it that badly but now he's blustered about it so much it would be embarrassing so not get it.
The meeting with Zelensky in Oval Office wasn't some kind of convoluted strategy, a tease, or a bluff. It was fully serious and a preludium to something very nasty. That nasty thing hasn't happened yet.
If I threatened someone until they sold me something that they made very clear they did not want to sell noone would call it "Buying" and we shouldn't either. It would be extorting. Under no circumstances are we buying Greenland at this point, anything that happens is something else.
The problem is that virtually the entire new world and much of the old world was acquired by force and threats of force that has been legitimized over time. So yes, I think this is clearly extortion and any sale that takes would be coerced.
For sure in the future I'm sure the US will teach that it was a fair deal and nato was corrupt anyway but I hate to see the whitewashing of it going on already like it's a casual land purchase offer
> It’s not invading, yet. Just buying or psyopping is more likely than fighting NATO.
Threatening to invade (which the Trump administration has been explicitly doing) is about as damaging as invading in the long run, either way we have sent the message loud and clear that the US is no longer a reliable ally and everyone has to shift away from the post-WW2 world order.
I find it funny that they could simply exit the Antarctic treaty and take over Antarctica and gain more value. There's plenty of good stuff under that ice too. It's very likely that it's got his favorite mineral of all: gold.
Don’t give governments bad ideas —surely the treaty will collapse one day and the big powers will divvy it up and push out the has been powers from the playground… but let’s keep things as they are as long as possible.
Yet one more bafflingly stupid decision from the cruelest and stupidest administration the US has ever seen. Perhaps electing a failed businessman and malignant narcissist and surrounding him with yes men was a bad idea? The cost of eggs certainly hasn't gone down.
What examples of digging through that amount of ice for the purposes of mining are you familiar with? What's a good example?
It'd be interesting to understand how much the environment there increases the cost of mining. Anything is possible, but it'd be cool to know whether it makes any sense. (and yes, I think our leadership in the US is fully capable of causing an international crisis over mineral assets that would in financial terms be best left in the ground)
It's not for mining, but the US built Camp Century and Camp TUTO in the ice to determine how feasible Project Iceworm would be. A construction film about the former was declassified some decades ago [0]. Icefield construction wasn't feasible even in the context of cold-war era MAD spending.
Actual subglacial mining has only been attempted a few times. Kumtor gold mine in Kyrgyzstan is in the middle of a couple glaciers and reshaped the landscape to redirect the glaciers a bit. Svea Nord in Svalbard ran tunnels under a glacier for coal. Canada's Granduc mine wasn't technically on or under a glacier, but it was just below one.
I guess I don't even know what to do with some of this information. It occurred to me that you'd also probably have to build some infrastructure (power plant, railroad, fuel terminal, a real port... I don't know) in order to even get the ball rolling. I don't think anyone's going to pay for that by taxing the citizens of Nuuk.
I also wonder if there has ever been a real geopolitical obstacle to doing this stuff, since the Danes and Greenlanders seem amenable to doing business. It would seem the obstacles have all been financial.
As I said in a comment elsewhere, arctic mining is doable with nation-state level resources. There's just no reason to do so that isn't better accomplished by other means. It would be stupid, expensive, and devastate a beautiful country.
As for "amenable", my experience is that people in the arctic are relatively unhappy about that sort of industrial development. They like the places they live.
If “non experts” aren’t welcome, can you establish your expertise on the topic? In particular, what’s your experience with mining thorough ice or maintaining industrial operations in the Arctic or near-arctic conditions?
The main problem with ice, is that it moves all the time. The glaciers on Iceland move up to 46m per day. Also, any tunnel created in fast moving ice could easily be crushed by the pressure of the ice.
Greenland isn't entirely covered in ice. Take a look at any of the mineral resources maps floating around for the country. Everything's on the coastal margins in places only covered by seasonal snow. The interior is a big blank because no one's been able to search under the ice.
However, the adjacent Canadian provinces (Nunavut & Northern Labrador) share many of the same geologic provinces, also without significant glaciation. There aren't a lot of big mines up there relative to the mineral wealth because it's simply too challenging. Constructing big infrastructure in the arctic takes resources approaching nation-state levels. Most mining companies can't muster that or maintain it long-term.
Don’t modern mines remove everything over a very large area? It’s not tunnels and pickaxes any longer. The trucks are the size of a three story building.
Start with a few bunker busting bombs, work outside of winter, dump ice, dirt into ocean. Sounds plausible.
And? So carve out a wider area. The defeatism is palpable in here, some hackers. Why even get out of bed in the morning, right?
They extract oil from tar sands in Alberta, for example. Difficult things are done all the time that are costly, as long as the price exceeds the cost.
To be clear my post above is not supportive of the administration, but rather the feasibility of mining at high latitudes.
Greenland is 99% uninhabited. There is no significant bill for invasion beyond transportation of mining equipment, cheap at sea. They were talking about buying it or the inhabitants, but that is paid with other people's money.
Reply below:
It's been under Danish control, and the Arctic is warming more quickly than other parts of the world.
You can do both, but why would you? It's not like we've tapped out Australia. And until we have, why bother with Greenland if the same money invested in Australia, or Sweden, or Canada would yield more profit?
Maybe, people previously thought it was not worth it to mine in greenland and thats why there is no noticable mining operation. But what do i know about cost-ratio or thinking.
I'm glad the resident HN tech bros are also Arctic mining experts. Surely they wouldn't complain about non-experts writing clickbaity articles while making claims with no evidence themselves.
Today I heard some US official going on about how it's ideal for datacenters.
Presumably the B200s will be brought in via dogsled.
US has absolutely lost the plot
"Politics is an art of distraction" (c)
All the fuss and constant bombardment of tweets is to distract from the Epstein files. And it works very well!
It probably is pretty good for datacenters. You would save a ton on cooling cost. And CO2 footprint as a result. Not that current US cares about that but the rest of the world does.
And you don't have to own a country to put datacenters there. Simply investing there will bring jobs and money for the inhabitants, will make profit for the investor, it's a win win.
Forcibly taking it over will make a lot of enemies and disruption to trade. It will make less profit overall, especially once the population starts destroying your company assets, connection lines etc. Not to mention all the second tier effects in global lost trust from trading partners.
But Trump just looks at that big map and goes "This will be MINE". Is it really about more than that?
>It probably is pretty good for datacenters.
The cooling would be a bonus, but you also can't ignore all the negatives. No power, limited roads, no deep harbour, no skilled support staff, no fiber, no backup fiber, latency, geopolitical uncertainty, thawing permafrost etc
I'd bet the biggest compute in the country is on the US base already...
> You would save a ton on cooling cost
I'm not sure that you would. You might think that cooler ambient temperatures mean less cooling required, but it's really a matter of rapid heat transfer away from chips, which is why electronics in satellites need active cooling, despite the temperature of space being near absolute zero.
Yes, you'd still need a full forced air cooling system (especially with modern datacentre densities), so the only gain would be from the there being a higher temperature gradient for your heat exchangers to work with.
There's no way that by itself would make enough of a difference to justify building a dc there, given all the other negatives that others have mentioned.
Actually modern datacenters, such as xAI's Memphis one, are now using liquid cooling since the power density of SOTA chips demands it.
That data center likely still uses liquid to liquid heat exchangers with a chilled water loop and cooling towers to reject heat outside, but I could be wrong. Piping refrigerant around a massive building costs way more than chilled water, same goes for filling up the system, glycol and water is cheaper than refrigerant.
That's inevitable, really, given the way power densities have been increasing. I wouldn't be surprised if people weren't also experimenting with high pressure Helium and similar technologies.
It's certainly a far cry from opening some windows and stringing a few fans together in the hope that the chilly outside air will be enough to keep things cool!
Before we go down that path, datacenters full of oil tubs seems to be a trend in some spaces. Very good cooling power, low-tech heat extraction (small pumps to make the oil move, car radiators with big simple plumbing... do the trick well).
If you want to save a ton on cooling costs, wouldn't it be just easier to build those data centers in Alaska? Or if they don't have to be in America, there are lots of options in Northern Europe with better infrastructure than Greenland.
But of course you're right, really it's mostly about map-painting.
There's a theory I heard somewhere recently that part of the reason Trump is so interested in Greenland is due to his lack of understanding of maps.
The Mercator projection (which is how most 2D maps are displayed) makes Greenland appear to be the size of North America. It's large, to be sure (around 25% bigger than Alaska), but it's certainly not continent sized.
Obviously thats no justification for his actions, but found the explanation at least a bit amusing given his other odd misunderstandings (eg thinking people seeking asylum are from an insane asylum, thinking wind mills somehow affect whales, etc. The list goes on and on...)
Considering he thought it was "hole" milk, I'm choosing to believe it.
I don't think the environment being cool is a factor in current data center designs is it? Otherwise, the northern US or Alaska would be candidates. Instead, a lot of the data center boom is in states like Texas or the south.
I think some interviewer with Trump did actually ask him the question you posed and he said something to the effect of "ownership is important" for him _personally_ not necessarily for the _US_ which is the a ridiculous thing to hear from a leader of a country.
Iceland based data centers are able to cut their energy usage for cooling by 24-31% compared to US/UK equivalent due to the climate [0].
[0]: https://eandt.theiet.org/2022/12/12/iceland-coolest-location...
> I don't think the environment being cool is a factor in current data center designs is it? Otherwise, the northern US or Alaska would be candidates. Instead, a lot of the data center boom is in states like Texas or the south.
It is increasingly becoming so. And some designs work well. I only read a post about the internet archive's smart use of the server heat a couple days ago, I can't find it back now. And indeed, good point. Alaska would be great for that too.
And the US is kinda an exception, the rest of the world is watching emissions but the US is trying to screw the world up for everyone else. Including themselves but Trump followers seem to view all the disasters as an 'act of god'. I remember those poor school kids in the flooding in texas last year and there being more 'thoughts and prayers' than actual help or prevention.
I know Ireland is popular for datacenters in part because of the climate there (in another big part all the tax breaks but ok).
And yes you can cool them with renewable energy. Most datacenters are. But it also means that renewable energy can't be used for something else.
>I think some interviewer with Trump did actually ask him the question you posed and he said something to the effect of "ownership is important" for him _personally_ not necessarily for the _US_
Does he actually know the difference between "mine" and "the US'" though? I was under the assumption that since the US is his, anything important for him is also important for the US, and vice versa.
>But Trump just looks at that big map and goes "This will be MINE". Is it really about more than that?
It's about breaking up NATO for Putin.
Oddly enough your comment uses the same authoritarian techniques of distract and befuddle the audience.
What a worthless pile of bits you've dumped on the world.
Not to mention the energy needed. Greenland does not even have a national grid. Lots of untapped hydro but that's not something you build in a fortnight.
Right, there is potential for energy everywhere, some location specific (hydro, geothermal, solar, wind), and some less so (nuclear, coal, gas). The quickest (shortest lead time) solution is to do what xAI did and use on-site natural gas generators.
It's interesting that at some point datacenters in space also become viable, which sounds absurd, but since the need for FLOPS and power is immediate, space and Greenland have to be far down the list of places to choose to build. Right now you build where the lead time for power capacity of some sort is shortest.
I hope we can at least avoid the sanewashing.
> 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.
It is not "taking over" or "annexing". It is invading. A military ally, at that.
And it is not "tapping into [...] natural resources". It is plundering their natural resources.
None of these hypotheticals are consensual. There is no plan for a freely agreed-upon bilateral agreement. This is about invading and pillaging a foreign land. Whether it is Greenland, Canada, or any other country.
While we're at it I also fail to see any strategy.
> I also fail to see any strategy.
Also see Venezuela. Oil seems to have been a key part of the aim. However oil companies seem surprised and not entirely keen.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c205dx61x76o
Hey guys, want to invest tens of billions of dollars into a country that nationalized the infrastructure you built less than 20 years ago? Anyone?
If a sane administration is elected in 2028, support for oil majors in Venezuela disappears.
They are button mashing the policy controller
the end strategy is controlling trade between europe and china. the NW passage and eventually the arctic ocean will be opening.
the US shares its current control with russia for these new trade routes, but it wants to be able to unilaterally decide what china can do at sea. thus it needs control that isnt shared with russia or europe.
its the same thing with panama, the US needs to recapture control to ensure that china cannot ship through without US permission
Whatever the U.S. feels it needs to do in that regard can be accomplished with the current arrangement. It doesn’t need to invade or unilaterally annex or violate international law.
Nobody is talking about how less than 1% of the Epstein files have been released weeks past the deadline after Venezuela, ICE in Minneapolis and Greenland.
Plenty of people are still talking about that.
There are a lot of people and they talk about lots of different things.
If the talking gets too loud, the US will liberate and free another country.
Iran is all lined up.
They don't care. No one is punishing them for not complying with releasing all of the Epstein files, and no one is going to punish them for anything in those files. Jeffrey Epstein was the first and likely last person to suffer any consequence beyond reputational harm.
There are numerous reasons why the US will probably go to war with Iran at some point (it's part of the "Axis of Evil" after all) but distracting from Epstein isn't one of them.
I don't even have hope it will accomplish anything. Everyone who still supports him either doesn't care or will say it's Ai generated.
It is Putin’s strategy
Europe going forward is going to be treated the way the US treats and has always treated Latin American and African and Middle Eastern countries. That you see a conspiracy in further coercion of a non-consensual empire indicates how sheltered and "white identity" oriented you are.
> Middle Eastern countries.
Are we including the way arms are poured into various countries, for dubious reasons? Or are we excluding Israel, Saudi and Turkey?
Israel isn't a middle eastern country. It's a western colony in the middle east.
> While we're at it I also fail to see any strategy.
The word on the street is that it's yet another step to try to keep the Epstein files out of the news.
There's a strategy, but it's a strategy for changing the story away from Epstein, and for satisfying Trump's dictator fantasies.
Apparently the Lauder billionaire mentioned it because he has a mineral water bottling plant and some other insignificant business there. But Trump liked the idea so it’s basically all this is for some spring water.
More consequentially it’s an attempt to destroy NATO so Putin can have his way with Europe.
Has the US considered not poisoning their own wells? Might be cheaper.
Considering how quickly he moved past taking Canada I almost feel like he didn't want it that badly but now he's blustered about it so much it would be embarrassing so not get it.
Reminds me of the allies backstabbing us so easily in Shogun 2 Total War. Aggressive expansion be damned.
We’ve always been at war with east Asia.
> It is not "taking over" or "annexing". It is invading. A military ally, at that.
I do not get your point. An annexation is a military invasion with the intention of an ongoing control over that area.
"Taking over" is an euphemism of some more powerful entity stealing from some less powerful.
What's your point here?
The meeting with Zelensky in Oval Office wasn't some kind of convoluted strategy, a tease, or a bluff. It was fully serious and a preludium to something very nasty. That nasty thing hasn't happened yet.
It’s not invading, yet. Just buying or psyopping is more likely than fighting NATO.
If I threatened someone until they sold me something that they made very clear they did not want to sell noone would call it "Buying" and we shouldn't either. It would be extorting. Under no circumstances are we buying Greenland at this point, anything that happens is something else.
Extortion is the right word here.
The problem is that virtually the entire new world and much of the old world was acquired by force and threats of force that has been legitimized over time. So yes, I think this is clearly extortion and any sale that takes would be coerced.
But ever was it thus.
You are also, for sure, the product of some rape down the line of your ancestors, as we are all. This doesn't make rape justifiable.
For sure in the future I'm sure the US will teach that it was a fair deal and nato was corrupt anyway but I hate to see the whitewashing of it going on already like it's a casual land purchase offer
Extorting is more accurate. But definitely not invading.
> It’s not invading, yet. Just buying or psyopping is more likely than fighting NATO.
Threatening to invade (which the Trump administration has been explicitly doing) is about as damaging as invading in the long run, either way we have sent the message loud and clear that the US is no longer a reliable ally and everyone has to shift away from the post-WW2 world order.
I find it funny that they could simply exit the Antarctic treaty and take over Antarctica and gain more value. There's plenty of good stuff under that ice too. It's very likely that it's got his favorite mineral of all: gold.
Don’t give governments bad ideas —surely the treaty will collapse one day and the big powers will divvy it up and push out the has been powers from the playground… but let’s keep things as they are as long as possible.
I think that’s harder than just buying/hypnotizing/invading/whatever.
If we exit the Antarctic treaty, then so will everyone else and there’s multiple competing claims.
The US is on the verge of becoming a pariah within NATO. The Antarctica treaty ain't nothing compared to that.
I think the recent Canadian trade agreement with china is a pretty clear sign of where things are going.
Reliance on the US in any way is a liability.
[dead]
Yet one more bafflingly stupid decision from the cruelest and stupidest administration the US has ever seen. Perhaps electing a failed businessman and malignant narcissist and surrounding him with yes men was a bad idea? The cost of eggs certainly hasn't gone down.
Doesn’t matter, must have for trophy
So you’re telling me there’s a chance?…
[flagged]
What examples of digging through that amount of ice for the purposes of mining are you familiar with? What's a good example?
It'd be interesting to understand how much the environment there increases the cost of mining. Anything is possible, but it'd be cool to know whether it makes any sense. (and yes, I think our leadership in the US is fully capable of causing an international crisis over mineral assets that would in financial terms be best left in the ground)
It's not for mining, but the US built Camp Century and Camp TUTO in the ice to determine how feasible Project Iceworm would be. A construction film about the former was declassified some decades ago [0]. Icefield construction wasn't feasible even in the context of cold-war era MAD spending.
Actual subglacial mining has only been attempted a few times. Kumtor gold mine in Kyrgyzstan is in the middle of a couple glaciers and reshaped the landscape to redirect the glaciers a bit. Svea Nord in Svalbard ran tunnels under a glacier for coal. Canada's Granduc mine wasn't technically on or under a glacier, but it was just below one.
[0] https://archive.org/details/TheU.S.ArmysTopSecretArcticCityU...
I guess I don't even know what to do with some of this information. It occurred to me that you'd also probably have to build some infrastructure (power plant, railroad, fuel terminal, a real port... I don't know) in order to even get the ball rolling. I don't think anyone's going to pay for that by taxing the citizens of Nuuk.
I also wonder if there has ever been a real geopolitical obstacle to doing this stuff, since the Danes and Greenlanders seem amenable to doing business. It would seem the obstacles have all been financial.
As I said in a comment elsewhere, arctic mining is doable with nation-state level resources. There's just no reason to do so that isn't better accomplished by other means. It would be stupid, expensive, and devastate a beautiful country.
As for "amenable", my experience is that people in the arctic are relatively unhappy about that sort of industrial development. They like the places they live.
If “non experts” aren’t welcome, can you establish your expertise on the topic? In particular, what’s your experience with mining thorough ice or maintaining industrial operations in the Arctic or near-arctic conditions?
The main problem with ice, is that it moves all the time. The glaciers on Iceland move up to 46m per day. Also, any tunnel created in fast moving ice could easily be crushed by the pressure of the ice.
Greenland isn't entirely covered in ice. Take a look at any of the mineral resources maps floating around for the country. Everything's on the coastal margins in places only covered by seasonal snow. The interior is a big blank because no one's been able to search under the ice.
However, the adjacent Canadian provinces (Nunavut & Northern Labrador) share many of the same geologic provinces, also without significant glaciation. There aren't a lot of big mines up there relative to the mineral wealth because it's simply too challenging. Constructing big infrastructure in the arctic takes resources approaching nation-state levels. Most mining companies can't muster that or maintain it long-term.
Don’t modern mines remove everything over a very large area? It’s not tunnels and pickaxes any longer. The trucks are the size of a three story building.
Start with a few bunker busting bombs, work outside of winter, dump ice, dirt into ocean. Sounds plausible.
Ok, and then repeat that every week when the new ice moves in?
It’s a misconception that there’s a lot of precipitation in the polar regions. They’re actually quite dry due to low humidity.
But yes mines continue mining, is that somehow unexpected?
The ice comes from the side not from above.
And? So carve out a wider area. The defeatism is palpable in here, some hackers. Why even get out of bed in the morning, right?
They extract oil from tar sands in Alberta, for example. Difficult things are done all the time that are costly, as long as the price exceeds the cost.
To be clear my post above is not supportive of the administration, but rather the feasibility of mining at high latitudes.
Don't about the resistance bombings! Every time you dig you get to unearth a pile of 22-year-old children
Yeah if there were no other cheaper alternatives I am sure someone would find a way.
But it seems like a pretty long financial stretch to first pay for invading a country and then this.
Greenland is 99% uninhabited. There is no significant bill for invasion beyond transportation of mining equipment, cheap at sea. They were talking about buying it or the inhabitants, but that is paid with other people's money.
Reply below: It's been under Danish control, and the Arctic is warming more quickly than other parts of the world.
I assume it has not happened because there are better things to bet your money on.
There is a cost benefit ratio to mining.
I imagine it is a lot easier to just strip mine Australia.
It’s definitely easier to mine in Australia.
But you can do both. It’s about marginal profitability, not absolute.
Do people think we must pick just one place to mine?
You can do both, but why would you? It's not like we've tapped out Australia. And until we have, why bother with Greenland if the same money invested in Australia, or Sweden, or Canada would yield more profit?
You’d do both because up can. Why mine in Australia when you have the US or Canada, etc etc.
The idea would mine in all places where it’s marginally profitable until your capital is fully committed.
Because those places are close enough in profitability that it doesn't make a massive difference.
Greenland is real hard to mine in, needs infrastructure from scratch, and nowhere near enough of a local population.
Maybe, people previously thought it was not worth it to mine in greenland and thats why there is no noticable mining operation. But what do i know about cost-ratio or thinking.
I'm glad the resident HN tech bros are also Arctic mining experts. Surely they wouldn't complain about non-experts writing clickbaity articles while making claims with no evidence themselves.
What about 50-100 years from now when most of the ice will have melted?