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Why Greenland's natural resources are nearly impossible to mine
- clickety_clack 8mo agoSo you’re telling me there’s a chance?…
- ethagknight 8mo ago[flagged]
- TitaRusell 8mo agoThere is a cost benefit ratio to mining. I imagine it is a lot easier to just strip mine Australia.
- prepend 8mo agoIt’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?
- throwawayqqq11 8mo agoMaybe, 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.
- dukeyukey 8mo agoYou 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?
- prepend 8mo agoYou’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.
- dukeyukey 8mo agoBecause 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.
- trashtester 8mo agoThe 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.
- mixmastamyk 8mo agoDon’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.
- fifilura 8mo agoOk, and then repeat that every week when the new ice moves in?
- mixmastamyk 8mo agoIt’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?
- fifilura 8mo agoThe ice comes from the side not from above.
- mixmastamyk 8mo agoAnd? 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.
- justin66 8mo agoWhat 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)
- AlotOfReading 8mo agoIt'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.ArmysTopSecretArcticCityUnderTheIceCampCenturyRestoredClassifiedFilm https://archive.org/details/TheU.S.ArmysTopSecretArcticCityU...
- justin66 8mo agoI 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.
- AlotOfReading 8mo agoAs 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.
- acdha 8mo agoIf “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?
- phatfish 8mo agoI'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.
- david-gpu 8mo agoI 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.
- lazide 8mo agoWe’ve always been at war with east Asia.
- prepend 8mo agoIt’s not invading, yet. Just buying or psyopping is more likely than fighting NATO.
- georgemcbay 8mo ago> 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.
- thatguy0900 8mo agoIf 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.
- fasbiner 8mo agoExtortion 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.
- 1970-01-01 8mo agoI 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.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- prepend 8mo agoI 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.
- Zigurd 8mo agoThe US is on the verge of becoming a pariah within NATO. The Antarctica treaty ain't nothing compared to that.
- decremental 8mo ago[dead]
- bjoli 8mo agoI 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.
- mc32 8mo agoDon’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.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- Havoc 8mo agoToday 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
- deepsun 8mo ago"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!
- moogly 8mo agoNot 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.
- HarHarVeryFunny 8mo agoRight, 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.
- wolvoleo 8mo agoIt 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?
- androiddrew 8mo agoDoesn’t matter, must have for trophy
- pier25 8mo agoWhat about 50-100 years from now when most of the ice will have melted?
- cdrnsf 8mo agoYet 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.