Greenland's harsh environment and lack of infrastructure have prevented rare earth mining

[nitpicked]

https://apnews.com/article/denmark-greenland-trump-rare-earths-mining-3f47c0b2ae3edfb322a908ee39c42c05

Greenland’s harsh environment, lack of key infrastructure and difficult geology have so far prevented anyone from building a mine to extract the sought-after rare earth elements that many high-tech products require. Even if President Donald Trump prevails in his effort to take control of the arctic island, those challenges won’t go away.
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The main challenge to mine in Greenland is, “of course, the remoteness. Even in the south where it’s 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 at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. Power would also have to be generated locally, and expert manpower would have to be brought in.

Another concern is the prospect of mining rare earths in the fragile Arctic environment just as Greenland tries to build a thriving tourism industry, said Patrick Schröder, a senior fellow in the Environment and Society program at the Chatham House think-tank in London.
(snip)

Besides the unforgiving climate that encases much of Greenland under layers of ice and freezes the northern fjords for much of the year, the rare earths found there tend to be encased in a complex type of rock called eudialyte, and no one has ever developed a profitable process to extract rare earths from that type of rock. Elsewhere, these elements are normally found in different rock formation called carbonatites, and there are proven methods to work with that.
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[IcyPeas]

1. Billionaires are searching for critical minerals in Greenland as ice melts

The billionaires have been scoping it out. Thanks to climate change (does trump even believe in that?). Here's 2 articles, one from 2022 and another from a year ago. All the tech bros are in on it. Data centers and AI is the new driving force.

As of 2025, Lumina was digging for anorthosite, and KoBold, financed by Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and other billionaires for nickel. Critical Metals Corporation has been operating a mine in southern Greenland, backed by Cantor Fitzgerald of which Howard Lutnick has been the firm’s chief executive prior to becoming commerce secretary in 2025.

Billionaires are funding a massive treasure hunt in Greenland as ice vanishes

Nuussuaq, Greenland CNN - Some of the world’s richest men are funding a massive treasure hunt, complete with helicopters and transmitters, on the west coast of Greenland.

The climate crisis is melting Greenland down at an unprecedented rate, which – in a twist of irony – is creating an opportunity for investors and mining companies who are searching for a trove of critical minerals capable of powering the green energy transition.

A band of billionaires, including Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg and Bill Gates, among others, is betting that below the surface of the hills and valleys on Greenland’s Disko Island and Nuussuaq Peninsula there are enough critical minerals to power hundreds of millions of electric vehicles.
…
Crews are taking soil samples, flying drones and helicopters with transmitters to measure the electromagnetic field of the subsurface and map the layers of rock below. They’re using artificial intelligence to analyze the data to pinpoint exactly where to drill as early as next summer.

“It is a concern to witness the consequences and impacts from the climate changes in Greenland,” Bluejay Mining CEO Bo Møller Stensgaard told CNN. “But, generally speaking, climate changes overall have made exploration and mining in Greenland easier and more accessible.”

CNN https://share.google/WGnFnl4gb3Wo7Au4Z


From January, 2025:

Trump's Greenland Obsession May Be About Extracting Metals for Tech Billionaires
The great battle for Greenland is probably all about resources to make apps like ChatGPT better.

The New York Times has also reported on the business interests of a firm called Critical Metals, which has plans to mine Greenland starting in the year 2026. Cantor Fitzgerald, a powerful financial firm owned by Trump’s current nominee for U.S. Commerce Secretary, Wall Street billionaire Howard Lutnick, has a stake in Critical Metals. Though Lutnick plans to step down from Cantor Fitzgerald and sell off his stake if he is confirmed, the Times has noted that Lutnick could stand to influence tariff and trade policy relative to Greenland in his new position as Commerce Secretary.

As such, the Arctic territory’s acquisition may come down to mining lithium to create car batteries and extracting precious metals to build America’s data centers.

The AI industry obviously has major plans to scale up its operations in the coming years and, to do that, it’s going to need easy access to two things: raw materials and energy. Last week, the Trump administration announced project “Stargate,” a $500 billion effort to build data centers across the U.S. with money from OpenAI, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Oracle, and other big-name players in the AI industry. The project seeks to create unparalleled “AI infrastructure” to make America competitive with China in the race to build increasingly advanced forms of AI.

https://share.google/In076yZxMxs04UgO4

[NNadir]

2. Why are we even discussing this?