Oil barrels are seen in this slide photo from July 17, 2007 in Kulusuk, Greenland, near the Arctic Circle as Denmark struggles to access a vast oil and other resources in the North Pole region. The proposed Kvanefjeld mine became a flashpoint in Greenland’s elections earlier this month, toppling the mining-friendly Siumut party, which has been in power uninterruptedly since 1979, when Greenland was ruled by Denmark.
COPENHAGEN, Denmark – Greenland’s right-wing government, sitting on vast oil reserves, has decided to suspend oil production on the island of Ammassalik in the Arctic, calling it a natural step that Arctic governments must take because of the climate crisis. The pro-independence Inuit Ataqatigiit (IA) is the largest party in Greenland and entered with a green and anti-mine programme. She promised that if the proposed Kvanefjeld mine were not built, she would enter into coalition negotiations with other parties, including the mining-friendly Siumut party, which has been in power almost continuously since 1979, when the country was ruled by Denmark.
The moratorium on the granting of fresh offshore oil and gas drilling licenses in the Arctic waters follows a failure of one of the pioneers of Arctic drilling, the British company Cairn Energy, in an attempt to maintain an injunction against the company and Greenpeace protests. This triggered the indefinite delay of an Arctic project, Russia’s Shtokman gas field in the Barents Sea and was cited as the reason for Exxon’s non-participation in a license in northeastern Greenland in 2013. If oil is found in Greenland, officials see the huge reserves as a way to help Greenlanders achieve their long-awaited dream of independence but Denmark will cut the annual subsidies it receives by 3.4 billion kronor ($540 million).
Remoteness, lack of infrastructure and difficult operating conditions have led to long project development time for the exploration and development of oil and gas fields in Greenland. The falling price of oil or gas has also acted as a deterrent to exploration and production in the region. The Greendrill has helped to understand the short-term ice loss in northern Greenland, which scientists fear is particularly sensitive to melting ice.
The overall goal of the project is to map the ebb and flow of the ice sheet over the last millions of years. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its last major report in 2014, warned that drainage events could accumulate over time, as the possibility of melt increases and the ice sheet slips as the effects diminish. In any case, it is an important step to find out why drainage events happen.
The history of ice cores began during the Cold War with a military mission called Project IceWorm. Starting in 1959, the US Army towed hundreds of soldiers and heavy equipment into a nuclear reactor under the ice sheet in Northwestern Greenland and dug a base tunnel under the ice sheet of Greenland. The last major US attempt to get under the ice was Project 2 (GISP2), which successfully gutted two kilometres of ice on its way to hitting the rock in 1993.
Researchers Corinne Benedek and Ian Willis from the University of Cambridge looked for cases of “backscattering” in the lakes at the tip of the Greenland ice sheet which increases in the winter months. This indicates that liquid water is drained from the lakes so that they have a frozen lake bottom. The researchers used special imaging techniques to estimate the volume change of the lakes during their runoff and show that they are shrinking.
Global warming accelerates the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which is trapped in enough water to raise sea levels 7 meters. This summer, scientists believe, the lakes put increasing pressure on the ice as it grew in size. In 2021, US researchers will return to the ice sheet to determine the last time it disappeared.
The five-year, $7 million campaign launched by the National Science Foundation last month marked the first major US ice drilling program on the Greenland ice sheet to store enough water to raise sea levels by 7 meters in 25 years. Previous projects have focused not only on climate records in the ice, but also on rocks containing radioactive clocks that indicate when they were last exposed to air. The coalition agreement also makes clear that a parliamentary body will be set up to scrutinise offshore activities and promises that safety plans for oil spills will be made available in the future.
China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) and- China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC) have expressed interest in a bid for an Onshore oil and gas block that Greenland will offer to Greenland in 2021, officials on the island said on Tuesday. Greenland is leading the way for oil companies to tap an estimated 25% of the world’s remaining oil or gas reserves in the Arctic Ocean, along with Alaska and Russia. The small island nation has shifted its oil and gas licensing strategy to offshore to generate revenue, officials said.
The controversy over the mines has heated up in recent years as global warming melted Greenland’s ice sheet, revealing rich mineral, oil and gas resources that have attracted international interest from countries such as China and the United States. It has also revealed a rift on the island over how to balance future economic development with protecting the pristine Arctic environment. Kvanefjeld is home to one of the world’s largest undeveloped rare earths deposits, surpassed only by China.
S climate has been interrupted by short warm periods, the last about 10,000 years, the so-called interglacials, in which there was less ice at the poles and the sea level was higher. The Greenland ice sheet has survived throughout human history, from the Holocene to the current interglacial period, which lasted about 12,000 years, and most interglaciers last about a million years. Our research shows that one of these periods was warm enough and long enough to melt large parts of the ice sheet, creating tundra ecosystems in northwestern Greenland.
