A protester holds a sign reading “We are not for sale” in front of the US consulate in Nuuk, Greenland

CHRISTIAN KLINDT SOELBECK/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP via Getty Images

The White House reiterated this week that US President Donald Trump wants to acquire Greenland, with a spokesperson saying that “utilizing the US military is always an option”. In that same statement, the spokesperson said acquiring Greenland is a national security priority needed to deter adversaries in the Arctic. But what are the reasons why the US is so interested in Greenland?

There is already a US military base on Greenland, isn’t there?

Yes, and there has been since 1951. The Pituffik Space Base in north-western Greenland is involved in missile warning and defence and space surveillance operations. It contains the world’s northernmost deep-water sea port.

The renewed emphasis on national security for the US is because of the changing climate in the Arctic, says Anne Merrild, a professor of sustainability and planning at Aalborg University in Denmark. “Melting sea ice is opening up new shipping routes, and there’s also growing interest from other powers such as Russia and China, so Greenland’s strategic value is less about acquiring something new and more about maintaining influence and stability in a region that is changing very fast.”

What about the minerals and fossil fuels on Greenland?

Much of Greenland hasn’t been explored. The estimates about its resource potential – offshore oil, iron ore, copper, zinc, gold, uranium and rare earth elements – are based on knowledge of shared geology with other areas, such as northern Canada and Norway, where resources have already been identified.

The logistical challenges of getting minerals and petroleum from Greenland are staggering, says Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute. “The idea that we’re going to be producing large amounts of minerals and petroleum products from Greenland in the near future is definitely not very likely,” she says. “There are no roads on the island, outside of the towns you need to take a boat or fly. It’s going to take many, many decades, centuries, before we uncover what we think of as the untapped potential of Greenland.”

Isn’t it difficult to process rare earth elements even once you’ve got them?

Prospecting and mining rare-earth elements – increasingly useful in technology associated with renewable energy, such as wind turbines and batteries – is only part of the story: extracting the elements from the minerals is a complex technical process. “Much of the expertise sits in China,” says Merrild. “For the US, this makes Greenland much more of a long-term strategic interest than a source of quick economic gains.” Even if rare earth elements could be extracted from Greenland, at the moment the processing capacity exists mainly in China.

In any case, Greenland is covered in ice. How long before it melts?

Greenland lost 105 billion tonnes of ice in 2024 to 2025. This is less than the annual average from 2002 to 2025, but the 29th year in a row with net ice loss. “Even a good year is a bad year,” says climate scientist Martin Stendel, also at the Danish Meteorological Institute, who runs the Polar Portal, which monitors Greenland ice.

“In the period 2002 to 2024, Greenland lost 4911 billion tonnes of ice,” he says, “contributing to roughly 1.5 centimetres of sea level rise.”

In total, the Greenland ice sheet contains 2.9 million cubic kilometres of ice. “By 2100, the Greenland ice sheet is projected to contribute between 8 and 27 centimetres to global sea level rise [according to a recent IPCC special report],” says Stendel. He says we may be approaching a tipping point where all the ice melts, although that would take thousands of years: “If all Greenland ice melted, sea level would rise by about 7.5 metres.”

What about the proposal to build a “network city” on Greenland?

A network city, called a freedom city by Trump during his presidential campaign, is a private, non-democratic city ruled by a technological entrepreneurial government. A start-up called Praxis aims to build one somewhere and is backed by PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel and OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman. Praxis has hundreds of millions of dollars of seed funding, and its co-founder, Dryden Brown, travelled to Greenland in 2023 to try to buy the country. He said on X that he wanted to build a prototype Terminus. Terminus is the proposed name of the city on Mars that Elon Musk wants to build.

“Greenland is not an empty space waiting to be experimented on,” says Merrild, who lived for many years on Greenland. “It has communities, democratic institutions and a strong sense of self-determination. Any proposals such as network cities or freedom cities would have to align with Greenland law, values and long-term social goals, and so far these ideas seem disconnected from reality.”

The US ambassador to Denmark, Ken Howery, is a co-founder of PayPal and an investor in Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm Founders Fund. President Trump has explicitly said he wants the ambassador to negotiate a deal to buy Greenland.

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