This is such an excellent article! I had no depth of understanding of why the new administration seeks, and has sought in the past, to acquire Greenland. Now it makes sense in a way that it hadn't before! And it is also now obvious to me that those in power who deny the reality of the human caused warming of our planet are actually planning to seize greater power and wealth exactly because they do believe in climate change and want to capitalize on it — AND with the unknowing support of millions of Americans who they've convinced that global warming is a "hoax." This is the darkest of the dark, the most evil of evils, the greatest greed-soaked intentional drive to send us all into oblivion. For profit and power. Madness!
Thank heavens for The Ink, which is yet another independent resource that I've only recently subscribed to after hearing and reading this excellent piece by Anand Giridharadas: https://mollystrongheart.blogspot.com/2025/01/excellent-please-read-and-share-anand.html. I was so moved and once I learned that Anand writes for The Ink, I became a paid subscriber. Those who tell the truth are priceless. And it is so vital that we become an increasingly informed populace! Deepest bow of gratitude for all of the courageous truth-tellers in our midst! May they inform and inspire us all! — Molly
Why does Donald Trump want Greenland?
“National security” may seem like a weird excuse for Trump’s demand that Denmark turn over that island to the United States, but turns out it’s not just a distraction.
Trump’s imperial fantasy is rooted in a very real struggle between nations for control of the submerged world under the Arctic ocean, and has everything to do with what’s happening to the region as the climate warms.
The real reason Trump may want Greenland turns out to be below the surface. Literally. We’re talking about a secret mountain range you’ve never heard of.
And this strategic impulse reveals that the right feels differently about climate change than it lets on.
To explain all of this, we talked to paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and veteran science communicator Neil Shubin. Dr. Shubin — who’s famous for his co-discovery of Tiktaalik, the “fish with feet” that lived 375 million years ago and is one of the likely common ancestors of all terrestrial vertebrates — has worked in the polar regions for more than 30 years, and has a new book out next week, titled Ends of the Earth: Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and our Future, which is a history of exploration of the Arctic and Antarctic, a meditation on how humanity’s story is one of our relationship to what happens at the poles, and an unlikely guide to current events.
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Your new book about the history of polar exploration ends up in a discussion of the politics of today, of saber-rattling over Greenland and secret missions to stake out claims on the continental shelf at the North Pole. And now a lot of people in the United States and northern Europe are going to be thinking a lot more about the Arctic. Why is it so important now for people to understand their connection to the poles?
There's a synergy, a dynamic, between us and the poles. The choices we make down south affect the poles, which in turn — as those polar regions change, ice melts and so forth and ocean currents change — will affect us. Many people deny climate change, and they don’t see the importance of the changes at the poles in their daily lives.
But witness what Donald Trump is doing with Greenland right now. He's not making that push for Bermuda, right? It's Greenland. And there is a reason why he's making that push.
You talk about some important reasons in this book that I think get left out of the conversation when the Trump people talk about “national security,” and it seems so ridiculous. But they are actually referring to something specific, and it’s something that major news organizations don't seem to be picking up on.
I think a lot of people just have no idea. What's really lost here is that countries are now jockeying for the biggest undeveloped patch of the earth, and Greenland is a very big piece of that, but not the whole story.
A lot of the conversation right now is around the mineral riches and resource riches of Greenland itself. And that's one way of looking at it. If you have an extractive mentality, you're gonna look at places and look and see extraction there. That's not how I see the world, but that's how many do. But when you look at Greenland, at northern Ellesmere Island on the Canadian side, and Siberia on the other, there is a real geopolitical struggle that is not being talked about that's at stake.
And that is control of the entire ocean floor underneath the North Pole, an area many times the size of Texas, on the seafloor. And what you have by a quirk of nature, by a quirk of geology, is an underwater mountain range that extends from Ellesmere Island and Greenland on one side, all the way to Siberia on the other, running right below the North Pole.
Now, remember, the Arctic region is not a continent. It's a frozen world over the ocean. And so what that means is when people study geology — when various expeditions, Russian, Swedish, Canadian —
And Danish, importantly.
Danish, exactly. When they have gone up there to map the seafloor, that mountain range is actually not just ocean floor. It's a piece of continental shelf, which has historical relationships to Siberia, historical relationships to Canada's Ellesmere Island and Greenland.
Now that seems esoteric, but the reality is by the law of the sea, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, UNCLOS, nations can claim an area about 200 miles from their part of the seafloor as part of their domain, which means they can own the mineral rights, the fishing rights. Other rights are unclear, but they clearly can own or claim to own a vast tract of the earth that is rich in resources.
And this is largely undeveloped?
Massively undeveloped, massively underexplored, and increasingly accessible, with global change.
So what you see is one of the major frontiers that's up for grabs. It's the largest piece of the earth that's up for grabs among countries. And Canada through Ellesmere Island, Russia through Siberia, and Denmark through Greenland, each can make a claim to this.
The U.S. cannot make a claim there now because our Arctic piece is Alaska. It doesn't extend to this ridge, which is called the Lomonosov Ridge, and that’s why there’s this interest in Greenland.
It's a very touchy time because the Arctic is divided up among countries. The Arctic is heating up militarily, economically, socially, and physically. And it’s changing fast. It’s becoming more accessible. That’s affecting our lives down south.
But importantly, it’s heating up in a political struggle that's going to play out over the coming decade. Because different countries have made their claims and they're all probably going to get approved. And now the diplomats are going to have to try to figure that out or that's going to be solved militarily.
And that's a bigger problem now with the new U.S. administration. We've now pushed things in that direction in a significant way, potentially.
Oh, absolutely. Who knows what the actual impact will be. I wasn't entirely surprised when I saw Trump going for Greenland, knowing as I do about its geopolitical importance. If you view the world hegemonically, that's an obvious place.
As somebody who loves these regions so much it's an area of great concern. Number one the peoples who are Indigenous to them — they're they're lost in this. They're not a part of this conversation, at least in terms of mineral extraction and so forth, about the Lomonosov Ridge geopolitically.
But their lives are changing, too, in really remarkable ways. Just witness some of the communities in Alaska that have to relocate the entire town. There are multiple of them where they're losing miles of coastline, in over a decade and they have to move whole cities, whole towns.
But the challenge is really that the whole place is getting militarized. Both Russia and China now are making claims, building bases and so forth. The U.S. has had a military presence that's driven a lot of the science that I've done; the Cold War era militarization of the Arctic, first out of the worry about nuclear bombs, that paid for a lot of science up there.
One thing that people don't get is that there is already a big military presence in Greenland — and it's the U.S.
Exactly. We are the military presence in Greenland at this point. We're very large.
The Russian footprint in the Arctic is huge, as you'd imagine, because Siberia is so long. They've also made a major investment in icebreakers, which we haven't. We're really catching up on the icebreaker game. And that has affected science, honestly. When you work in Antarctica, everything has to be brought in and brought out. And we have a very limited number of icebreakers to support that mission.
When you're a scientist there, you realize a lot of the reason you’re here — you’re here for discovery, for ideals, to learn about the world. Yet what's funding my research, what powers it is geopolitical struggles among countries. Science is part of that game. I wouldn't call myself a pawn, but it's definitely a piece of it. And it always has been.
So there’s something I wanted to ask about. It seems like there’s a weird contradiction. These saber-rattling nationalist regimes, a lot of the leaders are climate change deniers or depend on the support of climate change deniers.
Oh, it's crazy, isn't it? It's almost hypocritical.
Yet the possibility of resource extraction in the Arctic is based entirely on climate change being real and understood by scientists, who are pointing them to where they might look.
These guys, Putin and Trump, who have dismissed the notion of climate change politically, are making policy based on their understanding — and the understanding of their advisors — that this is a serious issue and it's going to have a real effect.
They want to deny climate change, so why not go for Bermuda? It's not Sierra Leone they're interested in. Their interest is in the Arctic, what’s going on in their geopolitical interest, is in the Arctic. And the reason why is you can't deny the changes that are happening. You can't deny that the place is more accessible. You can't deny that geopolitically, increased accessibility means it's much more important.
So embedded in the wave of interest in Greenland is an acceptance of climate change, by the biggest climate-change deniers.
Exactly. Trump going after Greenland is an acknowledgment of climate change.
That's the thing that drives me crazy as a writer. The support for the adventure — and this is true of Russia and of the U.S. — it's dependent on the support of people who don't believe in that. It strikes me as a discordant note, and you feel it acutely when you see the places themselves.
They’re having their ice cream cake and eating it, too.
Yeah, exactly. But it's going to affect us down here. It's not just the geopolitics up north. Look, the amount of melting is enormous. In Antarctica in the 1980s, it was melting about 40 gigatons per year. When you map it through the satellites, now we're at about 280 gigatons per year. Greenland, about the same, a little bit less. That's an enormous amount of fresh water in the oceans. Obviously, sea level rise is a big piece of that. Obviously, coastal communities are affected by that. When you have that much fresh water in the oceans, you're changing global circulation, global climate. Agricultural belts can change, habitats can change, you name it.
And I think people don't really appreciate the extent to which things can change in the coming century.
Maybe this is too speculative, but what do you want to see happen in the Arctic? What do you think is going to happen? And what do you hope will happen?
Honestly, a dream that will never happen, if I'm just wishing, I think the Antarctic Treaty, in its core, was a very idealistic thing where no country claimed the Arctic, where it was purely for scientific purposes and investigation and exploration. It was a world resource where countries didn't recognize each other's claims — they're allowed to make claims, but nobody recognized them — it was sort of this weird balance they came to.
You talk about “Antarctic exceptionalism,” a norms-based understanding of cooperation that kind of overlays all the treaties.
We talk about competition there, but a big piece of the work, historically, a big piece of the international work there was cooperation. There was something about the place that did breed competition, but it also, like the yin and the yang, had a high degree of surprising cooperation as well. So when I think about the future I'd like to see, it's really one that has cooperative management, cooperative appreciation, a cooperative approach to discovery in the Arctic.
Now, that's so idealistic. I know it sounds painful, but it's an ideal. And if we don't have ideals, where are we? We're just tacticians.
And so I think building on the spirit of the Antarctic Treaty, It has been gamed, but at its best, it did work. There's nobody building military bases in Antarctica at all, on a continent the size of North America. And that there's a reason for that. That's because of the treaty, and people adhering to the treaty.
That could change. And I worry about that. That's what I'd like to see: that people learn from the cooperation that's necessary for doing polar work. And that's also true for going to Mars. The U.S. is not going to be able to do that alone if we decide to do it. It's going to be an international effort.
And I'd also naively like to see it as the change there is so obvious. The Arctic, by some estimates, is heating five times faster than the rest of the Earth on average. The change is so visible that that maybe it becomes the canary in the coal mine that does force global cooperation. That's naive, but it is so visible.
Ocean level rise could get us there; there’s not a good solution.
Absolutely. I spend the summers at a marine lab, when I'm not in the Arctic or the Antarctica, I'll spend the summers in a marine lab in Massachusetts. They're concerned about climate change. Their utilities are all below in the basement and below sea level. So there's this weird tie between the places.
One of the reasons why I wrote the book is really an aspiration that walking a terrain that is so fragile, that is so important for understanding ourselves and our place in nature and so forth, can really change you as a human.
And naively I think that, by people encountering that themselves, either through literature or through documentaries or however they do it, that it does it for them as well and impacts the kind of choices they make in life. It certainly has changed and impacts mine.
But I think people have to feel it in their daily lives. The Arctic and Antarctica have been this invisible factor in our lives for a long time. They have been on a knife edge from the beginning. It doesn't take much change for ice to appear or disappear and when that ice appears and disappears it affects the entire planet. It has done that over history, and it just so happens that the fragility of that place was behind our origin as a species and much of our evolution as a species — and it's behind our future as a species.
People have to feel the effects. A tragedy is most acute if it's felt personally. And unfortunately, right now, the people who are feeling it most, at least up in the Arctic, are the Indigenous communities in Alaska and so forth. But coastal communities and others in the United States, in Asia are going to feel it as well. Pacific Island nations can virtually disappear.
There's a community called Grise Fiord, near where we work, which was created by the Canadians in the early-to-mid-1950s. But you talk to the people there, they're really worried about ships up there. They're really worried about an oil spill or a slick or something like that. Because they're living on a knife edge with the environment. And all it takes is one push to put it into a rather catastrophic state
You write about how they live with a yearly cycle of famine.
It's a rough thing. You go to their co-op, which is their store supplied from down south, and everything's really expensive, a bag of Doritos is $14 or whatever. It's a lifestyle that's hard to maintain.
There's a story you tell in the book about a veteran climber who's walking a steep ridgeline with a newcomer. They're tethered together and the newcomer falls and without thinking about it the veteran dives over the other side to balance his fall.
That's the knife edge, yes. In a way, climate change impacts put us all on this knife edge. We're going to have to make that kind of decision ultimately for one another or suffer the consequences.
Please go here for the original interview: https://the.ink/p/walking-the-knife-edge-in-greenland-neil-shubin-interview-polar-science-imperial-ambition-denmark-trump-climate-change?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share
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