
As Greenland’s Ice Melts, Glacial Sand Deposits May Offer a Welcome Economic Opportunity
Greenland’s majority Indigenous population is in favor of exploring sand extraction, according to an academic research poll.
Greenland’s majority Indigenous population is in favor of exploring sand extraction, according to an academic research poll.
Achieving the energy transition will take money, minerals, land, water, and skilled labor. Will we have enough of each?
People have been finding loose diamonds across the United States and Canada since the early 1800s, but for the most part, no one knows where they came from. It was not until the 1990s that geologists tracked down the first commercial deposits, on the remote tundra of Canada’s Northwest Territories. Yaakov Weiss, a geochemist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, is investigating the origins of these rich diamond mines.
Are we willing to compromise deep sea ecosystems and biodiversity for prodigious amounts of mineral materials? Will deep sea mining have the largest footprint of any single human activity on the planet? The race is on to create more progressive, environmental regulations concerning deep sea mining, but much more scientific research is still necessary to understand how to best regulate these ecosystems.