Moon dust: Greenland's recipe for saving Planet Earth
QEQERTARSUATSIAAT FJORD, Greenland, October 14
Among the glaciers and turquoise fjords of southwestern Greenland, a mining company is betting rock similar to the one the Apollo missions brought back from the moon can address some of Planet Earth’s climate change problems.
“This rock was created in the early days in the formation of our planet,” says geologist Anders Norby-Lie, who began exploring anorthosite at the remote mountain landscape in Greenland nine years ago.
A fjord
- A fjord is a long, deep, narrow body of water that reaches far inland. Fjords are often set in a U-shaped valley with steep walls of rock on either side. Fjords are found mainly in Norway, Chile, New Zealand, Canada, Greenland, and the U.S. state of Alaska. … Glaciation carves deep valleys
More recently, it has excited mining companies and investors hoping to sell it as a relatively sustainable source of aluminium as well as an ingredient to make fibreglass.
The government elected in April has placed it at the centre of its efforts to promote Greenland as environmentally responsible and even the U.S. space agency NASA has taken note.
The mineral-rich island has become a hot prospect for miners seeking anything from copper and titanium to platinum and rare earth minerals, which are needed for electric vehicle motors.
That could appear an easy solution to Greenland’s challenge of how to grow its tiny economy so it can realise its long-term goal of independence from Denmark, but the government campaigned on an environmental platform and needs to honour that.
“Not all money is worth earning,” Greenland’s mineral resources minister Naaja Nathanielsen told Reuters in an interview in the capital Nuuk. “We have a greener profile, and we’ve been willing to make some decisions on it pretty quickly.” Already the government has banned future oil and gas
