What's Hidden Under the Ice of Greenland?

this is Greenland the largest Most Fascinating and most mysterious island in the world it is more than three times larger than France and has remained a part of the Kingdom of Denmark for more than 300 years now which theoretically makes Denmark a transcontinental country the world's 12th largest country by land area and the largest country with a capital in Europe other than Russia when placed over the European continent Greenland's vast size becomes significantly more apparent covering nearly everything from Portugal to Poland but despite all of this vast size the population on the world's largest island is only around 56 000 people which is even less than the population of Andorra a tiny microstate wedged in between Spain and France and nearly one in three of those 56 000 greenlanders all live in just a single town right here called Nook the capital of the island and of course the biggest reason why there are so few people on this massive land mass is because the vast majority of it is at least for the moment completely uninhabitable two-thirds of the island stretches high up into the north beyond the circumference of the Arctic Circle a region of the planet that receives significantly less intense solar radiation than elsewhere because the sun's Rays have to travel a longer distance through the atmosphere in order to reach it which means that solar radiation is less concentrated and spread out across a much larger surface area than around a location like the equator where the distance that the Rays have to travel through the atmosphere is a lot less basically that all just means that this part of the planet is a lot colder than average but due to the influence of the Gulf Stream the warm ocean current that flows northwards from the Gulf of Mexico and across the North Atlantic towards Europe a great deal of Greenland has a lot more mild weather than you might expect for its latitude up here the average winter temperature in the capital and biggest city Nook is still negative 9 degrees Celsius the town of akaluate and none of it Canada is at an approximately similar latitude but because of its distance away from the warming effects of the Gulf Stream the average winter temperatures here are more like negative 27 degrees Celsius and it's therefore significantly colder than Nook on average however the biggest and most mysterious thing to understand about the island of Greenland is its absolutely colossal ice sheet and the unknown wonders and discoveries that are hiding just beneath it out of our sight one of the many natural wonders of our world this ancient ice sheet covers approximately 80 percent of the surface of Greenland and is around the same size of Alaska this makes it the second largest body of ice that can be found anywhere in the world after the ice sheet over on the opposite side of the planet on Antarctica on Greenland this huge sheet of ice is on average one and a half kilometers thick while in some place places it can reach up to three kilometers thick of nothing but solid ice built up over eons of time in total there are some 2 million 850 000 cubic kilometers worth of Frozen ice on Greenland that weighs approximately 2.85 quadrillion metric tons a truly unfathomable amount of mass for us to comprehend the sheer weight of all that ice on the surface is so tremendous that it has pushed much of the underlying bedrock in the interior of the island to be beneath the sea level but since many mountains occur on the island around the periphery the ice sheet is largely confined in a geographic shape that would most resemble a gigantic Bowl the coasts of the island are therefore largely free of this ice sheet and it's devastatingly colder temperatures and that's naturally why for thousands of years now human activity has pretty much been limited only to the coastlines ice cores drilled out from the sheet by scientists have revealed that an ice sheet in some form or another has covered significant parts of Greenland for at least the past 18 million years while the oldest ice on the island today is as much as 1 million years old so for pretty much the entirety of human history the vast majority of this island has been sealed beneath this impenetrable wall of ice and the secrets locked beneath it have only just recently been able to be accessed for example ice cores drilled out from the sheet by scientists back in 1966 revealed the presence of sediments the suggested Greenland was once nearly completely ice free and vegetated at least once in the past million years which came as a huge shock geologically speaking that's fairly recent in time and it suggests that the island is significantly more fragile and vulnerable to climate change than almost anybody initially thought today only a single small forested area on Greenland remains in the very far south of the Island right here in the qingwa valley in this location the summer temperatures are just barely high enough to sustain trees and there are big 1500 meter high mountains that surround it on nearly all sides which served to protect it from the cold and fast winds that whip across the ice sheet just a bit further to the north but other than this little 15 kilometer long pocket of trees and forests the rest is nothing but ice rocks shrubs and Scattered pockets of human and animal life in the future however this tiny pocket of natural life in the South may become the Genesis point for Life spreading across the rest of the island because the massive ice sheet that covers most of it for better and For Worse is currently in the process of melting researchers from NASA's jet propulsion laboratory already reported a long time ago back in 2006 that the ice sheet and Glaciers on Greenland were melt at a rate of about 217 cubic kilometers a year which was about twice as fast as they were melting just five years before then in 2001 and as the climate around the world continues to grow warmer nowhere is being more heavily affected than the Arctic where the temperatures are rising at about twice the rate of the global average with two-thirds of the island stretching above the Arctic Circle and with a projected three to nine degrees Celsius increase in local average temperatures the Greenland ice sheet is significantly more vulnerable than other locations are to these warming effects at the present it's been estimated that the island is losing approximately 200 billion metric tons of ice per year to the ocean and research has shown that this could end up accelerating the global sea levels rise by around 30 centimeters by the end of this Century if this pace of melting continues steadily or increases with current trends the entire 2 million eight hundred and fifty thousand cubic kilometers worth of ice on the island could all melt completely within just a few centuries worth of time a blink of an eye in geological time that usually spans millions of years if this ends up coming to pass the Greenland ice sheet will contribute a volume of water to the world's oceans that is even greater than the entirety of the Gulf of Mexico resulting in a catastrophic Global sea level rise of approximately seven meters this would consequently flood nearly every major coastal city that exists in the world today and would profoundly change the entire planet's geography much of Florida and Southern Louisiana would be buried Beneath the Sea including major cities like Miami and New Orleans the San Francisco Bay would expand dramatically to flood much of the California Central Valley including cities like Sacramento and Stockton a good portion of the Bahamas would be entirely least submerged a significant chunk of the low-lying areas of Northwestern Europe like the Netherlands Belgium and Northwestern Germany would be dramatically flooded along with significant areas of the po valley in Italy including Venice and the low-lying Nile Delta in Egypt including Egypt's second largest city Alexandria a great deal of Southerner Rock would be submerged along with a majority of Bangladesh and a good deal of West Bengal in India some of the most heavily populated places in the world a great deal of the lower Mekong Delta within Vietnam including Ho Chi Minh City would also be totally flooded along with substantial low-lying areas of Eastern China including major Global cities like Shanghai and Tianjin in short were the Greenland ice sheet to completely melt over the span of a few centuries time it would gradually flood the homes of hundreds of millions of people worldwide today and prove absolutely catastrophic to Modern Human Society and with such a massive volume of fresh water being suddenly added to the Salty ocean around it it could also prove to dramatically disrupt the circulation pattern of the Gulf Stream that currently brings warmth over to Europe and so almost paradoxically turn Europe into a colder continent than it is today but at the same time the removal of all that ice on Greenland would finally reveal all of the land of one of earth's greatest land masses to humans for the first time in history and all the secrets that have been hiding beneath it but luckily for us we may not have to wait centuries to learn about most of these secrets and many of them have already been discovered in 1942 during the second world war an American Lockheed P-38 Lightning had to make an emergency landing on the island the crew was rescued but the plane was left behind where it landed and became lost to time half a century later in 1992 after years of searching for it a team finally rediscovered the long-lost airplane that was by then buried beneath 268 feet of ice from the past 50 years of cumulative snowfall the plane was later restored and even returned back to Flying condition and took to the skies once again after being buried for the previous half a century hidden beneath the ice of Greenland it would ultimately end up becoming only one of many American artifacts lost to the ice here for some time in 1968 an American bomber carrying four thermonuclear bombs caught fire mid-air and crashed on Greenland around here an extensive cleanup operation was subsequently carried out by both the United States and Denmark and nearly all of the parts coming from the plane and the nuclear weapons were discovered except for one puzzling and potentially troubling peace the secondary stage cylinder from one of the nuclear bombs carrying uranium and lithium deuteride essentially the piece that carries the nuclear fuel for one of the bombs a pretty small component no larger than a beer cake this component was never discovered by the cleanup operation and likely remains buried and hidden beneath hundreds of feet of ice somewhere around that area to this day and then just a decade ago in 2013 a team of scientists made one of the most amazing discoveries beneath the ice of Greenland ever made so far using ice penetrating radar data collected from nasa-owned satellites they discovered that the Greenland ice sheet was hiding beneath it the longest Canyon found anywhere in the world now described as a mega Canyon the so-called Greenland Grand Canyon stretches for more than 750 kilometers across the island which is more than 300 kilometers longer than even the Grand Canyon in Arizona it stretches up to 10 kilometers wide and carves up to 800 meters deep to just beneath sea level and is believed to be a tremendously ancient geographic feature of the island because it was most likely carved out by a mighty ancient river system of the very distant past and not by any of the ice or glaciers of the past several million years that have kept its presence a very well hidden secret now for Millennia were the ice sheet to be removed this Canyon could prove to be one of the greatest and most glorious of Earth's natural wonders to behold but since a great deal of it is presently beneath sea level it would also likely end up being flooded with water after the ice sheet melts if and when the ice Gene melts in the future much of the interior of Greenland that has been pushed beneath sea level by the weight of the ice for eons now could end up transforming into a vast interior lake or sea that could potentially serve to even further accelerate the Island's warming process us but at the same time with the massive weight of the ice being removed the island would also steadily begin a process known as isostatic rebound where the land would gradually over a span of decades and centuries literally rebound back above sea level in elevation finally free of the crushing weight that had lasted there for millions of years and so in reality Greenland's future geography in a few hundred years from now is basically anybody's best guess but without a doubt the most important things hiding beneath the three kilometers of ice on Greenland today are the resources and raw materials and specifically hydrocarbons and rare earth Elements and Minerals the United States Geological Survey as estimated before that they believe there are a total of 141 billion barrels of hydrocarbons accounting for roughly 13 of all the planet's undiscovered oil and 30 percent of all of its undiscovered natural gas sitting untapped just beneath the surface of Greenland if these resource estimates are accurate and were ever to be realized Greenland would suddenly end up having about as much oil and natural gas as a rock and would have the fifth or sixth largest amount of hydrocarbon reserves of any country in the world since Greenland continues to remain a territorial possession of Denmark a European union and NATO member State these reserves could theoretically help to dramatically increase Europe's energy independence from other nations like Russia or Iran but beyond oil and gas the more interesting resources hidden beneath Greenland are likely to be Rare Earth Elements and Minerals these are resources that take up this section of the periodic table of elements that you've probably forgotten since high school chemistry class but the big thing to understand is that these resources are vital to powering the Technologies of our modern world from everything to smartphones electric cars MRI machines fighter jets and dozens upon dozens of other critically important applications once upon a time it was the United States who was the largest producer of these rare Earths but that's no longer the case at all today these are resources that are almost monopolistically dominated by China as they currently provide more than 85 percent of the world's Supply and are home to around two-thirds of the global supply of many rare metals and minerals like antimony and barites America Europe and other Western Nations have largely no other choice but to import huge amounts of these Rare Earth Elements and Minerals directly from China which is generally considered to be the greatest geopolitical opponent of the United States in the 21st century but the warming of Greenland and the melting of the ice sheet is completely changing this entire calculus because it's now generally believed that Greenland is home to the second highest amount of rare Earths after China of sudden and particular strategic importance is the previously overlooked and remote Tiny Town of narsak on the south coast of the island home to only around 1700 people this is potentially the most strategically important small town of under a couple thousand people found anywhere in the world today because the scraggly and Rocky Hills that surround it are now estimated to contain roughly an entire quarter of the Earth's supply of rare earth minerals a single mineral deposit site Within These Hills known as kavanafield has been claimed to be the world's second largest deposit of rare earth oxides at around 11 million tons and the sixth largest deposit of uranium yet to be discovered at around 270 000 tons if these estimates are correct it means that this single site within Greenland is the largest concentration of rare Earths found anywhere outside of China and it places the island as fourth in the world for numbers of rare earth reserves and roughly equivalent to Russia it would also mean that this site's uranium reserves alone are roughly equivalent to the entirety of China's known reserves and ranks Greenland as ninth in the world for known reserves of uranium and that's all coming from just a single deposit based on these assumptions mining companies billionaires and Empires from around the world have been eyeballing the tiny Villages of Greenland now for years and the subject within Greenland itself is incredibly divisive on the one hand expanding Greenland's resource extraction industry could provide enormous amounts of money to the island nation and finally secure their financial and legal independence from Denmark after centuries of colonial rule while Greenland was granted home rule from Copenhagen more than 40 years ago back in 1979 Denmark continues to fully administer the Island's foreign policy and provides the greenlandic government with an annual subsidy of around 600 million dollars but it's about 60 of their entire annual government budget Greenland's government is therefore still highly dependent financially on Denmark and the revenues gained from Mining and hydrocarbon extraction could dramatically change this and pave the way for full Independence and sovereignty in the future but on the other hand there are many locals on the island who are very wary of foreign Mining and energy companies coming and setting up their operations there operations that could potentially lead to things like pollution contamination and changing ways of the traditional Inuit lifestyles of the locals and the world's greatest Powers have already begun casting their long geopolitical gazes to this distant Island that history always paid very little attention to until now Chinese state-owned companies have already been attempting to invest in mining operations on the island like at the kavana field deposit along with further offers to invest in air and Maritime Port infrastructure what better way after all to continue securing their own Global Rare Earth Monopoly by buying up the assets or securing the trade relationships of what could potentially become the second greatest source of them in the world and as the Arctic continues to warm up the sea ice across it will melt to a point where eventually potentially as early as next decade there won't be any sea ice at all during the summer months which will open up a new trade route known as the Northern sea route through the northern Waters of Russia this inevitability will dramatically shorten the trading distance that cargo containers will have to travel between East Asia on the one side and Europe and North America over on the other it will dramatically speed up trading times between the economies of Eastern Asia and the west by a significant order of magnitude compared with contemporary trade routes between them through the Suez Canal or around the southern tip of Africa and make the Russians a lot of money in the process as well via transiting fees sometime next decade this is likely going to become one of the biggest and most vital trade routes in the world and it will also dramatically improve the accessibility of Greenland's vast hidden strategic resources it is certainly for all of these reasons and the knowledge of how critically important Greenland will one day become to the global economy why the Trump Administration in the United States floated around the idea of purchasing the island from Denmark back in 2019 and why Washington has been putting continuous pressure on Copenhagen to block the Investments of all Chinese companies there since they still control Greenland's foreign policy Denmark acquiesce to the American demands by canceling two Chinese construction bids for airports at Nook and alulasad and they declined a Chinese offer to purchase an abandoned Naval Base on the Island's South Coast however they also firmly rejected the American proposals to purchase the island outright and it's not like the United States even has to purchase it anyway they already operate a major air base in the far north atula whose primary purpose is to serve as an early warning system for potential ballistic missiles being fired at the U.S mainland from Russia the greatest forces of the 21st century that are reshaping our entire world all therefore converge at Greenland rapid warming melting and sea level rise caused by global climate change the increasing demand of technology companies for Rare Earth Resources that are vital to power our modern society and the emerging Global geopolitical cold war between the United States and China there is vast wealth that has been hiding beneath Greenland for centuries and it's only now that we've all begun to actually recognize it but while Greenland may be rich in resources like hydrocarbons and rare Earths it will take a very long time for Greenland to ever be rich in another major resource food at the present only 0.002 percent of Greenland's land is actually arable and suitable for agriculture which means that nearly all of the Island's food supply for the 56 000 people who live there today has to be imported from Denmark or from abroad and since all of this food has to be imported it's generally more expensive and as you've almost certainly noticed groceries pretty much everywhere have gotten a lot more expensive lately but luckily for you I know about a great solution hellofresh if you're anything like me you typically struggle a lot to decide what to do at dinner time should I order expensive takeout eat unhealthy freezer food or make a time-consuming home-cooked meal I struggled with all of these exact same decisions for years until I began using hellofresh because it simultaneously healthy affordable and quick now every week I select all of the meals that I want on their 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help support my Channel at the same time and as always thank you so much for watching

Channel: RealLifeLore

Views: 4,827,399

Keywords: real life lore, real life lore maps, real life lore geography, real life maps, world map, world map is wrong, world map with countries, world map real size, map of the world, world geography, geography, geography (field of study), facts you didn’t know

Id: roSRpjgxvnQ

Length: 23min 53sec (1433 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 07 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/nateguy]

Super interesting video. The section about the unearthed resources was morbidly humorous.

"If global warming gets so bad that all of Greenland's ice melts, we'll have even more fossil fuels to burn and minerals to mine!"

[u/liiteantonella]

I love the longer videos! Been watching RLL since 1m subs and love to see how far you've come over the years. Congrats on 6 mil!!