ABSTRACT
The extractive gaze has fallen upon Greenland at many times, but in the twenty-first century, it has become sharply focused and intense as international energy and mining companies have identified the country’s potential for mineral and oil development. Many people may hear about contemporary Greenland from stories in the media. Reports on climate change are often accompanied by satellite images of surface melt on the inland ice or photographs of rapidly receding glaciers and starving polar bears, but the country is also being represented both within and internationally in the form of mineralogical maps and descriptions of geological strata and sedimentary deposits that hint at extractive opportunities arising from global warming. This cartographic and political focus on the subsurface moves us away from thinking about horizons of possibility, as northern lands and waters become accessible, to the potential wealth to be found in the depths of mountains, below subsea floors, or under the inland ice. With this emphasis on the vertical and the volumetric idea of space and territory (Elden 2013), the subsurface and its potential mineral and hydrocarbon wealth is located within the political imaginary of Greenland as a state in formation. And while the idea of Greenland’s mineral riches or oil and gas deposits being increasingly accessible to exploitation as a result of climate change is a seductive one for the world’s media and energy and mining corporations, interest in the possibility of extracting resources from Greenland’s subsoil is nothing new, as I discussed in the previous chapter. Barriers to developing mines in Greenland in the past have been as much due to inappropriate mining policy or to an assessment of high investment risk and poor profits rather than geography, geology and remoteness or environmental and climatic conditions (e.g. Sinding 1992).
