When warming from climate change uncovered portions of the ice sheet on Greenland, Chinese tourists arrived as did Chinese mining companies interested in the country's newly accessible deposits of rare earth minerals, said to be the world's tenth largest known deposit. In September, 2019, London's Rainbow mining company announced it was ready to expand rare earth production in Burundi to twenty times its current output in order to compete with China, already the world's major extractor of the hazardous-to-mine rare earth elements. Rare earth elements have a wide variety of uses in hybrid cars, catalytic converters, wind turbines, aircraft engines, cell phones, film making, oil refining, x-rays, powerful magnets for MRI machines, control rods in nuclear reactors, and for TV and computer screens.
To date, Greenland's 56,000 citizens rely on fishing exports and an annual grant from Denmark. An independence movement lobbies to free Greenland from Denmark, and Greenland's Prime Minister Kim Kielsen sees potential ties with China as a way to eliminate the need for Denmark's help. (The earlier post, "Iceland Gives China the Cold Shoulder," describes China's earlier attempt to stake a claim in the Arctic.)
Denmark is not opposed to granting Greenland's independence. But it now does use Greenland as a way to claim Arctic land and the U.S. military base on Greenland to claim an exemption from paying its share of NATO funding. (In 2019, Norway's leader termed President Trump's attempt to purchase Greenland "ridiculous.")
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