Panoramic landscape of the abandoned mining town of Ivittu, Greenland
President Trump’s quest to make the United States gain ground through what could be a leveraged buyout of Greenland from Denmark is gaining momentum. What initially seemed like an atavistic aspiration after a stressful election is becoming a more serious prospect after Denmark announced a massive increase in security spending in the run-up to Christmas. Alarmingly, the Russians have expressed support for Trump’s suggestion, as it would drive a wedge between the US and its European NATO allies. Further, it may also prove Russia’s interest in a repurchase of Alaska, which many nationalists feel was an unfair sale price in the nineteenth century. While Trump is likely to fully defend Alaska’s security, the fight over polar resources is likely to get messier as the first US ambassador-at-large for the Arctic considers his future three months after his Senate confirmation.
What is driving Trump’s interest in Greenland is undoubtedly its mineral wealth, and this is by no means a new motivation for a US security presence on the world’s largest island. For the past two years, I have led a US National Science Foundation project to examine ways to redevelop Greenland’s aging mineral infrastructure for a warmer world. My doctoral student Thomas Hale conducted fieldwork and consultation meetings on the island referring to an old mining area that has a past historical connection to US security interests, which I discovered while doing research for a book titled Earth in foil: aluminum and the quest for industrial sustainability.
Aluminum is the most abundant metal in the earth’s crust, but paradoxically it was among the last to be isolated for industrial use. The secret sauce that allowed the industrial exploitation of aluminum was a rare mineral called “cryolite”. The co-discoverer of this process of using cryolite was one Charles Hall, who was also the founder of the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa). The only known cryolite mine at the beginning of the twentieth century was in Greenland. As the demand for aluminum grew astronomically with the advent of military and commercial aviation, so did the importance of Greenland.
There was growing anxiety about the dependence of the manufacturing process on this single mineral source in a remote and isolated location. Researchers at Alcoa were working tirelessly to find a way to synthesize cryolite from more abundant raw materials. Finally in 1932, three researchers at Alcoa led by John Morrow filed a successful patent for the synthesis of cryolite from fluorospar (fluorite, or calcium fluoride) and sodium aluminate. Although fluospar still had to be mined, it was much more abundant and accessible, as was sodium aluminate. The availability of synthetic cryolite (aluminum sodium fluoride) began to reduce demand for natural cryolite in the late 1930s.
However, during World War II, the critical need for aluminum required large quantities of natural and synthetic cryolite. So the US government built a naval base near the cryolite mine in Greenland called Bluie West Seven. During the initial period of US humanitarian aid to Greenland (1940), the cryolite mine was identified as the only sensitive military target in need of protection. In addition to the fear of German attacks, there was also concern about labor unrest in the mine, and to alleviate these concerns, a force of 15 American servicemen were discharged and then hired by the Cryolite Company. This wartime town, Kangilinnguit, is now a Danish military base. It is connected by a five-kilometer road to Ivigtut, which was later renamed “Ivittuut”. The mine’s production peaked in 1942, when it mined and shipped 85,000 tons of cryolite to North American aluminum smelters.
In December 2019, Smithsonian Journalist Katie Lockhart published an article about her visit to Ivittuut, which has now become a regular stop on Greenland cruises. Her interview with Rie Oldenburg, a historian and head of education at Campus Kujalleq, a school in nearby Qaqortoq, Greenland, revealed that due to security concerns, no photographs of Ivittu were allowed to be taken during the war and no one was allowed to wrote. letters to family or friends for fear of being intercepted by the Germans. Her visit took place during the presidency of Donald Trump, and when she asked the local Inuit how it was during the war and their relationship with the Americans, they refused to answer, fearing that their answers would reflect poorly on the United States in a time. when the president was openly considering buying the island.
Locals proved that the American soldiers had left behind a remarkable testament to the materialism that would shape Greenland’s modern consumer culture—Sears, Roebuck and Company catalogs! Long before the ubiquity of Amazon Prime, these catalogs allowed Inuit and Danish Greenlanders “to order name-brand appliances like General Electric ovens and refrigerators and boats that modernized the Greenlandic way of life.” The mine continued to operate with an inclined tunnel 1,500 feet long and working up to two hundred feet below sea level. The only economically viable cryolite mine in the world had produced 3.7 million tons of ore grading 58 percent cryolite by 1962, when it was officially declared “depleted”. Mining operations ceased and only small crews remained to clean up the old dumps. In 1987, the town of Ivittu was abandoned and its infrastructure and quarry pit became heritage sites.
The deep, complex and dramatic histories of mineral availability and supply are inextricably linked to the history of human livelihoods and security. Cryolite became essential to aluminum production simply by acting as a solvent for the primary aluminum ore and making it cost-effective to extract the metal by lowering the temperature and thus the energy demand for the reaction. It was that specific innovation of aluminum production that led to the development of a small Inuit village in the Arctic and even a US military base.
Minerals as key inputs to industry can garner such remarkable levels of impact that they can propel and transform the lives of individuals, communities and countries. However, all this was possible in Ivittuut without the US “buying” Greenland. For minerals needed for the green transition or for defense purposes such as rare earth metals, as well as Arctic environmental security imperatives, the United States can learn from our legacy of cooperation with Denmark. Greenland now has self-government within the Kingdom of Denmark, and this must also be respected by the United States, as well as all other countries that support the self-determination of indigenous communities. We can have environmental security, mineral security and indeed human security without physical acquisition or annexation through reasonable diplomatic engagement.
