Global warming, live 24/7

I’ve just arrived in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, which on Sunday celebrates Self-Governance Day. That will mark another step of autonomy from Denmark, its colonial ruler since the 18th century, and is most likely just a stepping stone on the way to full independence for the island, which is populated by 56,000 mostly indigenous people (closely related to Canada’s Inuit).

I’m always a sucker for a breakaway territory story, but this one has a twist: it’s happening because of global warming. Greenland’s economy has long relied on Danish government subsidies, as Greenland hasn’t had much economic activity other than shrimp fishing and subsistence hunting. Global warming is being felt more keenly in Greenland than perhaps anywhere else: the cold season is getting shorter, making it more difficult to dogsled, essential to the Greenlanders’ traditional seal hunting.

But there is an ironic silver lining: oil. Global warming is melting the sea ice around the island, which has always made it too treacherous to prospect or drill for oil there. But in 2007, the U.S. Geological Survey released its first comprehensive assessment of the oil and natural gas potential of the Arctic, and found that the seas off northeastern Greenland were among the most promising, with an estimated 8.9 billion barrels of oil and 86.2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. “If this resource is proved and realized, northeastern Greenland would rank 19th” among the world’s 500 oil and gas provinces, the report predicts. The seas to the west of Greenland have almost as much.

In addition, the glacier that covers 90 percent of the interior of Greenland is receding inwards, in some cases exposing rich mineral veins underneath.

And even though all of Greenland’s population lives on the coast, it won’t be affected by global warming’s rising waters: Greenland’s massive ice cap (two miles deep in some places) actually presses down the ground underneath, so as the ice melts Greenland itself is rising.

All of this presents “huge opportunities” for Greenland, a government minister, Mininnguaq Kleist, told me on my last trip there last year. “Ten or 15 years ago, people would say you were completely unrealistic if you talked about independence. But now it’s very realistic.”

This is a great human story, as indigenous once-colonized peoples gain political independence and the cultural renaissance that goes along with that. But it’s also, I suspect, going to be a big geopolitical story over the next few decades. With that much oil, Greenland is going to be an extremely hot commodity and various powers are going to be competing for influence there. The woman sitting next to me on the flight in, a Danish psychiatrist who has lived here for four years, told me: “The American oil companies are going to come in, and Greenlanders are so polite and modest, they are just going to get overwhelmed.” It’s even been suggested that the U.S. and Russia could go to war over Greenland. (OK, the person suggesting that was very drunk, but still.)

Internet costs $20 an hour here so I don’t know how often I’ll be able to blog over the next six days. But in the meantime, see the story live as it happens: one of Greenland’s newspapers has a webcam showing an inland glacier melting, live. And it also has sped up some archived video to get a time lapse view; it’s remarkable how much happens to a glacier over 24 hours. Just imagine what’s going to happen over the next few years.