Karen Hanghøj, a scientist with Denmark’s Geological Survey, points to the southern tip of Greenland on a colorful map hanging in her office.
“What you can see here in the southern region here is you have a big pink region,” she says. “And then within the pink region, you see you have all these little purple dots.
“And what the purple dots are is a later period of rifting. These complexes have these weird chemistries and have these very, very strange minerals in them,” she adds.
Those minerals include rare earth elements. They are essential to making cellphones, wind turbines, hybrid cars and many other products. China enjoys a near monopoly on the global supply, to find new sources of the 17 metals. One particularly large known deposit is in Greenland. But there’s a catch.
Hanghøj lifts a hefty rock off her desk. It comes from that pink and purple polka-dotted region, though the rock itself is nondescript — except for one shiny black nugget known as steenstrupine.
“That mineral has all of the rare earths, or most of the rare earths, but also most of the uranium,” Hanghøj says.
Uranium would therefore have to mined along with those coveted rare earth minerals…
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