President Donald Trump’s insistence that the U.S. will acquire Greenland “” is just the latest chapter in a co-dependent and often complicated relationship between America and the Arctic’s largest island – one that stretches back more than a century.

Americans have long that U.S. leaders considered . As I recounted in my 2024 book, “,” about Greenland’s environmental, military and scientific history, some of these ideas were little more than , while others reflected unfettered .

Inuit and their dog team stand in front of a U.S. military radar installation at Thule, Greenland, that scanned the skies for Soviet bombers and missiles during the Cold War. More than 100 native Inuit were removed from their land during base construction.

But today’s world isn’t the same as when the United States last had a significant presence in Greenland, decades ago during the Cold War.

Before charging headlong into this icy island again, the U.S. would be remiss not to learn from past failures and consider how Earth’s climate is fundamentally .

Early US plundering of Greenland’s metals

In 1909, Robert Peary, a U.S. Navy officer, announced that he had won the race to the North Pole – a spectacular claim . Before that, Peary had spent years exploring Greenland by dogsled, often taking what he found.

In 1894, he convinced six Greenlanders to , reportedly promising them tools and weapons in return. Within a few months, from diseases.

People moved the 34-ton Cape York meteorite fragment named Ahnighito from the Greenland coast to Robert Peary’s ship, which took it to New York in 1897.

Peary also took three huge fragments of the , known to Greenlanders as Saviksoah. It was a unique source of metal that Greenlandic Inuit had to make tools. The largest piece of the meteorite, , weighed 34 tons. Today, it , which reportedly for the space rocks.

World War II: Strategic location and minerals

World War II put Greenland on the map for the U.S. military. In spring 1941, Denmark’s ambassador giving the U.S. military access to help protect the island from Nazi Germany and contribute to the war effort in Europe. That treaty remains in effect today.

New in western and southern Greenland became crucial refueling stops for planes flying from America to Europe.

Hundreds of American soldiers were garrisoned at Ivittuut, a remote town on the southern Greenland coast where they protected the . The rare mineral was used for , critical for building airplanes during the war.

The Ivittuut cryolite mine in southwestern Greenland, shown in 1940. U.S. troops guarded the mine, essential for aluminum production, during World War II.

And because Greenland is upwind from Europe, weather data collected on the island proved essential for as officers planned their moves during World War II.

Both the Americans and Germans built weather stations on Greenland, starting what historians refer to as the . There was , though allied patrols routinely scoured the east coast of the island for Nazi encampments. The weather war ended in 1944 when the U.S. Coast Guard, and , found the last of four German weather stations and captured their meteorologists.

American soldiers capture members of Germany’s Edelweiss II weather station in northeastern Greenland in 1944.

Cold War: Fanciful engineering ideas vs the ice

The heyday of U.S. military engineering dreams in Greenland arrived during the Cold War in the 1950s.

To counter the risk of Soviet missiles and bombers coming over the Arctic, the U.S. military transported , according to The New York Times, to a barren, northwest Greenland beach – 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) from the North Pole and 2,752 miles (4,430 kilometers) from Moscow.

There, in one top-secret summer, at . It housed bombers, fighters, nuclear missiles and more than 10,000 soldiers. The whole operation was revealed to the world the following year, on a September 1952 cover of and by the U.S. Army in its weekly show, “The Big Picture.”

A wave of U.S. military engineers lands on the shores of northwestern Greenland to build Thule Airbase in summer 1951.

But in the realm of ideas born out of paranoia, and were the pinnacle.

The U.S. Army built Camp Century, a , inside the ice sheet by digging deep trenches and then covering them with snow. The base held 200 men in bunkrooms heated to 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 Celsius). It was the center of U.S. Army research on snow and ice and became a reminder to the USSR that the American military could operate at will in the Arctic.

Metal arches placed over trenches cut into the snow-formed roofs at Camp Century. The arches were covered with snow and ice, removed, and reused. A similar idea had been planned for rail lines through the ice.

The Army also imagined buried inside Greenland’s ice sheet. On Project Iceworm’s tracks, atomic-powered trains would move nuclear-tipped missiles in snow tunnels between hidden launch stations – a shell game covering an area about the size of Alabama.

In the end, Project Iceworm never got beyond the Army excavated at . The soft snow and ice, constantly moving, buckled that track as the tunnel walls closed in. In the early 1960s, first the White House, and then NATO, .

An aerial view shows Camp Century, which was powered by a small-scale portable nuclear reactor.

In 1966, the Army abandoned Camp Century, leaving hundreds of tons of waste inside the ice sheet. Today, the crushed and lies more than 100 feet (30 meters) below the ice sheet surface. But as the climate warms and the ice melts, that : millions of gallons of frozen sewage, asbestos-wrapped pipes, toxic lead paint and carcinogenic PCBs.

Who will clean up the mess and at what cost is an open question.

Greenland remains a tough place to turn a profit

In the past, the American focus in Greenland was on short-term gains with little regard for the future. , scattered around the island today and in need of cleanup, are one example. Peary’s disregard of the is another.

History shows that many of the fanciful ideas for Greenland failed because they showed little consideration of the island’s isolation, harsh climate and dynamic ice sheet.

World War II-vintage trucks abandoned at a U.S. airfield in east Greenland were still there decades later.

Trump’s demands for of the island as a source of wealth and U.S. security are . In today’s , disregarding the dramatic effects of climate change in Greenland can as .

Recent floods, fed by Greenland’s melting ice sheet, have that had stood for half a century. The permafrost that underlies the island is rapidly thawing and destabilizing infrastructure, including the critical at Thule, renamed Pituffik Space Base in 2022. The island’s mountain sides are as the .

The and have conducted geological surveys in Greenland and pinpointed along the rocky, exposed coasts. However, most of the mining so far to cryolite and some small-scale extraction of lead, iron, copper and zinc. Today, , which is useful for its aluminum and silica, is running.

It’s the ice that matters

The greatest value of Greenland for humanity is not its or potential , but .

A NASA animation of satellite data shows Greenland’s ice sheet mass losses between 2002 and 2023, measured in meters of water equivalent in the ice.

If human activities continue to heat the planet, melting Greenland’s ice sheet, sea level will rise until the ice is gone. Losing even part of the ice sheet, which holds enough water to raise global sea level 24 feet in all, would have for coastal cities and island nations around the world.

That’s big-time global insecurity. The most forward-looking strategy is to protect Greenland’s ice sheet rather than plundering a remote Arctic island while and around the world.

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