As Greenland’s Ice Melts, Glacial Sand Deposits May Offer a Welcome Economic Opportunity – Columbia Climate School

Greenland’s glaciers grind rock into a fine powder that discolors meltwater and often makes beautiful patterns as it mixes with seawater.(courtesy of NASA Earth Observatory, by Joshua Stevens, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Public Domain).

Greenland’s ice sheet is losing 280 billion tons of mass per year, and some models suggest that its glaciers may be melting up to 100 times faster than expected. But flowing off those glaciers comes a potential economic boom: sand. Each season, millions of tons of sediment flow from melting glaciers into the ocean, adding landmass to the largest island in the world. According to a research paper published in Nature last fall, three out of four Greenlanders support extracting and exporting sand — so long as they’re the ones in charge of managing the resource…