Word: greenland
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Because while people may be learning more about Greenland through global warming's effects on its fragile environment, what's less well known is that a grassroots movement for greater self-rule has been brewing in the Danish territory for the last 30 years. First colonized in 1721 when a Norwegian Danish priest came to what is now the capital city of Nuuk, Greenland remains part of the Danish kingdom. In 1979, its predominantly Inuit population fought for management of domestic affairs, which it was granted, but Copenhagen still handles its foreign relations and supports the island with a whopping...
...those years, environmental and social change have hit Greenland hard and fast. In Nuuk, drying musk ox hides hang over the balconies of the monolithic blocks of public housing that absorb exiles from the quickly emptying outlying villages stationed around the island's rocky fringe. The island's transition to a cash economy has rendered subsistence hunting a less and less viable way to live, and the effects of climate change on sea ice has made hunting seasons shorter and less predictable. Poverty, alcoholism and high suicide rates haunt the population. Alfred Jakobsen, deputy minister of the environment...
...long before Russia planted a metal flag in the sea floor beneath the North Pole last month, Greenland had been eyeing its own potential reserves of oil and gas surrounding the island. Shrimp processing is the biggest contributor to the territory's GDP today, but big oil could offer a much shorter path to self-reliance. In September, Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Denmark's Dong Energy joined the ranks of those who have been looking for oil off Greenland's west coast, and last month the U.S. Geological Survey released an estimate that an area off Greenland's northeast coast...
What happens when they find it is another matter. Right now, Greenland and Denmark have 50-50 rights to profits from Greenland's natural resources. Securing full rights to administer the oil, gas and minerals harvested from their land and water has been a recurring theme among Greenlanders who want greater sovereignty, but talks about whether the territory will take over sole rights are currently stalled. And in August Denmark sent a crew of some 40 scientists on a technically unprecedented mission to explore whether a ridge beneath the North Pole was geologically linked to their territory...
...harvesting whatever Greenland's icy waters may yield - not to mention the resources under the polar cap - is a long way off. The sea ice is still too thick in most places to access reserves that may or may not exist, and the technology to drill in these inhospitable conditions is not there yet. "If anybody has reached anything, we haven't heard about it," says Mr. Steen Ryd Larsen, who heads the department in charge of Greenland in the Danish Prime Minister's office. "And if somebody reaches the resources, it would be another decade before it generates income...