Received this from a friend? Sign up here

Trump has said the US needs Greenland for security, claiming that it is “covered with Russian and Chinese ships”. While that’s an exaggeration, shipping in the Arctic rose by 37 per cent from 2013 to 2023, partly because the melting of sea ice has allowed vessels to penetrate further, for longer periods throughout the year.

A Chinese icebreaker sailed past Greenland to the Northwest Passage in 2017, and Russia has been encouraging shipping on its Northern Sea Route between Asia and Europe.

Trump has also said the potential Greenland deal would give the US mineral rights, while reportedly excluding China and Russia. Climate change is expected to pave the way for more resource extraction in the Arctic, and the new shipping there is largely carrying natural gas from Russia and iron ore from Canada.

Greenland is believed to have large amounts of oil and gas, as well as critical materials such as lithium, graphite and rare earth elements. And the whole reason they’re in demand is because of the green energy transition, given that they are used to make solar panels and batteries.

Meanwhile, climate scientists are much more concerned about how quickly Greenland’s ice sheet is melting. Looking into its past can help give an indication of how much ice will melt in the coming decades, and the impact this will have on sea levels. You can read more about this, as well as Greenland’s animals and minerals, in our selection of environment coverage from January.

Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Prudhoe Dome, a bulge of ice the size of Luxembourg, disappeared in a warmer past climate – a climate that Greenland could experience again by 2100. Researchers showed this by drilling 500 metres through the ice to find sand that was bleached by the sun 7000 years ago. It’s part of a drilling project to figure out whether the world will see centimetres of sea level rise from Greenland this century, or closer to 1 metre. Read more.

With a lifespan of up to 500 years, Greenland sharks live longer than any vertebrate on the planet. What we didn’t know was they do that despite serious heart disease. The finding could eventually help unlock strategies for healthy ageing in humans. Read more.

For all Trump’s talk of Greenland’s minerals, most of them haven’t been accessed – researchers reckon they’re there because of similar geology to Canada and Norway. Even with climate change, they will be hard to extract. And even if rare earth elements can be got out of the ground, China has most of the processing capacity. That probably won’t deter Trump, whose billionaire ally Peter Thiel has backed a venture to build sovereign “network cities” in Greenland. Read more.

Cotton bollworms and corn earworms, both of them megapests, have interbred. Does that make this new hybrid a mega megapest? I’m not sure, but it has resistance to pesticides and could wreak havoc on Brazil’s soya crop, which feeds people and animals around the world.  Read more.

The finding in 2024 that metallic nodules produce oxygen in the deep sea provoked the ire of The Metals Company, which has applied to the Trump administration to mine these nodules. Its scientists have argued this is impossible. Now, researchers are going back to the Pacific to prove dark oxygen exists and figure out exactly how it’s made. Read more.

International waters have largely been open to exploitation by ever more destructive fishing techniques, even though we need to set aside swathes of them to reach the sustainability goal of conserving 30 per cent of the planet by 2030. That could finally change with the high seas treaty, which came into force this month and will allow countries to establish marine protected areas around biodiversity hotspots like the Sargasso Sea. Read more.

A team of dendrologists noticed that cold Alpine lakes can preserve dead trees for 8000 years. They noticed that the Arctic Ocean is also cold. And they noticed that major rivers run through the boreal forest into the Arctic Ocean. This gave them a crazy idea to cut and sink trees to sequester carbon and cool the climate. But maybe it’s not so crazy, if you consider that this might have all happened 56 million years ago. Read more.

Today most major governments and companies have a goal to achieve net-zero emissions. But we didn’t even think we had to nullify emissions to stop climate change, until two scientists started fiddling with a climate model on a train to Exeter in 2005. Their realisation of the importance of net zero was one of breakthroughs highlighted in our special issue on the 21 best ideas of the 21st century. Read more.

More than 14,000 years ago, a den collapsed on two wolf pups in Siberia and preserved their bodies in the permafrost. Researchers dissecting one of their stomach’s found what looked like “like a piece of jerky with a bit of fluff”. It’s a good thing the scientists didn’t eat it, because that piece of jerky was actually a piece of woolly rhino that allowed them to reconstruct the entire genome of that species. The genome suggests it may have been human hunting, rather than interbreeding, that doomed it to extinction. Read more.

Spreading aerosols to block sunlight in the stratosphere could cool the globe by 1°C or more, but if we ever stopped spreading them, temperatures would rapidly rebound, with catastrophic impacts. Some pretty nifty computer modelling has found that this “termination shock” would end up causing greater economic damages than if we had simply let temperatures continue to rise. It’s a sobering finding, not that the geoengineering start-ups that are already raising tens of millions of dollars are going to suddenly call it quits… Read more.

Gary Neill

In 2021, tidal flooding collapsed the walls of Arif Pujianto’s home in Indonesia and polluted his well with saltwater. Now Pujianto and three of his neighbours are suing the Swiss cement manufacturer Holcim, arguing that its carbon emissions helped cause this flooding. The case rests on attribution science, which compares real-world events to computer modelling of what would have happened without human-made emissions. Attribution science has regularly shown how much human emissions contributed to certain storms, heatwaves and wildfires. Now “end-to-end attribution” is showing how much companies’ emissions contributed to extreme weather. Pujianto’s case is one of several trying to translate this attribution into legal liability. Depending on the result, it could help make the “polluter pays” slogan a reality. Read more.