Greenland has become a point of interest for several countries, including the United States and China. This interest comes at a time when Greenland’s government faces difficult decisions about the island’s future. Those decisions include whether to approve large mining projects. Greenland has large amounts of resources known as ‘rare earth’ metals. These metals are used to create equipment for electric vehicles, combat aircraft, weapons systems and many kinds of electronics. Greenland has what the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) calls the world’s biggest undeveloped deposits of rare earth metals. Deposit is a term that means an amount of a resource, like a mineral, that exists in the ground. Most of Greenland, the world’s largest island, is north of the Arctic Circle.
