Springtime for Greenland

You may think I'm obsessed with global warming, and maybe I am. But hey, I live in Florida, and I'm maybe 3 feet above sea level. So I get very interested when I see stories like this...

Here are a few select paragraphs from a New York Times story ...

A penisula long thought to be part of Greenland's mainland turned out to be an island when a glacier retreated.

“We are already in a new era of geography,” said the Arctic explorer Will Steger. “This phenomenon — of an island all of a sudden appearing out of nowhere and the ice melting around it — is a real common phenomenon now.”

Greenland is covered by 630,000 cubic miles of ice, enough water to raise global sea levels by 23 feet. Carl Egede Boggild, a professor of snow-and-ice physics at the University Center of Svalbard, said Greenland could be losing more than 80 cubic miles of ice per year. “That corresponds to three times the volume of all the glaciers in the Alps,” Dr. Boggild said.

XX -- When I was at the Mineral Roundup in Vancouver last year, Greenland had a booth. With all their ice melting, they're betting dollars to doughnuts that there is a TREMENDOUS amount of mineral wealth that is going to be revealed -- wealth that can be grabbed by small, fast-moving companies.

This may remind Red-Hot Canadian Small-Caps subscribers of the micro-cap copper company in your portfolio, one whose main asset was until recently buried under a Canadian glacier. Now, with glaciers in full retreat, it has become much, much easier for this company to get at that copper.

It's the old story that catastrophe can be both risk and opportunity. How much risk? I'll close with this line from the story...

"...given the acceleration of tidewater-glacier melting, a sea-level rise of a foot or two in the coming decades is entirely possible."

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