Our Planet Climate and Geopolitics
“Would you like some Arctic ice with that?” could be regularly heard in the cocktail bars of Dubai soon, if a Greenland start-up is successful. Launched in 2022, Arctic Ice harvests ice from Greenland’s fjords and ships it 9,000 nautical miles from Nuuk to the UAE in a refrigerated shipping container for use in exclusive bars. It recently sent its first 20 metric tonnes of ice. The pitch: the part of the ice sheet being sold has, it claims, never been in contact with soil or human contaminants, making it the “cleanest H20 on Earth” – with the added bonus of melting slower than typical mineral water ice. Co-founder Malik V Rasmussen told The Guardian that the company harvests ice that has already fallen off glaciers and the company is committed to becoming carbon neutral. Reminder: there is nothing carbon neutral about shipping ice half-way round the world, and Greenland is losing about 270 billion metric tonnes of ice per year. Scientists have found that the speed of the country’s glacier melt has increased five-fold over the last 20 years.