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Thematic Article
Greenland from the water, the ice, and the ground
Mark Nuttall*†
mnuttall@ualberta.ca
Abstract
Greenland is increasingly described through geopolitical, extractive, and climate science framings: as ice sheet, strategic space, mineral frontier, and planetary climate barometer. This article argues that such external narratives obscure Kalaallit Nunaat as an Indigenous homeland and self-governing political community. Drawing on the case of Pikialasorsuaq, the North Water polynya between northwest Greenland and Nunavut, the article points to the importance of reframing Greenlandic sovereignty, environmental protection, and geopolitics through land–sea–ice relations. Climate-driven changes in sea ice reshape mobility, risk, and anticipatory knowledge, while also opening the region to increased shipping, resource exploration, tourism, and strategic attention. Inuit-led initiatives for ecosystem management around Pikialasorsuaq demonstrate that conservation and environmental protection are not matters of bounded territory or external expertise, but practices of stewardship, mobility, and food security. This article is published in the Thematic Collection ‘On Greenland’, edited by Tim Ingold.
Keywords
Kalaallit Nunaatself-determinationPikialasorsuaqInuit-led protectionArctic geopoliticsenvironmental governance Article Outline
Introduction: Greenland beyond the external gaze
Scale, place, and political life
Land–sea–ice relations on the northwest coast
Pikialasorsuaq and Inuit-led protection
Geopolitics from the water, ice, and ground
References
Introduction: Greenland beyond the external gaze
In April 2026, US president Donald Trump described Greenland as a ‘big, poorly run, piece of ice’, to which Greenland’s premier Jens-Frederik Nielsen retorted: ‘We are not some piece of ice’ (Jacobsen 2026). The exchange illustrates, on the one hand, a recurrent external gaze that reduces Greenland to ice, territory, resource space, and strategic asset and, on the other hand, Greenland’s political reality as a self-governing Inuit majority engaged in debates over autonomy, independence, welfare, resource extraction, language, the legacies of Danish policy, and environmental responsibility.
A self-governing territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, Greenland—Kalaallit Nunaat—achieved home rule in 1979 and greater autonomy in the form of self-rule in 2009. The 2009 Self-Government Act recognises the people of Greenland as a people under international law with the right to self-determination, and sets out a possible route to independence should they choose to pursue it (Statsministeriet 2009). It also allows Greenland to assume authority over many more domestic areas than it could exercise under the previous home rule arrangement. This includes ownership and administration of mineral resources, which Greenland assumed in 2010. At the same time, foreign, defence and security policy, monetary policy, and nationality remain matters for the Danish state.
Greenland has greater global visibility than it did even a decade or so ago, and recent geopolitical pressure has highlighted its global significance. Yet Greenland is often made global from elsewhere: as ice sheet, climate hotspot, strategic space, mineral frontier, and object of Great-Power attention. Such framings should not be dismissed, but they emerge from a scale of attention that hovers above the map of Greenland, and abstract Kalaallit Nunaat from the relations through which Greenlandic places are lived and governed, and where self-determination is enacted. We can reach a better understanding of Greenland by framing its constitution within the nexus of human–environmental relations in an amalgam of land, sea, and ice: where routes, weather, animals, coastal settlements, monitoring regimes, protected areas, and political institutions intersect. Here, with a focus on the northwest coast, I will show how Inuit agency reframes sovereignty, environmental protection, and geopolitics, from amidst the water, the ice, and the land.
Scale, place, and political life
With international focus sharpened even more keenly on Greenland in recent years, media commentary and scholarship alike usually pull discussion of the territory’s future into the abstractions of geopolitics and climate science. Such discussion often revolves around Arctic security, military infrastructure, critical minerals, tipping points and the ice sheet as a planetary barometer, shipping routes, and the interest other states have in Greenland’s future. These are not trivial matters, and Greenland has global significance in terms of diplomacy, minerals, defence infrastructures, and Earth-system change. However, from the perspective of political authorities in Nuuk, Greenland’s growing capital, the question is not only why Greenland matters to the world, but what kind of Greenland is made to matter, who has the authority to define it, and what the implications are.
Greenland cannot be understood adequately if it is treated only as a strategic object, a climate laboratory, a space for extractive industry, or an image viewed from a satellite. Kalaallit Nunaat is an Indigenous homeland. To see it only in terms of security, extraction, or melting ice is to reproduce the very abstraction that many Greenlanders have long resisted: the reduction of a lived social, cultural, and political world to surface, territory, and resource. What is required, instead, is analysis that begins not from Greenland as an object of external interest, but from the places where Greenlandic futures are actually being made and self-determination is being enacted: in municipalities, settlements, and towns, on hunting grounds, in fisheries, at airports and harbours, and across the sea-ice routes and open-water spaces that connect communities to one another.
Greenlandic politics and public discourse involve ongoing debate over how to sustain livelihoods, fund the welfare system, manage environmental change, and articulate pathways toward greater autonomy or independence. Even so, all this is frequently spoken and written about from the vantage point of Nuuk alone. As the capital and the centre of administration, media, education, and formal politics, Nuuk affords a viewpoint that is of course indispensable to any account of contemporary Greenland and the imagining of Greenlandic futures. The city is also home to roughly a third of the population in a country of just under 57,000 people.
But most Greenlanders live elsewhere, distributed along an immense coastline in smaller towns and settlements, mainly on the west coast, but also on the east, connected not by roads but by boats, planes, helicopters, and, in some northern and eastern regions, dogsleds in winter. A national political community therefore contains sharply differentiated regional worlds in a territory that is constituted by mobility and human relations, including with the nonhuman. Infrastructure, tourism, conservation, mining, and fisheries management are never encountered evenly across Greenland, and neither is climate change. Reduced sea-ice reliability in the north may intensify the risks of travel and constrain access to hunting and fishing grounds, while in the south warmer conditions may extend growing seasons or alter agricultural possibilities.
Land–sea–ice relations on the northwest coast
If Nuuk is one, albeit critically important, centre of Greenlandic politics, it is not the only place from which the country should be understood, even if researchers and journalists tend to gravitate towards the capital. Analysis of Greenland needs to be attentive to the differentiated scales of Greenlandic life and politics. I have carried out research in Nuuk, but I have also conducted long-term ethnographic research in the Upernavik region along the northwest coast, as well as in communities further north, in Qimusseriarsuaq (Melville Bay) and Avanersuaq. When I first worked there in the late 1980s, community life, sharing, and close social association were bound up with seasonal rounds of hunting and fishing, travel by dogsled across sea ice in winter and spring, and movement by boat around headlands and through inner fjords and island channels in summer and autumn.
Today, in Greenland’s northern coastal areas, people continue to depend on marine resources: they hunt seals, walrus, polar bears, narwhal, beluga, and whales; and fish for halibut, cod, salmon, and Arctic char. Winter and spring sea ice has reliably provided habitat for key species and has been vital for mobility and access to hunting and fishing places by dogsled. Over the last three decades, however, the sea-ice regime has markedly altered. Projections point to continued decline in drift ice and, perhaps more consequentially for everyday mobility, to thinning and reduction of land-fast ice. Less ice increases heat exchange between ocean and atmosphere and allows for more solar absorption by Arctic waters. As ice declines, ocean heat transport, Atlantic inflow, and changing temperature and salinity regimes are also altering the conditions under which sea ice forms and persists (Nuttall 2020; Rantanen et al. 2022; AMAP 2024; Zhang et al. 2025).
For people who make their living through hunting and fishing, physical changes translate into shifting risks. Hunters have told me that travelling to the ice edge now makes them feel anxious in ways they did not experience previously (Nuttall 2019). At the same time, the scale and pace of change challenge anticipatory knowledge: it becomes harder to predict what the ice will do, or what conditions at sea will be like in summer (Nuttall 2010; Hastrup 2013). For many people, the issue is not simply the disappearance of ice, but changes in timing, thickness, reliability, freeze-up, and navigability. Ice can connect and endanger; open water can enable and isolate.
The very land–sea–ice assemblages that make coastal life possible are also interpreted by outside interests as openings for shipping, resource exploration, tourism, scientific monitoring, and strategic mobility. Pikialasorsuaq, the North Water polynya between northwest Greenland and northeast Nunavut in Canada, is a region where changes in ice, sea, animal movements, and travel conditions are not only experienced by communities as posing risk and uncertainty, but also seen by actors from elsewhere as providing opportunities for new forms of access. It offers an example of how Inuit campaigns for environmental protection are promoting a form of conservation and ecosystem management grounded in Indigenous use, mobility, knowledge, and authority.
Pikialasorsuaq and Inuit-led protection
Located in northern Baffin Bay, the North Water polynya is an area of recurrently open water surrounded by sea ice. For centuries it has sustained extraordinary biological abundance and facilitated Inuit movement, exchange, and subsistence across what is now an international boundary between Greenland and Canada (Hastrup et al. 2018a). Named by 19th-century European explorers and whalers, it is known as Pikialasorsuaq (‘the great upwelling’) in Kalaallisut (Greenlandic), and as Sarvarjuaq (‘the place that never freezes’) in Inuktitut. The polynya is not just an ecological formation, it is a social and historical corridor, binding communities, travel routes, and hunting grounds in a mesh of human–environment relations. Scientific research has shown the North Water to be a uniquely productive yet increasingly vulnerable ecosystem, while Inuit political initiatives have insisted that any future for the region must be shaped by those whose lives remain tied to it (Pikialasorsuaq Commission 2017; Ribeiro et al. 2021; Inuit Circumpolar Council 2024).
In 2016, the Inuit Circumpolar Council established the Pikialasorsuaq Commission. Its 2017 report, People of the Ice Bridge, calls for an Inuit-defined and Inuit-managed protected area and for a free travel zone for Inuit across the region. The Commission’s management plan—recognising that the vitality of the polynya depends on the movements of winds, currents, nutrients, animals, ice, and people—challenges approaches to conservation which model ecosystems as self-contained natural entities. Such approaches, typically implemented at national and international levels, lead to the imposition within territorially bounded jurisdictions of regimes of management which have not only been designed remotely, but are often at odds with local community concerns and priorities. The North Water, however, is neither bounded nor self-contained. It is a zone of habitation where travel by boat, or dogsled around its ice edges, seasonal observations, and hunting and fishing practices mediate relations of kinship and exchange with both human and other-than-human beings. For this reason, Inuit-led efforts around Pikialasorsuaq have not demanded that the area be preserved as untouched nature. They have instead argued for a kind of protection that secures socioecological integrity while safeguarding Indigenous mobility, food systems, and decision-making authority (Pikialasorsuaq Commission 2017). The Commission made this point forcefully, and more recent meetings convened by the Inuit Circumpolar Council have continued to emphasise free movement, cross-border cooperation, and Inuit leadership in the governance of the region (Inuit Circumpolar Council 2024).
This becomes all the more urgent as climate change alters the conditions that make Pikialasorsuaq possible. Research on the North Water suggests that its productivity depends on a delicate interaction of sea ice, winds, currents, and the formation of ice arches in Nares Strait (Hastrup et al. 2018b; Ribeiro et al. 2021; Gillie et al. 2024). That interaction is now under pressure. Long-term palaeoecological evidence indicates that periods of climatic instability in the past corresponded with reduced marine productivity and disruptions to human settlement, while contemporary warming threatens to thin sea ice cover even further, to alter the timing of freeze-up and break-up, and to intensify uncertainty for both human and nonhuman life (Ribeiro et al. 2021).
Historically, protected areas have often led to enforced dispossession, restricting Indigenous use while permitting other forms of access, for purposes including scientific research, tourism, and resource development. Indigenous-led protection, by contrast, can serve as an instrument of sovereignty, through the assertion of authority over how land and sea are to be used and governed. The difference lies in who defines protection and how it is enacted. The Pikialasorsuaq Commission foregrounds Inuit leadership, knowledge, and decision-making. It reframes protection as stewardship rather than restriction, and governance as relational rather than purely regulatory. This approach resonates with the broader development of Indigenous Protected Areas (IPAs), which are gaining recognition as frameworks capable of reconciling the conservation of biodiversity with Indigenous rights and governance. In the Canadian Arctic, for example, Tallurutiup Imanga (the Lancaster Sound marine protected area) and Tuvaijuittuq (which includes the marine waters off northern Ellesmere Island, extending to the Arctic Ocean boundary of Canada’s Exclusive Economic Zone) illustrate how protected-area governance supports ecological conservation while recognising Inuit rights, harvesting, stewardship, and decision-making (see Fisheries and Oceans Canada (2025) and Qikiqtani Inuit Association and Parks Canada (2019)). Pikialasorsuaq extends this logic across borders, proposing a form of governance that reflects the mobility and interconnectedness of Inuit communities. In October 2023, Canada and Greenland signed a letter of intent to cooperate on conservation of the polynya and to strengthen Inuit-led management initiatives.
Geopolitics from the water, ice, and ground
None of this is to suggest that geopolitics can easily be set aside. On the contrary, Greenland will remain the focus of intensifying external attention, and northern Greenland is one of the places where the worlds of strategic geopolitics and local habitation most visibly overlap (Nuttall 2024). Not far from Pikialasorsuaq, the American military presence at Pituffik Space Base, formerly Thule Air Base, remains vital to the United States for missile warning systems and space surveillance. It is worth remembering that, while President Trump may consider Greenland to be a big piece of ice, senior Pentagon officials, following the end of the Second World War, used to refer to the island as ‘the world’s largest stationary aircraft carrier’ (Doel 2016: 29). At the same time, outside interests will continue to view Greenland as providing opportunities for access to minerals, infrastructure, and shipping, and the region is seeing more cruise tourism during the summer. Greenland’s own foreign, security, and defence strategy has responded to the increased external interest in the country with a simple but forceful principle: ‘nothing about us without us’ (Government of Greenland 2024) (see also Nielsen & Strandsbjerg (2026)). This refutes the idea that such matters as resource extraction, business opportunities, security and strategic issues, and scientific research should be discussed primarily by others, with Greenlanders invited in only later, as stakeholders in decisions already framed elsewhere. Significantly, a trilateral security agreement between Denmark, Greenland and the US announced in September 2026, while reiterating US rights through NATO to use the territory as a base for security (which will likely lead to an expansion of US military presence), affirms the Kingdom of Denmark's territorial integrity and the right of Greenlanders to self-determination.
If northern Greenland is approached only as a place of strategic significance or as a resource frontier, something crucial is ignored. The region is not an empty northern margin, a big piece of ice awaiting appropriation by more powerful actors. It is a place of land, ice, and water, of human and nonhuman life and livelihood, experienced in movement and habitation. Harbours, airstrips, sea routes, dogsled trails, fishing grounds, the scientific monitoring of weather patterns, and the placing and operation of military installations may belong to different domains, but on the ground—and on the water, on the ice, and, in the case of military surveillance, in the sky—they coexist. Rather than being forced to choose between geopolitics and local livelihoods as mutually exclusive alternatives, the challenge, then, is to understand how they are folded into one another, often asymmetrically and unevenly, and how decisions made in the name of security, resource development, wildlife management, conservation, and environmental protection can reshape everyday life, even in places far from the sites where those decisions are made.
Declaration of conflict of interest
The author declares no potential conflict of interest.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research and authorship of this article.
AI disclosure
The author declares that no AI was used in the preparation of this work.
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Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/014.a30
Published on: 25 September 2026
Volume: 14
Issue: Issue 3
Article view count: 188
Article download count: 16
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© The author(s) 2026. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Nuttall, M. (2026), ‘Greenland from the water, the ice, and the ground’, Journal of the British Academy, 14(3): a30 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/014.a30Crossref
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July 2023
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