I'm from Greenland and live here. One of the reasons I somewhat support Danish rule is because I don't trust our own Greenlandic politicians. I'm afraid that some politician - if we ever become fully independent - will recieve a lot of money from some Russian, American or Chinese mining business and then suddenly agree to sell the rights to our underground minerals. At least when the Danes rule us, they (probably) won't just sell our country's resources off to some foreign company.

Dude there's no way. I remember being obsessed with Greenland back in Middle school because of its massive size and mysteries. This video really brought that back all of these years later so thank you for making this and congrats on 6 million subs!

You forgot to mention that ice penetrating radar studies shows that 50 to 70% of the ice in Greenland has formed since the end of the Holocene Thermal Maximum, which at this latitude occurred around 8,000 years ago.

It's not so much the distance from the sun, but rather the angle. At the equator, the sun is directly above (on average), so you're getting maximum sunlight. At 45th latitude, you're only getting 70%. In the Arctic circle, it's less than 50% or 60% even during arctic summer.

Spent a year in an American airbase called Sondestrom when I was in the USAF in 1971/72. For two weeks that winter we hit record low temperature of -102F. The amazing thing was that the air was so clear and clean. Only place allergies did not bother me.

I've travelled the west coast of Greenland about 15 years ago, it was incredible. One odd thing that stood out for me was how clean the air is, it makes it impossible to estimate distances correctly. A little green hill behind our campside, it looked like you could walk up there in 10 minutes, but after an hour of hiking I was barely halfway up. Same goes for the glaciers, it is hard to really understand the size of these walls of ice. I really hope the Greenlandic ice sheet will survive some more centuries!

6:40- for reference. By the time you reach the end of the video- enough ice has melted to fill 2,480 Olympic sized swimming pools.

I haven’t been to Greenland, only flown over it but it was so beautiful. So much land is completely untouched by humans.

the effect of latitude in the climate has more to do with the angle in which sun light hits the surface of the planet than due to the thickness of atmosphere being crossed. This is because sun light on a oblique angle is spread out, while vertical or near vertical sun light is less spread out, or more concentraded. The difference of thickness between different latitudes is quite irrelevant in comparisson to the effect of angle irradiation.

1:32 Two different physical effects are being conflated here. The greater travel distance through the atmosphere means that more light and heat from the Sun gets absorbed or scattered. Also, the fact that the angle of incidence is more acute means that the incoming radiation is spread out over a larger surface area. Both have the same root cause that the latitude is high and hence the angle of incidence is low, but the physics between the two effects are vastly different.

Isostatic rebound wouldn't be limited to Greenland, as the weight of that water would be offset to the oceans where it would push down on much thinner and more flexible places like the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which will push up the surrounding lands as well, which would likely offset some of those projected sea level rises.

RealLifeLore: talks about rising sea levels The Netherlands: "ah shit, here we go again"

I've lived in Nuuk my entire life and never knew that we had a forest down south, thanks for educating me :). Also when pronouncing Nuuk, you stretch the U a bit more than what you said in the start ;)

I saw Greenland from an airplane window, definitely the most breathtaking view I’ve ever seen.

Your explanations and your graphics are consistently superb! Should be some kind of award for this quality of presentations. Gold medal to you!

Greenland is just one of those places full of beauty but too expensive and hostile for most people to effectively explore anything that isn't already a well trodden path. From a travelers perspective the more isolated parts of Greenland and the scenery (mountains, ice, kayaking further up the coast, etc) remain a dream for the future.

Even without the atmospheric effects (which do contribute, of course, just in a minor way), it's just the incident angle of the sunlight that causes the temperature differences between the equator and the poles. Celestial bodies without atmospheres have similar temperature gradients along their latitude

the plane they dug out of the ice was one of only a squadron of planes that crashed there due to lack of fuel.. I believe also there are several B17s under the ice as well as more P38s. it's just that the plane the became known as glacier girl was the most intact.

You are mixing 2 factors up. 1. Sunlight travels longer through the atmosphere causing a smaller percentage to make it through to the surface. 2. The angle at which the sun shines on the surface becomes smaller the closer you get to the poles (because the earth is a sphere), thus spreading the same amount of energy over a larger surface area. Less energy per square meter equals less heat to warm the surface.

Can only imagine all the persevered things hiding in the ice. Also the canyon looks like one of the most fortified places in the world

I too have been fascinated by Greenland, my dream coming true having visited for 3 months. The local people have helped me more than any other country. Greeting from Australia 🇦🇺.

Tbh this is probably my favourite of your videos. It's just so interesting

1:20 you make it sound like the longer distance of light traveling through the atmosphere is what causes the light to spread out over a larger area. In reality both phenomena are caused by the lower angle of light rays relative to the surface

The light having to travel through more atmosphere isnt why there's less solar energy. It's because of the angle that Greenland is relative to the photon's paths. The solar energy is less dense per unit area at steep angles.

The P-38 was part of a small squadron that totaled 6 P-38's and 2 B-17's. They lost their way on the Greenland to Iceland leg and turned around, running out of fuel and landing all together on the cap. Everyone was eventually rescued via sled dog party. The 1992 expedition found one of the B-17's as well but was too crunched up to bother retrieving. The restored P-38 is currently air worthy and renamed 'Glacier Girl'. There's a great book with tons of photos from 1994 on this called 'The Lost Squadron'.

A man from Iceland recently purchased a farm in Greenland with the idea of reindeer farming. When hearing of Greenland having rare earth minerals, he did some in-depth research into the minerals on his land. He found there was over a billion dollars of rare earth minerals on his land. Amazing!

The view at 4m46s is just breathtaking

Great video! BTW, some stats are mentioned at 16:24 and the attributed source is Greenland Minerals (stock code GGG - since then changed name to Energy Transition Minerals), a mining/exploration company. It's interesting to note that the company has discovered a great deposit of rare earth and other valiuable minerals but was blocked by the local government from developing it. The reason is that the ore contains a small amount of uranium, the mining of which is not allowed by law. Of course, there could very well be (likely to be) some political machinations in the background. The company offered some solutions for the handling of uranium but quoting the decision: "...the Company's exploitation licence application cannot be granted because it would involve exploitation of an ore body that contains more than 100 ppm of uranium (the threshold that was introduced in Greenland Parliament Act No. 20 of 1 December 2021 to ban uranium prospecting, exploration and exploitation, etc ('Act No. 20')". This was followed by a leagal bunfight which is still continuing but for now, it looks like the company all but lost the case. It wil be interesting to see what will happen in the future with the exploitation of some minerals in Greenland if uranium is a blocker.

Ive worked in Greenland at Nuuk airport...we did major overhauls on the Bell 212 helicopters and C checks on dash 7s and dash 8 aircraft...stayed in a little cabin right opposite the hospital...really enjoyed my time there, went to Santa's Grotto but he was out 😁...tried local cuisine, whale blubber 🤢 was interesting! and a cool guy called Renè brought me reindeer steaks and fresh halibut ..was awesome! people were so friendly

Imagine the fossils potentially under Greenland

A mass like that, with such a deep canyon and valley/bowl like region below, I wonder what kind of wedge-like vertical pressure that has on the Earth's crust. If it were to melt completely, would the crust start shifting drastically? 🤔

Wouldn't be the first time. Florida was under water and the Georgia coast was 50 miles inland from where it is now. You can still find sharks teeth around Orlando and many miles inland of Georgia to this day.

Just flew over Greenland a few weeks ago while coming back from Paris. Saw some of the most incredible views looking outside my window. It’s amazing how vast the snowy mountains and frozen lakes and rivers are Edit: For the people that think I’m lying or just don’t know what I’m talking about for some reason, look up why planes fly over Greenland when going to and from Europe. It’s a thing and it’s because it’s the shortest distance due to the curvature of the earth. Enough comments telling me what I did and didn’t do. Thanks.

it's always this guy with some random topics that grab my interest somehow, keep it up

9:58 - a shirtless dude casually digging in a snow. I bet he's wearing shorts and flipflops as well

The archeological findings in that ancient canyon will be so great

I have a friend from Greenland. Met him in school in Norway. Had to click on this video. Kalaallit Nunaat! 🇳🇴🇬🇱

How much emphasis do we need? RealLifeLore: Yes.

Great video! I am addicted to this channel! So good!

Thanks for a nice video. So, with the interior lake, not all the ice will melt and flow into the ocean, making the rise in sea levels not quite right? What will e the effect of the rising of Iceland once the mass of ice is removed in sea levels?

Oddly there was no mention of the 2 giant asteroid impact craters discovered on Greenland that likely contributed to the last short ice age and may have been the reason large mammals like the Mastodon went extinct. These were discovered when the mapping was done that discovered the giant canyon on Greenland.

Can you do a video about the Amazon rainforest, specifically Vale do Javari, the most unexplored part of the Amazon? Apparently the lost civilization there built its city out of wood, not stone, so we don’t see how massive it was.

Very interesting and packed with new and relevant information! Thanks.

“Cities in the Central Valley like Stockton will sink!” So there is a plus to all this.

Man, Greenland really does make you feel small in this world. A few hundred years does not sound like alot of time, especially for a geographic feature but I realize I will be long gone before I ever get to witness any major change in it. All I have is this little window to view the world, and I will never get to see that great canyon or the ice melt simply because of time.

Big ups on 6 MILLION Subs! Deserved and always have videos I never knew I needed until you upload them!

Could the potential isostatic rebound of the land possibly raise sea level again? Or would that be negligible with how much water would be added with the melting

Love your episodes keep it up!!!!!

It’s not about the time sunlight spends travelling through the atmosphere. It’s the angle of incidence. The same number of rays are spread across a much larger surface area on the ground.

I´m from Greenland, and seing this being so informative was amazing! Loved it as i have loved all your other vids!

Your videos make me want to boot up Civ 6 haha nice work man 👏

Love how you deliver horrific news with a cheery music and a bubbly voice totally unbothered

The reason there is weaker/less light this far north is because the sun strikes the earth at more of an angle at these latitudes, as opposed to more or less straight on at the equator, therefore, the suns rays are spread out over a larger area. It is not because they have to travel through "more atmosphere". You can see in the picture in the video the much larger area over which the suns rays are spread out over, compared to at the equator. The video also greatly exaggerates the thickness of the atmosphere. The atmosphere wouldn't even be visible on the scale of the images in the video. It would be less than a hairs thickness so the picture misrepresents reality, but unfortunately that misrepresentation could influence the understanding of these concepts. In fact, the atmosphere is thicker/higher at the equator than at the poles but that isn't mentioned in the video, and that certainly doesn't diminish the strength of the suns rays at the equator. As they are so far north there are also months of the year when there is no sunlight at all, again due to the angle of the earth, and has nothing to do with the atmosphere.

Minor correction to the physics in the beginning of the video - the basis for lower solar energy in the Arctic Circle isn’t because of the distance light has to travel in the atmosphere (although it is indeed longer, but not the primary effect), the the flux density being so much smaller. Basically imagine taking a “cylinder” of the same light aiming straight at something versus that something being at a really sharp angle to the light. The shape of the light spot will be much larger in the second scenario, which means the energy is distributed over a larger area… or said another way, the same area receives less energy than its counterpart.

Greenland has been on my bucket list since I was 8 years old (the 80s) when I used to be so fascinated by the globe we kept in the classroom at the time......one day.

To think this Ice sheet survived the younger dryas that ended the last ice age and the global spanning civilisation that existed back then is pretty cool and I wonder how many wildlife undiscovered is underneath it that may be a isolated lake just like other places

I love how Greenland and Iceland uses geothermal energy in their systems. I wish we could use that all over. (Have you seen this huge sand battery 🔋 in Norway that currently runs a public swimming center and they are going to experiment with other methods with that energy storage source. It takes solar panels energy to convert electricity to heat the sand tower to 500° and they say you can get heat energy out of it for months before having to repower it up.)

My hometown of New Orleans is already a soup bowl. You gotta be crazy to buy a home down here. I find it utterly insane that after the catastrophic flooding of Katrina(as well as other hurricanes) home prices have soared much much higher than pre-Katrina levels and they still continue to climb. New Orleans no longer looks or feels the same so I’m already saying my good byes. It’s projected that New Orleans will be underwater by 2050, which sucks big time but Post-Katrina Nola already ruined it for me.

I had a buddy stationed at Thule. It's definitely not "major" lol, but it is important. The dude was so bored there, he got into collecting rocks 😆

It took 11 minutes to get to the part of the video that I thought this entire video was going to be about the Topography of Greenland under the ice.

Talks about Greenland: Most people: "Interesting." Plague Inc players: *Hellish screams of agony*

Fun fact: What we call "rare earth minerals" are in fact quite common. China, and Brazil, are the top exporters 'cause extracting them causes a lot of pollution. And they simply don't care. But you could find them nearly anywhere. They put that name in the XIX century 'cause they really thought were rare. So, no need to kill millions of people and flood thousands of cities to extract "rare earth minerals" from Greenland. Also, we now know how to extract them better. It's just that we don't do it 'cause it's expensive and the impact of doing so (even without polluting the surrounding environment) is quite great. Nobody wants a big open mine close to home in the western world.

The most cheerful reading of the apocalypse ever.

i live in stockton, ca, and that's always been my fear is flooding because we are so close to the coastline

amazing videos. and your modern conflict series on nebula is absolutely sick! so informative and interesting. thank you for being such a great creator!

The whole "Greenland" "Iceland" gag they pulled was always hilarious to me. Climate humor is a small niche.

5:00 most don’t understand plant metabolism; need average temp above 40F for several days to “grow”. That is why higher altitude trees small (grow

Is the melt rate higher than the freeze rate? If we are experiencing a cooling period (Maunder minimum), which appears to be happening, wont the ice in Greenland increase?

I’ve always had 1 question for historians, because the Viking Norsemen (🇩🇰Danes + 🇳🇴Norwegians) had already ‘discovered’ 🇬🇱Greenland by Leif Erikson ~ 1000 CE (half a century before Columbus in 1492) - doesn’t that make Erikson the first European to ‘discover’ America (as Greenland is part of the North American continent - both physically by plate tectonics, as well as demographically as Greenlandic is a Native American language)?

Most times it amazes me greatly the way I moved from an average lifestyle to earning over 63k per month, utter shock is the word. I have understood a lot in the past few years to doubt that opportunities abound in the financial markets, The only thing is to know where to focus.

Why no mention of the discovery under the ice of crater caused by the impact of a meteriorite at least a mile wide possibly causing a mini ice age in the distant past?

I know I'm late to this video but you mentioned that Greenland was ice free at least once in the past million years and before that period it was covered with ice. My question is was there a similar rise in sea level last time the ice sheet melted and when an ice sheet reformed would there have been an equal reduction of sea levels due to that? Also would I be correct in thinking that this melting would be occurring without human activity but that human activity is accelerating what is an inevitable cycle on the planet?

Hey RealLifeLore! I've been loving your videos for a long time now, and I just want to tell you that THIS is our favorite content, along with everything else about the world itself(eg. islands, the oceans, the most remote places in the world etc.) thank you RLL we love you!!

Man you could probably find a dinosaur in good condition there

1: 25, the sunrays traveling thru more atmosphere is one reason for Greenland receiving less sun. The other is the steep angle the rays come in at, making them more spread out, so less of them per given area. Thanks for the Greenland information.

Our narrator is what you get when you combine Carl Sagan with the navage guy.

Hey just want to thank you for another excellent video, I cant imagine the amount research needed to deliver such an informative clip nor the effort to keep the production as entertaining as they are.... Wow!!! Kudos to you and keep up the great work....

Hello from Ireland! As always, amazing content. You have more subscribers than the population of my country, that's insane!!! Congrats!!!

If the ice in Iceland is somewhat fresh water constantly raising sea levels, i’m wondering why Icelanders are not selling the ice as farmland water for many countries who need it for farming & drought and also reducing rising sea levels.

When the ice melts and those resources and raw materials become available for trading, the world is probably significantly changed and maybe there is no NATO or EU at all. So with so much of projecting into the future in this video you probably could’ve mentioned that if the world state is not as polarised as it is today, a lot can happen with diminished oil reserves that could be exhausted by that point.

I'm surprised you didn't mention the meteor that landed on Greenland around 50,000 years ago, or the guy who found the meteor and turned it into some cool arrows. It's really kind of a bizarre story.

I don't know why but arctic nature has always been one of the most fascinating things for me, even more than rainforest wildlife, because of how monotone they are, and I think they look way more beautiful and colourful than rainforests

Good keep it that way I’m so tired and my heart is heavy from people putting wild life out

That Forrest has got to be one of the most beautiful places on earth my god

Dude your voice sounds so much different than your older videos, weirdly relaxing and nostalgic to me. Im just typing this like 15 seconds into the video so im gonna finish it now but keep up the grewat work, I've been interested in your content for years and I've never been bored of a single video. Your ability to entertain while teaching about the most niche shit is awe inspiring and drives my curiousity!

Greenland’s physical geography and the hidden landscape have always been fascinating to me. Thank you for this amazingly informative video. 💯🤩 And congrats on the 6M subscribers! 🥳

Been to Summit Camp and Kanger several times. Beautiful place.

Honestly, (although dane so bias might apply) pretty good run down of the facts :D A bit harsh to call it a colony, as "colony" is usually connotated with exploitation - but then again. The only reason it wasn't was because it's a fcking hunk of ice and we already had Iceland at that point (which is green and has a lot of resources thanks to geothermal activity).

Where do you source the beautiful stock footage for this channel?

I absolutely love this channel. Well done brotha. Keep it up, I look forward to learning from your work

*** Look up Camp Century, the US plans for a forward under-ice base on Greenland. Really interesting stuff, they only abandoned the idea when they realized the magnitude and speed of the Greenland Ice Sheet's movement. But for several years, we had an under ice facility there. ***

Greeland is the impact Crater of a asteroid which got fill by the wave water eventfully freezing it over time. Hint given in the video "land mass bowl like"

Greenland is such an underrated country

As an Australian, I object to Greenland being dubbed the "largest island on Earth." :((

Dutchie here, we are already preparing for rising sea levels. Expecting it will happen anyway. Although 7m is a lot! I am very curious what’s underneath Greenland and Antarctica from a historical perspective once it has melted and hope they can preserve what’s found in the ice. And they should leave Greenland alone or make good deals instead of shady deals. Denmark should be heavily supported by all Europe to make their own decisions.

but if the centre of this land has been pushed to below sea level then it will be just a big lake surrounded by mountains

I would love it if you covered South America's Geography not many people do it, and it's full of awesome features.

I love the longer videos! Been watching RLL since 1m subs and love to see how far you've come over the years. Congrats on 6 mil!!

would we gain more land if we melt the greenland ice, or would the rising sea level cover more land?

the biggest thing about Greenland is the wealth in the ground . it is phenomenal . the only problem is it has to be collected with consideration of the land , not just destroy the island .