(Sound of iceberg crumbling and running into the ocean)
What you just witnessed was an iceberg about the size of Manhattan
breaking off a cliff in Greenland to drift out and melt into the ocean.
The Arctic region is melting as it's heated twice as fast
as the rest of the planet,
and science every day brings us news, alarming news, from the North.
Science tend to always bring us bad news from the North.
Just yesterday it was announced
that this April is the warmest we've ever experienced.
In certain parts of Greenland,
it was not one degree warmer, not two degrees warmer,
it was nine and a half degrees warmer than normal April's would be.
So I think the Arctic has become a symbol of global change and pending disaster.
I was myself born in Greenland a very long time ago.
I came from Greenland to Denmark and the U.S. to become a scientist,
to study geology with the one purpose of being able to come back
and do my fieldwork every summer in the vast Arctic nature.
I think it's kind of misleading
that the Arctic has gotten this emblem of being a symbol of disaster
because the reason why we, as scientists, go into the Arctic
is because the Arctic is the most wonderful region on the planet.
It is the most beautiful place and every scientist I know,
they go to the Arctic with that one particular reason:
to be in this beautiful place.
In contrast to what we see, those of us who live in the Arctic, of course,
industries see another property of the Arctic: they see opportunity.
The heating of the Arctic is supposed to give access
to new mineral resources; oil, gas, gold, fish, whatever,
and the business plan seems to be,
"Let us go and exploit and scavenge the last drop of everything
that is left in that last place on Earth
that has not yet been destroyed by humankind."
I think the question that I would like to pose today is:
Is that really the best idea we can come up with
and do exactly the same that has destroyed everywhere else
in the last place that has not been destroyed yet?
My suggestion is that we cannot risk to do those vast expanses
of undestroyed nature that the Arctic still possesses,
and we have to use our research capacity to try and come up with something
that is more smart, and more sustainablem and more long-term benefit for mankind.
I suggest that instead of doing what we had done everywhere else,
we should do something new,
and we should find out what are the true values of the Arctic.
I have a specific suggestion,
a method that I think could be a way of using the melting of the Arctic region
to actually fight problems otherwhere on the planet.
One of the major problems we have beside the climate change, of course,
is inequality and food security.
If we look at the wealth on Earth, we know it's unevenly distributed on the planet,
some regions are rich, some are poor.
The rich regions, which are not what's shown on this map,
but could as well have been, this map shows soil quality.
It shows where the crops that, as coming from the fields,
are richest on the planet.
You see that richness couples completely with where the soil was good.
The reason for this is not that the soil has always been like that,
it is because the soil was replenished with minerals during the last ice age.
Ice came down from the north, scoured the rocks,
turned it into a fine powder and dumped it in front of the glaciers
and fertilized the grounds across North America, Europe, and Asia,
and that's where everything that feeds humankind today grows.
On the other hand, if you look into the tropics,
you have red barren soils with very poor fertility,
and that is the reason why people in the tropics are poor,
why we have malnutrition and undernutrition,
because these soils are basically impossible to grow crops on.
My suggestion is very simple.
In Greenland, where we have the last bit of the ice cap in the Northern Hemisphere,
and it's melting right now, it's been melting forever,
but now it's melting faster,
it's flushing out billions of tons of very finely ground rock flour
that contains all the mineral nutrients that are missing in the tropics.
The idea is that we take that mud, this material from Greenland,
transferred to the tropical regions and spread it on the ground,
where it will re-fertilize the soil and provide for new wealth
and new development in these countries.
At the same time the Arctic region
is also, of course, needing development and new trades
but rather than doing the same again as we have done everywhere else,
we could do something to develop the Arctic
that at the same time does something good in the rest of the world.
My suggestion is again that we take the mud
coming out of the glaciers in Greenland and take it to the tropics,
because the mud that you find in Greenland is unlike any other mud you find.
The mud you have in the Amazon, the Mississippi, or any other major river,
is what's leftover after all the nutrients have been sucked out of the ground,
and the leftovers are flushed down the river.
Whereas in Greenland, it has, intact all the minerals
that plants need to grow in.
In Greenland this is dumped by the rivers in the fjords, the valleys, and the lakes,
and it's very easy to take it without making a large industry
without having any chemical treatment, anything.
You basically just take up this stuff and take it to where it's needed.
That, of course, begs a new question:
Is that really a good idea to take millions of tons of something
from someplace on Earth and take it to some other part of Earth?
Isn't that another climate threat?
Is that not something that's going to make our problem even greater?
My suggestion is that it's not, because the good news is
that the mechanism by which the nutrients are released
from this material to the plants is a process we call "weathering":
weathering is when something, minerals,
react the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
We take this, spread it on the tropical soils.
What happens is that it will start reacting the CO2 from the atmosphere
and draw it out of the atmosphere.
We can calculate that by transporting this material
from the Arctic to the tropics,
we actually emit less CO2 in the process
than we consume by the reaction of this material with the atmosphere.
My suggestion is that Greenlandic glacier mud can be a solution
to problems like hunger and poverty in the tropics,
also it will lower the incentive
to cut rainforest to make new land for agriculture.
Therefore I will suggest
that the Arctic could be a source of good news finally.
I will say that Greenland is not called "Greenland" for nothing,
it's actually the place that could make parts of the Earth
that is now barren green as we see Greenland is here.
So it's time for good news from the North.
(Applause)