The U.S. has 3 of the world's 240 icebreakers, the crucial shipping technology that would unlock Greenland | Fortune

"The cold, hard reality facing any U.S., NATO or European plans for Greenland is the ice. It chokes harbors, entombs minerals, and freezes shorelines into minefields of white and blue shards that threaten ships all year. And the only way to break through all that is, well, with icebreakers: enormous ships with burly engines, reinforced hulls, and heavy bows that can crush and cleave ice."

"Despite toning down his rhetoric, U.S. President Donald Trump seems set on the U.S. owning Greenland for security and economic reasons: to keep what he calls "the big, beautiful piece of ice" out of the hands of Moscow and Beijing, to secure a strategic Arctic location for U.S. assets, and to extract the island's mineral wealth including rare earths. Without specifying any plan, he told world leaders gathered in Davos, Switzerland,"

"Yet there is no meaningful way to do that - or anything else in the semiautonomous Danish territory - without icebreakers' crucial ability to cut trails through frozen seas. Even if they decided to surge U.S. material into Greenland tomorrow, "they would have two or three years gap in which they're not really able to access the island most of the time," said Alberto Rizzi, a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations."

Arctic ice physically blocks Greenland's harbors, buries mineral deposits, and freezes shorelines into hazardous fields that endanger ships year-round. Icebreakers provide the only practical method to penetrate those ice conditions, requiring powerful engines, reinforced hulls, and heavy bows. The United States currently operates only three icebreakers, with one nearly unusable, and has agreements to acquire eleven more. Procurement options for additional icebreakers are limited to Chinese and Russian shipyards or to Canada and Finland, allies the U.S. has recently criticized. Strategic interest in Greenland centers on security, Arctic basing, and rare earth mineral extraction, but access would face a multi-year capability gap.

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