Major ice loss from Greenland is exposing the island’s natural resources, inadvertently making some of the world’s largest untapped critical mineral reserves more accessible.

Greenland, a vast but sparsely populated island situated between the Arctic and North Atlantic Oceans, has been transformed by the climate crisis in recent decades.

A major analysis of historic satellite images, published last year by researchers at the U.K.’s University of Leeds, showed that the autonomous Danish territory is turning increasingly green due to human-caused global warming.

The changing environment has seen parts of Greenland’s ice sheet and glaciers replaced by wetlands, areas of shrub and barren rock.

Scientists have repeatedly sounded the alarm over the melting snow and ice on the island, warning the loss of ice mass risks increased greenhouse gas emissions and rising sea levels.

For mining companies, Greenland’s ice retreat could facilitate the start of a mineral “gold rush.”

“What’s happening now is interesting because the waters around Greenland are opening up earlier and earlier each year and closing down later and later each year. And the ability to get into these far-flung places is a lot easier than it was 20, 30, 40 or 70 years ago,” Roderick McIllree, executive director of U.K.-based mining company 80 Mile, told CNBC via video call.

“Now, the ice probably only really forms for three or four months in the very northern latitudes and the rest of the country is seeing receding ice caps that is exposing rocks and potential mineral deposits that haven’t been seen before,” he added.

80 Mile currently has three projects it is actively developing in Greenland, including a large oil concession on the island’s east coast, a titanium project near the U.S. Pituffik Space Base in the northwest and its Disko-Nuussuaq project in the southwest.

Underlining the island’s strategic potential as a globally significant mining hub, McIllree said the firm’s Disko project could be one of the largest occurrences of nickel and copper on the planet.

Greenland, which has long pitched itself as a Western alternative to China’s near monopoly on rare earth elements, has been thrust into the center of a geopolitical storm in recent weeks.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire to gain control of the territory, describing the prospect as an “absolute necessity” for purposes related to national security.

Speaking at a news conference earlier in the month, Trump refused to rule out the possibility of using military force to make Greenland a part of U.S.

Greenland Prime Minister Mute Egede said Monday that the island is open to closer ties with U.S., particularly in areas such as mining. Egede has previously insisted Greenland is “not for sale” and called for the international community to respect the island’s aspirations for independence.

Jakob Kløve Keiding, senior consultant at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), said a 2023 survey of Greenland’s resource potential evaluated a total of 38 raw materials on the island, the vast majority of which have a relatively high or moderate potential.

These materials include the rare earth metals graphite, niobium, platinum group metals, molybdenum, tantalum and titanium. Greenland is also known to have significant lithium, hafnium, uranium and gold deposits.

Critical minerals refer to a subset of materials considered essential to the energy transition. The end-use of these materials, which tend to have a high risk of supply chain disruption, are wide-ranging and include electric vehicle batteries, energy storage technologies and national security applications.

“There is huge potential [in Greenland] but, at the moment, there is not actually much mining going on,” Keiding told CNBC via telephone.

“Greenland is what we would call a greenfield exploration area. So, [it is] in the early stages of exploration where, for many of the deposits, we don’t have that much data. But there are some large and well-established deposits with known resources.”

Keiding issued a note of caution when asked about the prospect of a mineral gold rush, saying that while Greenland’s retreating ice may remove some logistical hurdles, progress in terms of extraction will likely take “quite some time.”

India’s days of buying cheap Russian oil could be over.

Sweeping sanctions by the U.S. against Russia’s energy companies and operators of vessels that transport oil will complicate Indian efforts to keep importing cheap Russian crude and could push up inflation in Asia’s third-largest economy, analysts said.

The country could be looking at a potential oil shock, said Bob McNally, president of Rapidan Energy Group.

“India will be more affected than China by sanctions, since India imports much greater amount of its oil from Russia than China,” he told CNBC.

Last Friday, the U.S. Treasury announced sanctions on two Russian oil producers, along with 183 vessels which are primarily oil tankers that have been shipping barrels of Russian crude. At present, tankers sanctioned by the U.S. are still permitted to offload crude oil until March 12.

The South Asian nation imported a significant 88% of its oil needs between April and November 2024, little changed from a year earlier, according to government data. Around 40% of those imports came from Russia, data from trade intelligence firm Kpler showed. 

Out of the newly sanctioned 183 tankers, 75 of them have transported Russian oil to India in the past, according to data provided by Kpler. Just last year alone, the 183 sanctioned tankers transported around 687 million barrels of crude, of which 30% were shipped to India.

“Most of these barrels went to Indian refiners and, hence, the impact will likely be largest there,” BNP Paribas’ senior commodities strategist Aldo Spanier said in a research note following the sanctions.

The new U.S. sanctions were deeper and broader than foreseen by markets, and the disruptions are expected to amplify, Spanier added.

India’s Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas did not respond to a CNBC request for comment.

The sanctions are also coming at a time when India is tipped to surpass China as the number one oil consumer in the world in 2025, accounting for 25% of total oil consumption growth globally.

Increasing demand for transportation fuels and home cooking fuels is set to spur this growth of 330,000 barrels per day this year — the most of any country, forecasts by the U.S. Energy Information Administration showed. 

India consumed 5.3 million barrels per day in 2023, EIA’s most recent data showed. This consumption is expected to have increased by 220,000 barrels per day last year.

India wasn’t always this dependent on Russian oil.

As recently as 2021, Russian oil accounted for just 12% of India’s oil imports by volume. By 2024, that share had spiked to 37.6%, Muyu Xu, senior oil analyst at Kpler told CNBC.

The catalyst for increased oil imports was the Ukraine war, which prompted some Western countries to impose sanctions against Russia and curtail their purchases of Russian crude. As prices of Russian oil fell, India was able to hoover up supplies cheaply from companies that were not under sanctions.

The discount of Russia’s crude, Urals, to the global benchmark Brent has averaged around $12 per barrel from last August to October, according to S&P Global’s most recently published data last November. In 2024, Russia’s Urals were also cheaper by $4 per barrel compared to oil from Iraq, one of India’s main sources of crude oil imports, data from Kpler showed.

“If India were to fully comply with U.S. sanctions, we could see a sharp decline in Russian crude arrivals in February and potentially March,” Xu added.

Supply disruptions to India could be as high as 500,000 barrels per day, Rystad Energy’s senior analyst Viktor Kurilov shared via email.

Additionally, as Donald Trump’s inauguration draws closer, the world’s supply of cheap Iranian crude, is also facing the risk of tighter sanctions. Iran made up 4% of the world’s oil production in 2023, according to an EIA report released last year.

“It is [also] a bit of a double whammy for the key importer [India] as Iran will likely face new sanctions pressure with the incoming Trump administration,” Helima Croft, global head of commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, told CNBC.

If the new sanctions are coupled with a potential curb on Iranian crude, Brent prices could rise even higher to $90 per barrel, Goldman Sachs wrote in a note published after the announcement of the sanctions.

The Indian economy is “significantly vulnerable” to fluctuations in oil prices, a research paper published in 2023 established. Domestic retail prices of gasoline and diesel surge “like rockets” in response to rising crude oil prices, Abdhut Deheri, assistant economics professor at the Vellore Institute of Technology and M. Ramachandran from Pondicherry University’s department of economics said in the research paper.

Analysis from the Reserve Bank of India in 2019 found that every $10 per barrel rise in oil prices could lead to a 0.4% increase in headline inflation. 

“High oil prices, if passed to consumers, could further hurt their purchasing power at a time when income and GDP growth have slowed,” Dhiraj Nim, an economist at ANZ. 

However, weak consumer demand could deter producers from passing on the cost burden to consumers, which means it could dent companies’ profits instead, Nim added. Although if the government chooses to shoulder the additional costs, it would strain its finances.

Not only will China and India have to pay more for the oil they consume, they will need to pay more to have it delivered to their shores because oil tanker rates have also risen, said Andy Lipow, president of energy consultancy Lipow Oil Associates.

Combined with a stronger U.S. dollar and weaker rupee, the impact on the India economy will be magnified, said Lipow. 

India’s rupee recently plunged to a record low as a result of pressure from a strong greenback and selling by foreign portfolio investors. 

The country is no stranger to protests over high fuel prices. In 2018, widespread protests across the country against record-high petrol and diesel prices led to the closure of businesses and schools  in several regions.