A 30-minute stroll across New York’s Central Park separates Trump Tower from the American Museum of Natural History. If the US president ever found himself inside the museum he could see the Cape York meteorite: a 58-tonne mass of iron taken from northwest Greenland and sold in 1897 by the explorer Robert Peary, with the help of local Inuit guides.

For centuries before Danish colonisation, the people of Greenland had used fragments of the meteorite to make tools and hunting equipment. Peary removed that resource from local control, ultimately selling the meteorite for an amount equivalent to just US$1.5 million today. It was a transaction as one-sided as anything the president may now be contemplating.

But Donald Trump is now eyeing a prize much larger than a meteorite. His advocacy of the US taking control of Greenland, possibly by force, signals a shift from dealmaking to dominance. The scientific cost would be severe. A unilateral US takeover threatens to disrupt the open scientific collaboration that is helping us understand the threat of global sea-level rise.

Greenland is sovereign in everything other than defence and foreign policy, but by being part of the Kingdom of Denmark, it is included within Nato. As with any nation, access to its land and coastal waters is tightly controlled through permits that specify where work may take place and what activities are allowed.

Over many decades, Greenland has granted international scientists access to help unlock the environmental secrets preserved within its ice, rocks and seabed. US researchers have been among the main beneficiaries, drilling deep into the ice to explain the historic link between carbon dioxide........

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