The Emirs have polar water!

Emmanuelle Ducros 08:54, January 11, 2024

A story told by the British daily Guardian, that of the Greenlandic start-up Arctic Ice and its surprising business plan. A story that casts a chill.

Do you know how far away Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, is from Dubai? 8276 km as the crow flies. double by sea. It's this never-ending path that the startup Arctic Ice takes blocks of ice along in a cargo ship. They are caught in a fjord, transported refrigerated and sold in the United Arab Emirates to become ice cubes in luxury cocktails. A very sad fate for a thousand-year-old ice cream.

This story sounds like fiction. What's the point of transporting ice all around the planet?

Founder Malik Vahl Rasmussen, a young Greenlander, praises exceptional ice, glacial ice, so to speak. It is nearly 100,000 years old, and comes from parts of the ice sheets that have not been in contact with soil or contaminated by pollutants produced by human activities. Ice cream that's purer than pure, devoid of bubbles. Which is even supposed to melt more slowly than regular ice. In Dubai, where the oil fortunes no longer know how to spend their dollars, this extravagant luxury is the last thrill. The start-up was launched in 2022 and has sold around twenty tonnes of ice cream in recent months.

The carbon footprint of this ice is chilling.

An ice caught with a crane boat, transported to the port of Nuuk, loaded into a container ship, transported to Denmark and then reloaded on another ship that takes it to Dubai. It's really hard to believe the founder who explains that he is participating in his country's ecological transition by using containers that would otherwise leave Greenland empty. A kind of low-carbon rationalization, according to him. For the rest, it's far from that, but the company claims that it will be carbon neutral in the long run. Maybe. But it's still insane debauchery for ice cream. And it collides with images of glacial melting, which embody global warming.

Behind that, there is an interesting geopolitical aspect.

Because if ecologically we can protest against this transport of ice, we can also see it as an attempt at decolonization.

Greenland is a former Danish colony, which has been granted political autonomy since 1979, but which still belongs to the Danish crown and is still economically dependent. It creates recurring friction.

According to Rasmussen, Arctic Ice is also a way to create new sources of income for Greenland, to gain independence. "In Greenland, we make all our money from fish and tourism," says the founder. Now there is ice, which covers 85% of its territory. It's such a central thing that there are no less than 50 words for it in Inuktikut, the language of Greenland.