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Greenland has drawn prospectors for more than a century, yet its mining record stays thin. The Ivittuut cryolite mine once delivered large profits, including to the Danish state, and the Black Angel operation produced zinc, lead and silver for decades. Coal came from Qullissat and base metals from Blyklippen, though most of these ventures proved economically marginal. Gold arrived in the 1990s, when geologists confirmed an occurrence in the south that became the Nalunaq mine, the island’s first gold producer when it opened in 2004.
Nalunaq, a Greenlandic word meaning roughly the place that is hard to find, ran until 2008, then sat idle before a Greenland-focused company bought it in 2015 and restarted production in late 2024. It counts among the highest-grade gold deposits anywhere. The island also holds minerals that matter to modern supply chains. A 2023 survey found that 25 of the 34 materials the European Commission calls critical are present in Greenland, including rare earth elements in the southern Gardar province, though no rare earth mine operates there yet.
That gap between promise and production has become a geopolitical talking point. Washington has floated acquiring the territory, senior U.S. officials have visited, and American and Chinese interests have both circled the island’s resources. The practical hurdles are large. Greenland has roughly 93 miles of road across a landmass three times the size of Texas, only a handful of ports, and short field seasons. Today just two mines operate: the small Nalunaq gold mine and the White Mountain anorthosite quarry.
Into that setting steps Amaroq Ltd. (OTCQX: AMRQF, LSE: AMRQ), owner of the Nalunaq mine and a portfolio spread across southern and western Greenland. The company has announced that it had begun its 2026 resource drilling programme at the Nanoq gold project, a target within the same regional gold belt as its producing mine. Three company-owned rigs are working first at the Central Zone, where earlier holes returned striking grades, including 187.4 g/t gold over 1.5 metres and 19.6 g/t gold over 4.9 metres.
The aim is to gather enough closely spaced data to support a maiden mineral resource estimate later in the year, the formal step that turns scattered high-grade hits into a defined tonnage and grade. The work is expected to be broadly comparable in scale to 2025, when Amaroq completed 4,807 metres across 27 holes. After building density at the Central Zone, the rigs are due to step out to the West 1 Zone about 500 metres away, where surface samples have returned up to 9.5 g/t gold on what geologists believe is a similar parallel structure.
Two efforts run alongside the drilling. A Canadian laboratory, SGS Lakefield, is conducting provisional metallurgical tests to see whether ore from Nanoq could be processed through the existing plant at Nalunaq, which would avoid building separate facilities. Amaroq is also weighing early engineering work, possibly a harbour and an access road, to make the site cheaper to reach from 2027 onward. Valued at about $674 million (GBP 499 million) on the London market, the company is a mid-sized explorer whose fortunes track a gold price that has stayed near record levels.
Whether Nanoq becomes a second mine or stays an exploration story will depend on what the drill core shows over the coming months. This current episode offers a clear window into how mining actually advances in a place like Greenland, slowly, one drilling season at a time, with geology, weather, infrastructure and metal prices all pulling in different directions. A maiden resource estimate, if it comes, would mark the moment Nanoq stops being a promising set of numbers and starts to resemble a project.
