The town of Narsaq (pop. 1,346) lies on the southern tip of Greenland, its rolling green turf punctuated by grey-roofed houses painted in primary colors, its bay dotted with the flotsam and jetsam of thawing sea ice. To the north, mountains rise. A series of stepped terraces are etched out of the flinty tops, like an ashen rice paddy where nothing grows and nothing lives.

These terraces are the remains of an old Narsaq uranium mine called Kvanefjeld, or Kuannersuit in Greenlandic and of the second densest collection of rare earth elements in the world, says Billy Fleming, the Wilks Family Director of the Ian L. McHarg Center at the Weitzman School of Design. Fleming, a landscape architect, teaches an annual studio course, Designing a Green New Deal: The Spatial Politics of Our Response to Climate Change. In the last five years, Fleming and graduate students enrolled in the Master of Landscape Architecture and Master of City Planning programs have looked at the coalfield-to-prison pipeline in Central Appalachia and now the climate future of Greenland, where the ice sheet is rapidly melting, exposing new land, new potential, and new risks for the island.

Read more at Penn Today.