alt Hacker NewsWhat examples of digging through that amount of ice for the purposes of mining are you familiar with? What's a good example?
It'd be interesting to understand how much the environment there increases the cost of mining. Anything is possible, but it'd be cool to know whether it makes any sense. (and yes, I think our leadership in the US is fully capable of causing an international crisis over mineral assets that would in financial terms be best left in the ground)
It's not for mining, but the US built Camp Century and Camp TUTO in the ice to determine how feasible Project Iceworm would be. A construction film about the former was declassified some decades ago [0]. Icefield construction wasn't feasible even in the context of cold-war era MAD spending.
Actual subglacial mining has only been attempted a few times. Kumtor gold mine in Kyrgyzstan is in the middle of a couple glaciers and reshaped the landscape to redirect the glaciers a bit. Svea Nord in Svalbard ran tunnels under a glacier for coal. Canada's Granduc mine wasn't technically on or under a glacier, but it was just below one.
[0] https://archive.org/details/TheU.S.ArmysTopSecretArcticCityU...