Introduction to Agnete Steenfelt

Welcome to Polar Podcasts, where you’ll hear stories from geologists who’ve spent their careers, their lives, exploring and studying the remarkable and remote geology of Greenland. Why did they become fascinated with Greenland? What were the problems and the discoveries that drove them? And what was it like working in these remote places, where few people venture, even now? 

Agnete Steenfelt – emeritus senior scientist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, where she has spent her career – was one of few female field geologists employed at the Geological Survey of Greenland in the early 1970s. With European interest in nuclear power generation, she was led a program of radiometric surveying applied to uranium exploration in east Greenland.

With her passion for geochemistry, Agnete was instrumental in introducing modern geochemical sampling and mapping to Greenland as a whole – a program that would grow to decades of work and tens of thousands of samples covering almost the entirety of Greenland, and resulting in geochemical maps on a continental scale that revealed the hidden nature of large-scale mineral enrichments in different parts of Greenland.

Polar Podcasts goes to air on August 4. Tune in and subscribe to hear Agnete Steenfelt and other career Greenland geologists talk about their experiences working in Greenland over the decades.