Outside the elegant Nordic-style office of North America's newest Prime Minister, the message from Scotland brought jubilation: People hugged each other, slapped hands and cheered.
The discovery of oil had been confirmed, off the coast of Canada's Baffin Island, and everyone here knew what it meant: Greenland, a country that passed a referendum to put itself on the road to national sovereignty last year, could now afford to become an independent, mainly Inuit country.
But as staffers cheered outside, the mood of Kuupik Kleist, the 52-year-old separatist Prime Minister, was more sober: Suddenly, the abstract concept of an independent Greenland - a country of 57,000 people spread out over a mass of land the size of Western Europe - had become a much more tangible, and far more intimidating, possibility.
Mr. Kleist, who grew up hunting caribou in a remote northern village and has fought for Inuit independence his whole life, acknowledged the gravity of the situation: His tiny community might become a powerful force in both energy and, possibly, in pollution; never again will Greenland be the most remote place on Earth.
"What happened this morning will not in any particular way change what we are heading toward," Mr. Kleist said as he prepared to face a parliamentary debate over his first budget since Greenland became a self-governing nation under Danish rule after an independence referendum last year. "We will be pursuing the same goals of independence - but maybe, hopefully, we will have more muscles to do it."
Greenland, which since the referendum has taken responsibility for all government services except defence and foreign affairs, is currently financed almost entirely through a $500-million annual grant, amounting to almost $10,000 per Greenlander, from Denmark. Shrimp fishing is the only other source of revenue. While Copenhagen is willing to grant the ice-covered nation independence, it would be financially impossible without resource riches.
"If a huge amount of oil should be exploited, there are some basic developments that will be possible in terms of developing our democracy, in terms of developing our infrastructure; also in terms of making the Greenland people stand on their own feet, both politically and economically," Mr. Kleist said. "That is the main goal for my party: to make the Greenland people to stand on their own feet, in all matters."
It is an extraordinary moment for Mr. Kleist, whose life in many ways embodies the story of Greenland, an extremely isolated and rarely noticed colony that is only now emerging from icy obscurity to assert itself with a degree of self-confidence and calm organization that has taken foreign leaders by surprise.
He was born in the late 1950s in a tiny settlement far to the north, in Disko Bay (where the current oil exploration is being staged); his adoptive parents raised him in the Inuit traditions of hunting and fishing, which he still practises in his spare time. His village was shut down in a Danish effort to consolidate and urbanize the Inuit, one that left many families dependent on welfare. Then he was sent, in a jarring experiment, to study in Copenhagen, a city where he knew nobody.
In the 1970s, Mr. Kleist became a key figure in a left-wing youth movement that saw the Inuit as a self-governing, independent people; the country won self rule in 1979 and last year's referendum has led to a largely autonomous government. To many Greenlanders, Mr. Kleist is also known as an accomplished guitarist and a record producer who has played a key role in the nation's surprisingly robust music scene.
The Greenlanders are well aware that Canada, just across the Baffin Strait, is watching with alarm as their newly semi-independent North American neighbour embarks on the sort of deep-sea drilling that Canada does not allow off its own coast out of fears of a Gulf of Mexico-style leak.
When the platform, operated by Scotland-based Cairn Energy under licence to Mr. Kleist's government, declared that it had found natural gas in August, Canadian Environment Minister Jim Prentice made an alarmed announcement and declared that Canadian monitors be stationed permanently on the platform.
Mr. Kleist says that this announcement is fostering closer relations with Canada - which, despite being closer physically to Greenland than any other country, has no direct diplomatic connections. There are no direct airline routes between the two nations.
"We have developed a good dialogue with the Canadian government," Mr. Kleist said. "Immediately after the first announcement by the Environmental Minister I did contact him, and wrote him a letter, and afterwards we had negotiations with government representatives … so what started as a conflict between us and Canada, turned out to be very fruitful co-operation."
Relations are far less friendly with environmental groups. Greenpeace released research in August showing that a spill on the deep-sea platform would be almost impossible to limit or clean up, since the technology used to limit the Gulf of Mexico spill would be unworkable in Arctic waters. Greenpeace sent a ship to observe the platform; it was repelled by fire hoses.
But Greenlanders tend to have a deep distrust of environmentalists and especially of Greenpeace, which supported the European Union ban on seal-hunting products, seen here as a cruel Western blow to a main traditional source of Inuit income. Mr. Kleist, who is far more diplomatic about such matters than his parliamentary colleagues, nevertheless has nothing good to say about environmentalists.
"I don't understand these Europeans. I mean, why don't they worry about their own stuff back home?" he said. "In the first place, you might have noticed that the last actions carried out by Greenpeace were not very popular in Greenland, and everybody who has a little bit of insight into what is going on around the world thinks that what Greenpeace is doing these days is purely a question of promoting the organization itself. … We are capable of taking care of the environment ourselves."
Still, he acknowledges, the Nuuk government, only a year old, has only just passed the laws necessary to ensure environmental regulation and oversight of oil drilling, and doesn't possess the resources to enforce and inspect the operations.
"We are very much aware that we need to build up our capacity in [environmental regulation]" he said, "and we don't claim to be experts at all, but we are doing our best, and we are aware of the threats and the risks, and global debate on this."
And, he says in a moment of reassurance, the oil hasn't started flowing yet. Nor has the uranium begun emerging from the ground, after his parliament authorized it last week; the vast wealth of resources believed to be trapped under Greenland, increasingly accessible in an era of global warming, remains a future promise.
"We haven't earned one single kroner yet! Independence is something we need to prepare for, and we've set up an oil fund so we can be like Norway when it comes," he says. "But independence isn't something that can just appear, from the top down. We need to get ourselves prepared for it. And one day, I'm sure that the desire and the wish will be so strong that you cannot hold it back any more, and then we will become a country."