From US President Obama's climate change plan to the recent debate between EU nations and Greenland over ownership of the Arctic, the issue of climate change has never been far from headlines. Concern over water both regarding shortages and excesses have caused serious contention on the world stage. World Policy Journal delves into its archives to bring you Alun Anderson's piece on the precarious state of the Arctic polar ice caps. Reposted from our Winter 2009/2010 edition.
by Alun Anderson
If there is one place where we don’t want more water, it is at the very top of our planet. But a lot more water is what we are going to have—and all too quickly. In the far north, the biggest and fastest change to our planet ever caused by human activity is underway. More and more of the frozen Arctic seas are melting away. Each winter, the ice grows until it covers an area more than one-and-a-half times the size of the entire United States. In summer, as the 24-hour sunlight sets to work, that ice previously melted to half the winter area. Now, after a catastrophic collapse in 2007, close to two-thirds of the ice is vanishing. Compared to a decade earlier, the Arctic is losing an extra area of ice each summer that is six times the size of California.
The big, once-unthinkable question is not if—but when—the ice will disappear completely each summer. Predicting such a monumental shift is a tricky business. When the ice collapsed in the summer of 2007, scientists were caught napping. The ice shrank to an area that climate models predicted we would not see until 2055. Some estimates on total disappearance of the summer ice now suggest a date as early as 2013.
The cause of the great melt is the slow warming of the planet, set in motion by the rising levels of greenhouse gases that we are pumping into the atmosphere. Already that warming has gone too far for us to rescue the Arctic ice. Cuts in greenhouse gases that go well beyond anything politicians are now debating would be needed to keep even a part of the ice that remains. Temperature rise was always expected to be fastest in the Arctic. White ice reflects sunlight back into space like a giant mirror, but when it turns into dark water, the heat is soaked up instead. The seas then warm, more ice melts, and even more heat is absorbed in a destructive feedback loop that amplifies temperatures. The result is a rapid shift from white to black across the whole top of the globe—the clearest possible message that climate change has arrived in the Arctic and will soon be coming to the rest of the planet on a massive scale.
The warning comes with a further sting in its tail. As the summer ice disappears, the Arctic will begin a long, slow, painful revenge. There will be no quick disasters that will push us to mount a massive response. There will no floods of melt water that suddenly drown cities, New Orleans-style, mobilizing us to action. The climate won’t change abruptly, as depicted in the movie The Day After Tomorrow, when New York City entered the Ice Age in just a few days. The Arctic will exact a punishment that we humans are very bad at dealing with—spread over hundreds of years and almost completely unstoppable. There will be a steady boost to planetary warming and an endless rise in sea levels, gradually forcing many of the world’s great coastal cities to relocate or be inundated, and submerging low-lying nations beneath the sea forever.
In the decades to come, before we and our distant descendants face those graver consequences, we have more immediate concerns to face. We will have altered the Arctic irrevocably, wiping out a unique set of ecosystems and the animals that flourish within them. We will have transformed an enormous area of the planet and created a new sea with a new set of losers and winners and myriad political challenges. The big questions in this period of transition are whether we can protect what remains of the old Arctic; mitigate new conflicts; ensure that the new, opening sea is not pillaged for quick profits; and bring sustainable development to the people who have lived there for thousands of years but now see their traditional ways of living vanishing along with the ice.
A New World Forms
The transformation from ice to water comes just as better times were arriving for many of the iconic creatures of the Arctic. The polar bear is now protected everywhere from hunting. In the United States, the bear won its listing as a “threatened” species in May 2008. In the islands of Svalbard, just 800 miles from the North Pole, where many bears live, the Norwegian government protects them with such seriousness that the locals joke, “you are better off shooting a man than a bear; the authorities will investigate you less thoroughly.” Polar bears would be making a comeback, if only the ice were not vanishing.
In 2008, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) matched computer models of the future state of the Arctic ice with what we know about bears. Polar bears are utterly dependent on ice as a platform to hunt seals, their principal prey. As the Arctic summer ice disappears, the hunting period is growing shorter and breeding rates are falling. As ice floes drift further away from shore, bears find the swim back to land too exhausting. Drowned bears are appearing in unprecedented numbers. The computer model’s grim conclusion was that two-thirds of the world’s current polar bear population would be lost by 2050. Only in the frozen channels among the northernmost Canadian islands might bears hang on until the end of the century.
Along with polar bears, other charismatic beasts of the Arctic, equally dependent on sea ice, will go too. The narwhal, with its long spiral horn that inspired the myth of the unicorn, will be hard put to survive, as will many kinds of seal. The walrus, so recently recovered from mass commercial hunting; the bowhead whale, still only slowly gaining numbers after centuries of slaughter; and the white beluga whale will come under great pressure. All use sea ice to rest, hide, or feed. To keep their populations alive will require total protection in the ever smaller areas where they remain.
The disappearance of the ice is the greatest possible disaster for the current masters of the Arctic, but it is by no means the end of the Arctic itself. We will not have destroyed the Arctic but transformed it, with the Arctic reborn as a sea that is more like waters of the south. Fish and birds that are more at home in warmer water are already invading the Arctic, feeding on plankton that could never have flourished there a short while ago. Off the coast of Alaska, pollock are moving north and bringing with them the salmon that feed on them. And with the fish and plankton will come the terrifying symbol of the new Arctic—the killer whale. These ferocious predators have a tall fin that makes it hard for them to surface easily where there is a lot of ice. But as the thick ice melts, the killer whale can move north and prey on seal, beluga, narwhal, and bowhead whales. In some parts of the Arctic, beluga whales, known as the canaries of the sea for their constant chattering, have fallen silent— hoping to evade the ever-listening killer whales. In a more open Arctic, the killer whale will sit atop the food chain, toppling the polar bear from the throne it has held for 200,000 years. Whether we like it or not, this is the new ice-free Arctic we are creating.
Borders and Oil
As the new sea forms, a top priority is that it not become a new theater for international conflict, or a place where oil rigs and ships can go with impunity, beyond regulation, threatening more local ecological disasters. Early signs were troubling. In 2007, a Russian mini-sub planted a titanium flag beneath the North Pole, a clear sign of intent to seize control of the opening Arctic Ocean and its potential wealth. Canada’s foreign affairs minister, Peter MacKay, protested: “This isn’t the fifteenth century. You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say, ‘We’re claiming this territory.’” Soon after, the European Union foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, joined in, claiming that the flag planting had changed “the geostrategic dynamics of the region with potential consequences for international stability and European security interests.”
The interests, of course, lie in the large reserves of oil and gas in the Arctic. In 2008, the USGSanimated the oil industry by describing the Arctic as “the largest unexplored prospective area for petroleum remaining on earth,” containing an estimated 13 percent of the world’s oil and 30 percent of its gas.
Some Russian newspapers more sensibly described the flag planting as a “stunt,” which is pretty much what it turned out to be, since right now there are no signs of a new conflict in the Arctic. The five nations that border the Arctic seas—the United States, Russia, Canada, Norway, and Denmark(via its Arctic territory of Greenland)—are instead tamely following the rules laid out in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, rather than preparing for war. (The United States has yet to ratify that convention, but follows its rules.) After the Russian flag planting, a meeting of the five nations was hurriedly convened in Greenland to kill any idea that there would be an aggressive race for the North Pole. All signed an agreement affirming that “an extensive international legal framework applies to the Arctic Ocean.”
Peace currently reigns—except for some long-standing border disputes—and for good reason. The Law of the Sea clearly establishes that all coastal nations have a right to an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) that extends 200 nautical miles from their shores. Most of the easily exploited Arctic oil and gas lies in the shallow continental shelf seas well within this limit, in uncontested waters. Where shallow waters extend farther from land beyond this limit, the law allows nations to make more extensive claims to the seabed. But no nation can claim the deeper ocean beyond 2,500 meters in depth. To claim the shallow seabed, nations need detailed maps of the sea bottom and the sediments that lie below it, and evidence that the sea bed really is a natural geological extension of their own land. That evidence has to be submitted to a United Nations panel of experts before it can be approved.
So far, the bordering nations, all with shallow seas extending far into the Arctic, have been following the rules, instead of sending in navies. Each has been busily employing geologists and hydrographers on specially equipped ice breakers to gather the evidence they need to take their claims to the United Nations. There is no certainty, however, that their claims will ever be worth anything. Although there may be more oil and gas further out to sea, it will be so far from land that it will very tough to exploit. Easier prospects will remain available far into the future. By then, it is a reasonable bet that new, more efficient green technologies will be better able to compete with expensive Arctic oil and gas.
Even so, everyone is in a big rush, with more mapping expeditions to the Arctic launched in the past five years than in the previous fifty. But that is not because anyone has scented wealth. It is simply that the deadline for filing claims—ten years after ratification of the Law of the Sea—is approaching for most nations. A claim is essential because without it any benefits, however unlikely, will be lost forever. Back in 1867, when America bought Alaska from Russia for $7 million, critics complained it contained “nothing of value but furbearing animals.” No one thinks that money was wasted now.
The Coming Ice Wars?
There could still be conflict in the Arctic, but the flashpoints are old ones, close to shore, where exclusive economic zones of different nations overlap and borders have never been fixed. The disputed boundary region between Russia and Norway is the most dangerous of all. The USGSbelieves it contains the largest deposits of undiscovered gas in the Arctic. It is also richly endowed with oil and fish, and tensions could bring conflict. As Norwegian Rear Admiral Trond Grytting, chief of the regional military crisis headquarters on the country’s north coast, put it recently: “It would be naïve to rule out the possibility of incidents involving the use of arms and show of power in our region. It is pretty much a fact that enormous amounts of biological and geological resources in combination with unsettled borders are the most likely source for a conflict in any region.” In 2008, Norway announced plans to buy 48 F-35 fighter jets, in part to patrol more effectively the northern frontier. This does not necessarily signal war, but certainly makes clear that Norway will not tamely relinquish its claim to its bigger neighbor. And as Norway is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, other member nations must worry about this Arctic quarrel.
Equally intractable is the sea border between the United States and Canada, where Alaska and the Yukon meet. The land border largely runs straight along the 141st longitude—a demarcation line fixed in 1823 by negotiations in Moscow between Great Britain and Imperial Russia, which produced an accord written in French, and passed along when Alaska was bought by the United States and Canada became independent. The agreement does not say what should happen when that line hits the sea. The Canadians contend that it should simply continue straight on and neatly divide the coastal waters. The Americans say it stops at the sea and that a new line should run at an equal distance from the adjoining shores, which means pretty much at a right angle to the land. Each nation’s preferred method gives itself a bigger slice of the coastal waters (around 6,700 square miles are at stake) and neither side will budge. Both nations want to explore the disputed zone—and the higher the price of oil and gas, the lower the chance for compromise.
Even if there comes a time when ownership of the Arctic seabed is no longer contested, it is far from certain how much of its enormous oil, gas, and mineral wealth will ever be exploited. That depends on many other factors: technical, financial, and political. The United States, for instance, has enormous reserves of oil in the waters off Alaska but they are still very expensive to reach. The production technology needed to bring oil in deep water back to shore year round, amid ice, storms, and enormous icebergs, does not yet exist and would likely take a decade or two to develop (though oil exploration in the brief summer is a simpler proposition). To those costs must be added fierce local opposition. Inupiat Alaskans have seen plenty of benefits from the onshore oil industry at Prudhoe Bay, but offshore oil drilling is a step too far. The annual hunt for bowhead whales is a critical part of Inupiat culture, with everyone sharing in the fruits of a successful catch. Fears that offshore drilling would scare away the whales and pollute the seas led the whalers to join forces with environmental groups from down south and fight oil producers in court.
Oil companies have placed enormous bets that they will eventually prevail. In February 2008, they bid $3.4 billion in a competition for drilling rights in the Chukchi Sea, off the city of Barrow on the northwest coast of Alaska. Shell led the pack with $2.1 billion in winning bids, followed by ConocoPhillips. But even these sums do not guarantee a well will ever be drilled.
“Everyone is in a big rush, with the more mapping expeditions to the Arctic launched in the past five years than in the previous fifty.”
A little over a year later, a Washington,D.C., court ruled that the entire leasingprogram had been approved without adequate review of its impact, especially on the environment. Legal actions promise to run on. With every passing year, as the ice disappears, the stress on Alaska’s polar bears, walrus, and bowhead whales is going to become more visible. The additional impact from the noise of seismic exploration, drilling, and possible oil spills will become harder to justify. The pressure to move away from fossil fuels will grow, too, as climate change continues. Success for any Alaskan offshore oil industry looks uncertain. Russia,though, is a different story altogether.
Russia’s Northward Expansion
Onshore, development in Arctic Russia is booming, and there is uninhibited enthusiasm for more. Russia already pumps about as much oil as Saudi Arabia and more gas than any other nation. In 2007, the energy sector accounted for a third of Russia’s gross domestic product, 60 percent of its exports, and half of all government revenue.
In short, Moscow’s wealth and power comes from energy and the Russian Arctic lands are full of oil fields. Thus, it is no surprise that Russia plans to explore all its Arctic seas—the Barents, Pechora, Laptev, and Kara—that run along the top of Siberia. Lawsuits do not stand in the way, and Russian or foreign environmental groups have little influence in the corridors of power. A giant oil platform, the second largest in the world, is already nearly complete and will soon sit 40 miles offshore in the Pechora Sea. Its monumental heft (the rig weighs 500,000 tons and is tall enough to sit on the sea bottom) is designed to withstand the destructive power of shifting sea ice. Russia needs a host of new technologies for further expansion. To move oil across the Arctic seas from its onshore oil fields, Russia has put a new fleet of innovative icebreaking oil tankers to work. These ships can run through the Arctic ice alone, without the escort of specialized icebreakers that oil and cargo ships normally need. Russia’s new ships are constantly on the go shuttling oil, summer and winter, from fields on the Siberian coast at Varandey through the Arctic ice to the ice-free port at Murmansk, where conventional tankers can take the crude onward. Soon, these new ships will fill up on oil pumped from Russia’s offshore platforms as well.
While the new tankers are one tool in the new science of moving oil efficiently out of the Arctic, another project leads the way in pushing the frontiers for production into the distant, deep, and hostile Arctic waters. Almost 400 miles out in the frigid Barents Sea lies the Shtokman field, the secondlargest gas deposit in the world. Although far from the mainland, the field is close enough to the remote offshore islands where the Soviet Union once tested hundreds of atomic and hydrogen bombs for ownership to be uncontested.
Gas is easier to exploit than oil, and the environmental risks from a spill are much lower. Still, this conquest will not be easy. The frigid waters atop the Shtokman field are 1,000 feet deep and dotted with heavy, fast-moving ice that would tear apart the kind of deep-water rigs that work so well in the Gulf of Mexico, which are built on lattice works of welded steel pipes rising from the sea bottom. Huge icebergs weighing one million tons or more sometimes wander past. Their sheer force would destroy any man-made structure. There are also unpredictable, savage, hurricane-like storms. Ocean spray can quickly ice up ships and structures, weighing down and toppling them. The distance to land is at the limit of a helicopter flight, making air rescue difficult and dangerous. And for half the year, there is little daylight. Yet with astonishing ambition, Russian energy giant Gazprom, Norway’s StatoilHydro, and France’s Total are aiming for production by 2013.
A specially strengthened production ship will take gas from wells on the sea bottom via “riser” tubes and pump it ashore through a pipeline that will be longer than any ever completed in this environment. The ship will be able to withstand the pressure of thin ice coming at it head on, but more dangerous thick ice will be broken up by a flotilla of circling icebreakers before the floes can arrive. In case a monster iceberg drifts too near, the ship is designed to be able to quickly release its risers and flee to safety. Later, it will return and reconnect. Nothing like this has ever been built before.
On the Russian side of the Arctic, seas dotted with oil rigs are a real possibility. But with oil production and transport comes the fear of a big oil spill. No one has ever cleaned up a major spill in the Arctic. Conventional technology that skims oil from the surface of the water will not work well in fields of broken ice. The best bet may be simply to bomb the oil with napalm and hope to set it alight. If spilled oil were to spread and drift, it could circle the Arctic for decades—at low temperatures the oil does not evaporate, nor does its toxicity disappear. In 2007, the World Wildlife Fund called for a moratorium on all Arctic offshore oil production until new oil-spill technologies are available and in place. That call was not heeded. International agreements on Arctic rig design and oil spill clean up must now be top priorities as the rigs move north.
In an Inuit Land
While Russia pushes ahead and Alaska is mired in legal battles, the emerging governments of indigenous people will be key forces in deciding how fast oil and gas development proceeds across Canada and Greenland.
A decade ago, in a remarkable example of devolution, a huge swath of the Arctic—five times the size of California and making up 21 percent of Canada’s total area—was turned into a new territory called Nunavut. With local powers given to a government in the territory’s largest town, Iqaluit (population 6,200), Nunavut stretches from the west coast of Hudson Bay to the tip of Ellesmere Island just 500 miles from the North Pole, and across to Baffin Island and the sea border with Greenland. The territory includes thousands of islands, mountains, glaciers, dry polar deserts, and greener tundra at its southern fringes. There are no roads, railroads, or deep ports, so if you want to get around you have to travel by small plane, boat, or snowmobile. Only in the middle of winter, when some rivers freeze so hard that trucks can drive along them, can heavy goods be shifted by land. In this colossal space, there are only 30,000 people, some 85 percent of whom are Inuit. To get a sense of the population density, imagine the entire population of the United States as just 130,000.
Nunavut’s neighbor, Greenland, is of a similar size and boasts a population of 57,000, of which 90 percent are Inuit. Greenland has a Home Rule government within the Kingdom of Denmark, but in 2009 a referendum laid out a road to independence. To reach this goal, Greenland must gradually reduce its dependence on Denmark, which currently provides subsi-
“On The Russian side of the Arctic, seas dotted with oil rigs look to be a real possibility.”
dies totaling $500 million a year. Only when Greenland can pay its own way will independence become a possibility. That piles on the pressure to develop its natural resources. The USGS estimated the total oil off Greenland’s shores at 17 billion barrels, which, with oil at $75 a barrel, represents a $130 billion fortune. But there is no certainty that the resources are really there, or that much of it can be extracted profitably. Other plans are under discussion. Greenland might be able to emulate Iceland and develop cheap hydroelectric power that would attract aluminum smelters or even giant computer server farms needed to store the data collected by Internet search engines.
The Nunavut government, too, is committed to seeking greater economic power and self-sufficiency. But economic transformation must come from prospecting and exploiting minerals, oil, and gas. That may seem ironic given that Inuit leaders have spoken out loudly against the impact they face from greenhouse gases emitted by the rest of the world. But opportunity has a way of turning idealism into pragmatism. Their development needs are enormous. Huge social problems beset all the Inuit lands. In Nunavut, only a quarter of Inuit children graduate from high school, just 30 percent of adults are fully literate, homes are overcrowded, unemployment rates hover near 40 percent in some rural communities, and the suicide rate for young men is 40 times the Canadian average.
The bounty of Arctic oil, gas, and minerals that will be uncovered as the ice melts presents an opportunity for these people to use their growing political power to benefit from the wealth that surrounds them. But ensuring that development is sustainable, raises local skill levels, and does not harm the environment will be difficult. If the new Inuit governments are successful, we may see a new indigenous Arctic emerge that is a part of the global community, with living standards to match. But if they fail to control what happens in their lands, profits may simply disappear to the south, leaving the Inuit living among transient oil workers toiling in a ruined landscape.
An even worse possibility for the Inuit is that while rapid climate change is a certainty, the Arctic’s wealth may only be a mirage. If the world heeds calls to mitigate climate change and switches to green alternatives from high-priced oil, or if current successes in finding more accessible oil elsewhere continue, little of the oil of the Arctic may be worth the costs of extraction. The Inuit would then find themselves facing an increasingly bleak future. They will have to find new ways to live as ice turns to open water, surviving on the largesse of others in a rapidly changing environment.
Can Government Keep Up?
As the shape of the new Arctic begins to emerge, there is much that can be done to help the region, its waters, and its people through the transition to an open sea. The United States has moved with commendable speed on one key issue. As southern fish invade the new Arctic, there is a risk that they will be pursued by a voracious fishing industry that could imperil this new, fragile marine ecosystem before it even has a chance to establish itself. We could end up with the worst of all possible worlds: neither a new Arctic nor an old Arctic, but an Arctic wasteland. Thus, the speedy decision in early 2009 by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, later approved by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, to close around 150,000 square nautical miles of Alaskan Arctic waters to fishing was particularly welcome. Equally important was a U.S. Senate resolution directing the State Department to negotiate an international agreement on Arctic fish stocks. If an agreement can be made to protect the adjoining Canadian and Russian waters and the international waters in the Arctic basin, that would be a very good start for the new Arctic and its people.
International cooperation will be critical as the new Arctic forms. Fish and oil slicks do not respect national boundaries, and ships have the right to pass through the Arctic seas, just as they do elsewhere, outside of a nation’s territorial waters (which extend just 12 nautical miles from land). The more activity there is, the more stresses are placed on the animals living there, with increased chances for an oil spill that could have far worse consequences than the 1989 wreck of the Exxon Valdez in pristine waters of the Prince William Sound in Alaska. Lawyers are once again turning to the Law of the Sea for ideas, but while talk has begun, action has not. The law contains many articles that provide a framework for protecting the Arctic without having to go back and negotiate a new treaty. One such provision makes it possible to enforce rules on pollution that are stricter than international standards in areas that freeze part of the year. Another provides ways to protect unique ecological areas. Indeed, the Mediterranean and Baltic Seas already have additional regulations for ships entering their waters to provide increased protection against oil spills. Critical habitats in the Arctic can be designated “particularly sensitive sea areas,” as are the Galapagos Islands and the Great Barrier Reef, around which ships can be rerouted.
There is much more the Law of the Sea could do if the international community gets serious about protecting the Arctic, but the United States must take leadership by quickly ratifying the convention. Part of the concern over the lack of universal legislation comes from the heightened speculation that new trans-Arctic shipping routes will open as the ice vanishes, providing short cuts across the top of the world for container traffic that currently takes manufactured goods from China, Korea, and Japan to Europe and the East Coast of the United States via the Suez Canal or the southern tip of Africa.
Arctic Highways
Traffic is certainly going to grow, but the old dream of an easily navigable short cut between Atlantic and Pacific is likely to remain a mirage far into the future. The Northwest Passage, the fabled route that so many explorers died trying to discover, runs from Baffin Bay in eastern Canada to the north coast of Alaska. There are many possible paths among Canada’s northern islands, whether through the Amundsen Gulf running inshore of Banks Island that the first explorers used, or further out through Viscount Melville Sound. But none provides easy passage. Prevailing winds and currents mean that these channels will always be littered with chunks of winter ice, swept in from the deeper Arctic, making them a dangerous choice for all but the toughest ships.
To develop the route, the settlement of a long-running and bitter political dispute would be essential. Canada regards the routes among its islands as “internal waterways” that it controls fully. Other nations support the American view that they are “international straits” through which all ships have an automatic right of unimpeded passage. The difference mattered little until
“We could end up with the worst of all possible worlds—either a new Arctic nor an old Arctic, but an Arctic wasteland.”
1969, when the United States sent the oil tanker Manhattan through the straits deliberately, without seeking approval from the Canadian government. The tanker was testing a possible route for exporting oil from Alaska (a pipeline was built instead) and its passage caused a fury in Canada that has never died. Now, as the route becomes more navigable, the potential problem grows larger. The American position would allow any rust bucket from any nation to pass through Canada’s Arctic waters, risking accidents.
The northern route that runs across the other side of the Arctic, from the Bering Strait along the top of Siberia to Murmansk and on to Norway, is a better bet and was operated successfully by the Soviet Union in the communist era. But then, the route did not have to turn a profit and nuclearpowered icebreakers were available. Now only a few ships traverse its full length, delivering heavy engineering equipment from Korea to the Siberian oil fields, not shuttling cargo across the top of the world between East Asia and Europe. The future of this route is limited. Portions are too shallow for today’s container fleets, which rely on enormous, cost-effective ships.
A “North Pole Express” route that stays away from the coasts of either Canada or Russia—linking the West Coast of the United States, China, and Japan to Europe via the Bering Strait and the North Pole— could be navigable in summer, but only once all the seasonal ice has melted. A big disadvantage for this route and every other is that they will always freeze solid in winter, and the Arctic summers (while increasingly ice-free) remain short. Even in the distant future, ice-free transit will not be possible for more than a few months each year. To operate year-round, fleets of special ice-breaking ships, or strengthened vessels that run in convoy with heavy icebreakers, would have to be built, which would consume a lot of fuel as they batter their way through the frozen seas. With this scenario unlikely, it may seem as if Arctic waters will be relatively empty. But tankers taking oil out of the Russian fields, cargo boats delivering equipment and supplies, and cruise ships full of tourists are doing booming business—and these alone are enough to pose many problems.
Sending Out an S.O.S.
Each year, tens of thousands of tourists travel the coasts of Greenland and Alaska. Some make it all the way to the North Pole on Russian nuclear-powered icebreakers. The boom is happening without any new regulations or systems in place to protect people or the environment. It is a disaster waiting to happen. If a cruise ship with 2,000 people on board were to sink off the coast of Greenland, there is little that could be done to save the passengers or contain an oil spill. The Arctic desperately needs better search-and-rescue capability, salvage tugs on standby, oil spill countermeasures, and new international rules on ship safety. When one considers the possibility of a catastrophe— thousands of tourists dying out on the Arctic seas with no means of rescue, or a catastrophic oil spill engulfing endangered walrus and bird colonies—it would seem that an immediate rush to better police the Arctic should be inevitable. History teaches otherwise. From the Titanic to the Exxon Valdez, disasters always come before change.
In the United States, at least, progress on meeting the challenges of the new Arctic has been glacial. The U.S. Coast Guard needs icebreakers to work in the Arctic and continue to operate its Antarctic bases. Right now it has just two such ships: the Polar Sea, built in 1978, and the more modern Healy, built in 1999. A third ship, the Polar Star, was built in 1976 and has been laid up since 2006, awaiting a $30 million appropriation for a refit. With just two functioning ships and two polar seas to navigate, the Coast Guard remains ill-prepared for Arctic accidents. The possibility of such a catastrophe is “what keeps me up at night,” said Admiral Thad Allen, commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, at a naval conference in 2009.
A new icebreaker would cost around $900 million and there is no way to build a new one quickly. The Healy was planned in the 1980s, received funding in 1990, and became operational only in 2000. An initial $87.5 million for icebreakers was attached to an early draft of the federal stimulus bill in 2009 but did not make it through Congress. It is now unlikely that new icebreakers can be built before the two Polar-class icebreakers go out of commission, leaving the Coast Guard with only the Healy to explore and protect U.S. interests in Arctic waters.
In contrast, the new ice-breaking oil tankers plying the Russian Arctic went from keel-laying to launch in just nine weeks at a Korean shipyard. In a rapidly changing Arctic, government bureaucracies will find it hard to keep up with new realities. Only in Russia, which owns more than half the world’s icebreakers, is there national enthusiasm to build more. The most powerful icebreaker in the world, the nuclear Fifty Years of Victory, was launched by the Russian Federation in 2007. The diesel-powered St. Petersburg followed in 2009, and three more nuclear-powered icebreakers are planned to sail by 2020.
Echoes of the Old Arctic
While there is still much we can do to tackle climate change across the rest of the planet, we are almost certainly too late to reverse the disappearance of Arctic ice—even if drastic cuts are made in greenhouse gas emissions. Worse, the melting sea ice is going to make slowing climate change that much more difficult. For millions of years, the great dome of brilliant white ice at the top of the planet has reflected the 24-hour polar summer sunlight back into space, helping cool the entire globe. As the ice turns sea dark and soaks up the sun, the planet’s warming will really take off.
Already the signs are clear. In areas where the sea ice has disappeared, summer air temperatures are five to nine degrees Fahrenheit higher than the average of the previous 20 years. As the differences in temperature between the planet’s north and equator shrink, the changing Arctic is beginning to affect weather patterns across the hemisphere. When there is little ice in the Arctic in summer, there is less winter rain in the United States and Scandinavia, but more rain in the northern Mediterranean and Japan.
That is just a tiny start. As the new Arctic Sea heats up, a pool of warmer air is spreading across the nearby lands. Shrubs and trees are creeping north across the tundra. The resulting dark vegetation soaks up more heat. Again, the warming gains pace. With temperatures rising, odd bubble streams have begun to appear in the tundra lakes. As the frozen lake bottoms melt, micro-organisms begin to break down the rich stores of organic material into methane —a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, causing more than 20 times as much warming per molecule. Large quantities of methane rising into the atmosphere would boost global temperatures quickly. Out in the shallow Arctic shelf seas, frozen permafrost lies underwater and there, too, bubbling streams of methane are appearing where there were none before.
“Where sea ice has disappeared, summer air temperatures are five to nine degrees Fahrenheit higher.”
Away from the lakes, the permafrost is rotting away as it thaws, pouring out carbon dioxide. There is enough carbon stored in the permafrost to more than double the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—which would produce global temperatures an average of 12 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are now. Of course, this carbon will not all be released at once. The Arctic will prefer a long, slow settling of scores. The permafrost is many hundreds of yards deep and will melt over hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. As greenhouse gas emissions from the Arctic grow, they will carry with them the threat of faster warming for the rest of the globe. The only way we can combat this change is to reduce our own greenhouse gas emissions further. Year by year, the targets we’ll need to reach to maintain even a modicum of equilibrium will grow tougher. Meanwhile, the Arctic will be tightening the noose.
Arctic warming will also continue to melt the three-mile-thick Greenland ice cap, which currently adds a millimeter of water a year to the level of the global oceans. That melt will be very hard to stop. As the ice cap shrinks, its height naturally falls, bringing the top of the ice into lower and warmer air, speeding up the process even further. A millimeter a year may not seem like much, but consider that the pace is accelerating. Once all of Greenland’s ice has melted, sea levels will be 23 feet higher. Add the melt from Antarctica, other glaciers, and the natural expansion of the ocean as it warms and sea levels will eventually reach 60 feet above today’s waterline. As the centuries pass, more coastal cities will have to be relocated and huge chunks of lowlying countries like Holland and Bangladesh will simply vanish beneath the waters.
Long after the ice and the polar bears have departed, when killer whales roam the seas and many generations of humans have come and gone, the old Arctic will still be exacting its revenge. It will take time, but this is the reality we have created, and the future we have to look forward to.
Alon Anderson is the former editor-in-chief of New Scientist magazine. He is the author of After the Ice: Life, Death and Geopolitics in the New Arctic (HarperCollins/Smithsonian, 2009) and is a board member of the Boston based television network Xconomy.com.
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