Arctic: Fight for the Top Of the World

At the end of August, a wisp of flame suddenly appeared in the Arctic twilight over the Barents Sea, bathing the low clouds over the Norwegian port of Hammerfest in a spectral orange glow. With a tremendous roar, the flame bloomed over the windswept ocean and craggy gray rocks, competing for an instant with the Arctic summer’s never-setting sun. The first flare-off of natural gas from the Snohvit (Snow White in Norwegian) gas field, some 90Â miles (145Â km) offshore, was a beacon of promise: after 25 years of false starts, planning and construction, the first Arctic industrial oil-and-gas operation outside of Alaska was up and running. Norway’s state-owned petroleum firm Statoil could finally exploit once unreachable reserves, expected to deliver an estimated $1.4Â billion worth of liquefied natural gas each year for the next 25 years.

But in a place where the aurora borealis normally provides celestial beauty, Snow White’s luminous apparition also signals caution. What will a new era of exploitation bring to the Arctic, one of the earth’s last great uncharted regions? The vast area has long fascinated explorers, but it has just as long been the site of folly and exaggerated expectations. Over centuries, hundreds died in the doomed search for an ice-free Northwest Passage between Asia and Europe, many of them victims of ill-fated stabs at national and personal glory.

This summer, however, saw something new: for the first time in recorded history, the Northwest Passage was ice-free all the way from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The Arctic ice cap’s loss through melting this year was 10 times the recent annual average, amounting to an area greater than that of Texas and New Mexico combined. The Arctic has never been immune from politics; during the cold war, U.S. and Soviet submarines navigated its frigid waters. But now that global warming has rendered the Arctic more accessible than ever–and yet at the same time more fragile–a new frenzy has broken out for control of the trade routes at the top of the world and the riches that nations hope and believe may lie beneath the ice. Just as 150 years ago, when Russia and Britain fought for control of central Asia, it is tempting to think that–not on the steppe or dusty mountains but in the icy wastes of the frozen north–a new Great Game is afoot.

Gas and Global Warming

Russia is at the thick of the new game. In an expedition that lacked nothing in patriotic bluster, a Russian-led team descended to the seabed on Aug. 2 and planted a titanium Russian flag directly on the North Pole. In early September, Russian bombers launched cruise missiles during Arctic exercises. But it isn’t only the Russians who are staking their claims. On Aug. 10, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper flew to Resolute, a hamlet of 250 souls on Cornwallis Island in the northern territory of Nunavut, and announced plans for an Arctic military training facility and a refurbished deepwater port on the Northwest Passage. Then Danish scientists set sail on an expedition to map the seabed north of Greenland, a Danish dependency, and–not to be outdone–the U.S. Coast Guard dispatched the cutter Healy on a similar mission north of Alaska. The flurry of activity has prompted the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to schedule hearings this month to push for U.S. ratification of the international treaty on the Law of the Sea, which came into force in 1994. Ratification of the treaty has long been opposed by conservatives, who consider it a shackle on U.S. sovereignty, but it now has the support of the Bush Administration, largely because its terms would allow Washington to weigh in with its own claims in northern waters.

The current interest in the Arctic, in short, is a perfect storm seeded with political opportunism, national pride, military muscle flexing, high energy prices and the arcane exigencies of international law. But the tale begins with global warming, which is transforming the Arctic. The ice cap, which floats atop much of the Arctic Ocean, is at least 25% smaller than it was 30 years ago. As the heat-reflecting ice that has made the Arctic the most inaccessible and uncharted part of the earth turns into water–which absorbs heat–the shrinkage is accelerating faster than climate models ever predicted. On Aug. 28, satellite images analyzed by the University of Colorado’s National Snow and Ice Data Center revealed that the Arctic ice cap was already 10% smaller than at its previous record minimum, in September 2005–and it still had about a month of further melting to go. “If that’s not a tipping point, I’d hate to see what a tipping point is,” says Mark Serreze, the center’s senior research scientist. Trausti Valsson, a professor of environmental planning at the University of Iceland in Reykjavík, says Arctic warming has become a “self-propelling” process that could leave the Arctic Ocean ice-free in summers by 2040. Even in winter, says Valsson, ice coverage would amount only to what could form in a single season, meaning that “Arctic shipping, with specially built ships, will be easy in all areas during the whole year.”

As shrinkage of the ice has made it easier to access the Arctic, competition for the region’s resources has intensified. David Ooingoot Kalluk, 66, an Inuit who has hunted on the ice around Resolute for the past 48Â years, has sensed the weird new world to come. “The snow and ice now melt from the bottom, not the top,” Kalluk says as he glances out over the almost ice-free waters of Resolute Bay and fingers a pair of binoculars. He used to take dogsleds across the ice in June to hunt caribou on nearby Bathurst Island. Now, he says, the ice is too thin even in early May. If the warming continues, he fears that the cod population will shift farther north, disturbing the food chain for the ring-necked seal–the natural staple of the polar bears that regularly stalk the hamlet in the winter months.

Kalluk and his people will just have to adjust, but the polar bears may not be able to. A recent study by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) predicts that shrinking sea ice will mean a two-thirds reduction in their population by midcentury. Not even strict adherence to the Kyoto accord on limiting greenhouse gases would stop an Arctic meltdown, which means the Arctic, like nowhere else on Earth, is a place where efforts to mitigate global warming have yielded to full-bore adaptation to its impact. That process is freighted with irony. With gas and oil prices near historic highs and with scant prospect of any decrease in world demand for energy, it is only prudent to get a sense of what resources lie below the newly accessible sea. But there is something paradoxical about seeking in the Arctic the very carbon fuels that are melting the northern ice. “The rush to exploit Arctic resources can only perpetuate the vicious cycle of human-induced climate change,” says Mike Townsley of Greenpeace International.

The rush will go on for arctic resources, even though it is far from clear how extensive they really are. An often cited USGS report from 2000 estimated that the Arctic could contain 25% of the world’s undiscovered oil reserves. More precise guesses are just beginning to come out. Late last month the USGS put total reserves in the East Greenland Rift Basins at 31.4Â billion bbl. of “oil equivalent,” mostly in the form of natural gas. (That would be the equivalent of about four years of U.S. oil consumption.) While the assessment of the region won’t be finished until next year, Don Gautier, one of the survey’s principal investigators, says, “there’s no doubt that certain geologic provinces in the Arctic have significant oil and gas reserves.” Some of the most attractive are in the Barents Sea. In Russian waters, east of Norway’s Snohvit deposit, lies the Shtokman gas field, thought to be 10 times as big.

Granted, not everyone is convinced that the Arctic will be Big Oil’s new savior. A study by energy consultants Wood Mackenzie and Fugro Robertson concluded last year that Arctic reserves would prove “disappointing.” “Our assessment is that the Arctic has not 25% but 10% of world reserves,” says Wood Mackenzie vice president Andrew Latham. “And considering how hard it is to get, a very large fraction of that won’t be developed.” But for now, such downbeat assessments are being shrugged off. Just as global warming has made it easier to get to the Arctic, so high oil prices have made it worth the hassle of doing so. This summer’s activities were, in essence, attempts to claim the rights to seabeds that few considered worth a walrus’s whiskers a generation ago, when oil was cheap and the ice was thick.

Whose Ice Is It?

It’s one thing to covet the resources that may now be accessible in the Arctic. It’s another to establish a legal claim to them that others will recognize. Under the provisions of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), a country has exclusive economic rights to the sea’s resources within 200Â nautical miles (230Â miles, 370Â km) of its coast. The treaty provides for extending that limit up to 350 nautical miles if a country can prove that its continental shelf extends from the coastline beyond the current limit. That explains the rush by Russia, Denmark and Canada to try to use the murky form of the underwater Lomonosov Ridge to expand the territory they control. The ridge, a largely uncharted geological formation named for an 18th century Russian polymath born near the northern coastal city of Arkhangel’sk, runs under the Pole from north of Canada’s Ellesmere Island and Denmark’s Greenland to the New Siberian Islands of Russia. Each of the three countries hopes the ridge’s contours and rock content will throw up proof that it is an extension of the continental shelf rather than a strictly deep-ocean formation.

It was with an eye to bolstering Moscow’s claims that Artur Chilingarov, a member of Russia’s parliament, enlisted fellow parliamentarian Vladimir Gruzdev and the commander of the Mir 1 submersible, Anatoli Sagalevich, for last month’s aquatic assault on the North Pole. With the funding (and presence aboard) of a Swedish millionaire and an Australian adventure-tour operator, the expedition trailed an icebreaker to the pole, where Sagalevich piloted one of two submersibles to a depth of 13,100 ft. (4,301 m), planted the Russian flag and then skillfully resurfaced through the shifting holes in the ice. Chilingarov said the flag was to “stake the place for Russia,” although, in truth, Russia is already a dominant force in the Arctic; it has the world’s largest fleet of icebreakers and long experience developing its icy northern coastline.

Chilingarov and his team were given a heroes’ reception in Moscow and an audience with President Vladimir Putin. But the Russians’ adventurism also set off an irritable and predictable backlash. Canada’s then Foreign Minister Peter MacKay dismissed the Russian effort as a “show.” “This isn’t the 15th century,” he said. “You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say, ‘We’re claiming this territory.'” In Washington, Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation said, “Russia’s attempted grab is a cause for concern” and called on the U.S. government to “formulate a strong response.”

Sagalevich professes bafflement. “I don’t really know why some people got so nervous about [our] placing the Russian flag there,” he told Time. “The Americans placed their flag on the moon, and it doesn’t mean the moon became theirs.” The Russian acknowledges that though the mission “excited the whole world,” it amounted to only a “pinprick” in Moscow’s continued efforts to undergird its case for extended sovereignty in the Arctic. (In 2002 a U.N. commission shelved Russia’s claim to more of the Arctic for lack of detailed technical evidence.) Nor, despite this summer’s bravado, is it clear that Russia has real plans to follow up the Mir expedition. Robert Nigmatulin, director of the Institute of Ocean Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences, says establishing a claim to the continental shelf before 2009–as Russia must do under the terms of the unclos–would require drilling deepwater seabed samples, technology that he says Russia does not possess and is not inclined to pay for.

In any event, it is hardly as if Russia were the only nation to see the Arctic as a place to burnish national pride. The Norwegians have their new gas field, and Denmark is pursuing proof of its own claims just as doggedly as the Russians–though in a more consensual, Scandinavian mode. The Danes enlisted both a Swedish and a Russian icebreaker for its expedition to the largely uncharted waters north of Greenland to document what Science Minister Helge Sander refers to as “our hopefully justified claim of a continental shelf from Greenland toward the North Pole.” The Danes know that scientific inquiry alone will not determine who gets what in the north. “When we are talking resources, we are also talking politics,” says Sander, who predicts that the demarcation of rights to the Arctic will end with a “dogfight at the International Court of Justice in the Hague.”

If it does, expect Canadians to have one of the biggest dogs there–for Ottawa has never been shy about asserting ownership to much of the Arctic. In 1907 a senator claimed a Canada-wide triangle right up to the Pole, and there’s still a plaque on Melville Island commemorating that assertion. As a spur to maple-leaf nationalism, it is not just the Russians and Danes that Canadians have to worry about in the Arctic but also their giant neighbor to the south. When Prime Minister Harper declared in August that the “first principle of Arctic sovereignty is use it or lose it,” he was directing his message partly at Washington. The U.S. has long claimed that the Northwest Passage is an international strait through which all ships have the right to travel, whether Canadians want them there or not. That line has always rankled Canadians but never more so than now that the ice is disappearing. “I’ll jump up and down and say it–the passage is Canadian,” says Josh Hunter, Resolute’s senior administrative officer. “If the Americans try to come through unwanted, we’ll be out there on our snowmobiles blocking their passage.”

Even backed by the new icebreaker fleet Harper has promised, that’s not much of a deterrent. In truth, of course, it isn’t military encroachment the Canadians fear so much as the environmental peril that may come from unregulated use of their waters. Cruise ships transporting Arctic ecotourists, many of them Russian vessels hired out to Western tour operators, anchored off Resolute 17Â times this year alone. Once the Northwest Passage becomes not just a tourist destination but a viable commercial route that would cut an astonishing 5,000Â miles (8,000Â km) from the distance between Asia and Europe through the Panama Canal, shipping traffic could explode. “The idea of Liberian-registered tankers chugging through the Northwest Passage or oil spills that can’t be cleaned up–that’s what terrifies me,” says Mike Beedell, an Arctic adventurer who sailed a small sailboat through the passage 20 years ago.

With all the other Arctic nations making their plays, it would be too much to expect the U.S.–an Arctic state itself, thanks to Alaska–to stand idly by. The Coast Guard icebreaker now on its way back from plying the waters of the Chukchi Cap, north of the Bering Strait, has charted the seafloor with a multibeam echo sounder to delineate where Alaska’s continental shelf ends and the depths of the Arctic Ocean begin. But to press its case for extended territorial waters, as the other Arctic nations are doing, the U.S. needs to sign the convention. Some conservatives have always depicted the treaty as a no-win giveaway of U.S. sovereignty that would cast the baleful shadow of “world government” over the high seas and that might, for example, bar the U.S. from interdicting ships suspected of terrorist ties. Given the Senate’s rules, opponents of the treaty have plenty of chances to use procedural dodges to kill it. But at hearings on the convention due to begin on Sept. 27, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Joseph Biden will be able to muster support for ratification not only from the Bush Administration and the military but also from groups as disparate as the American Petroleum Institute, whose members would like to exploit the Arctic, and the World Wildlife Fund, whose supporters would like to stop them from doing so. With such backing, supporters of the treaty are guardedly optimistic that this time it will be ratified. The convention is “critical to our national interests as a maritime power and as the world’s leading economy,” Biden told Time. “Its ratification is long overdue.”

How can competing claims to the Arctic–of environmentalists and entrepreneurs, nations and natives–be reconciled? Antarctica, with no native population, has been saved from international competition by a treaty signed in 1959, which (among other things) bans all mining there until 2041. There have always been advocates of such an approach in the Arctic, but given well-established local populations and long-standing national claims, they have never gotten very far.

Meanwhile, as they always have, adventurers, hucksters and dreamers will continue to make their way north–some of them in bikinis. Iceland’s Valsson sees the Arctic as “the new Mediterranean,” with warming temperatures fostering new centers of civilization in Siberia and Arctic Canada. Hammerfest bears witness to some of that: the population is booming, and a sense of hope infuses the economy. But as winter approaches in Resolute and the lowering sky turns dark, Kalluk, the Inuit hunter, suspects that dreams of a new world in the north are overdone. “Whatever else happens,” he says, “the sun will still disappear for a good part of the year.” The unanswered question is whether that will be enough to preserve the harsh beauty that he and others in the Arctic have long known and cherished.