Smart move. The slow disappearance of the polar ice cap is transforming Churchill’s prospects. The bears may be unhappy, but the entire region, stretching from Alaska to the northern tip of Norway and on to Siberia, is acquiring new economic and geostrategic significance. Oilmen yearn for easier access to the mineral wealth that lies beneath the sea; shipping companies talk of new year-round sea lanes over the top of the world that will slash journey times. In a decade, three weeks have been added to the Arctic shipping season, which now stretches from mid-July to late November. This year the port expects to receive up to 850,000 tons of wheat bound for locations around the world, more than twice the 1997 figure.
Any optimism being felt in Churchill looks well placed. Temperatures in the Arctic have been rising faster than anywhere else in the world, and the dense sea ice that’s covered the ocean for the past 30,000 years, fluctuating with the seasons, is thawing fast. Over the past three decades, its average extent has shrunk by nearly a million square kilometers, the size of Texas and Arizona combined. “Every winter the ice doesn’t extend so far, every summer it contracts a little further,” says Barry Smit, professor of global climate change at the University of Guelph. Some models predict that the North Pole itself could unfreeze by the end of the century.
Of course, the warm-up has nasty implications for the 10 million or so residents of the High North scattered across the eight countries (apart from Canada, they comprise Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States) that border the Arctic. The meltdown will rob the natives of their traditional hunting grounds and the caribou and reindeer that are sometimes critical to their diet.
But for the farsighted, the Arctic is a new Klondike ripe for exploitation. A 2000 study by the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that the Arctic could hold a quarter of the world’s untapped oil reserves. That’s not to mention plentiful stocks of natural gas. The continuing presence of the ice and the need for exploration mean it may be at least 20 years before the first wells are tapped, but the excitement is already building. “If you go to Greenland, all they talk about is the great oil adventure that’s to come,” says Frede Jensen of the Danish Institute of International Studies in Copenhagen. Indeed, politicians from Greenland—a self-governing territory of Denmark—are now pressing for control over their own resources.
The energy industry is squaring up for the challenge. Boom times are forecast for the Russian port of Murmansk—one of the few in the region that are ice-free throughout the year—as the state-owned Gazprom plans the development of the vast offshore Shtokman gas field above the Arctic Circle. Meanwhile, this year’s merger of Norway’s two largest energy companies—Statoil and Norsk Hydro—will create a national champion large enough to tap the Arctic’s newly accessible petroleum. Its efforts can expect enthusiastic support from Western governments anxious to find more friendly supplies. “This is not oil from the Mideast,” says Tom Loftus, a former U.S. ambassador to Norway. “It may be expensive to extract, but the political expense per barrel is less.”
Other riches are to be found above the seabed. A world greedy for fish but dependent on rapidly depleting stocks can expect a welcome boost as trawlers move farther into once frozen waters. “If the Chinese all start eating fish fingers made from cod, they have got to get the fish from somewhere,” says Indra Overland of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. For good measure, scientists look forward to exploring the formerly inaccessible waters, which may swarm with unknown algae and other organisms.
Small wonder that ancient territorial disputes—once of interest only to mapmakers—are gaining new significance. Canada and the United States are already tussling over their maritime boundary in the Beaufort Sea between the Yukon and Alaska. Lawyers from a clutch of countries are dusting off copies of the 1920 treaty that governs the status of the Spitsbergen archipelago on the edge of the Arctic Circle. And Russia has staked a claim at the United Nations to the North Pole itself.
More wrangles may follow as the ice clears. Consider the Northwest Passage, the tortuous and usually icebound route through the islands off the Canadian mainland that might in time become another maritime highway. Does it constitute an international seaway, as Washington maintains, open to commercial vessels—and warships—of all nations? Or are the waters under Ottawa’s control, as it insists?
But don’t expect a return to cold-war-style confrontations, with nuclear subs playing cat-and-mouse games under the ice. Future battles will more likely be diplomatic and scientific ones, as geologists seek to establish the extent of their nations’ underwater continental shelves, a key measure in determining who owns which patch of the seabed. And these struggles are unlikely to be zero-sum games.
Russia, for example, wants to start using the so-called Arctic Bridge—a route around the top of the world—but not for defense purposes. Rather, it hopes to use the route to speed its oil and gas to Western markets. A more navigable Arctic seems likely to profit everyone but the natives (and those polar bears). Canada, for example, is already holding talks with Russia over allowing the latter’s powerful fleet of nuclear icebreakers to keep a sea lane open in all seasons. As both countries are starting to recognize, if Churchill wins, so will Murmansk.
