Who owns the North Pole (Part 90)

The United Nations is currently assessing Russian, Danish and Canadian claims to own sizeable chunks of the Arctic seabed. One thing is clear. The Arctic is heating up in meteorological, political and environmental terms as nations fall over themselves to exploit the region.

“The Arctic is opening up, and all sorts of flashpoints lie ahead,” said Klaus Dodds, professor of geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London. “If the central Arctic Ocean is freed of ice for several months a year, who will control the fishing and the dumping of waste there? The Russians have also made it clear they want to drill for oil and gas.”

This point was also stressed by Professor Chris Rapley, of University College London. “An increasingly ice-free Arctic is a geopolitical game changer,” he said. “…The Arctic nations are jostling for advantage, and the economic and ecological consequences of new trade routes opening up have yet to unfold. The changes that have occurred have been greater and faster than predicted….”

There are moves by China to invest in mines in Greenland, where declining ice cover is exposing vast outcrops of ores, including minerals crucial to mobile phone manufacture. It views the opening Arctic seas as an opportunity to maintain its access to the world’s most important resources. Some of the Earth’s major stocks of fish are migrating north as the planet heats up while the Arctic’s mineral resources are being exposed by retreating ice. “The Chinese have made no secret that they have their eyes on the Arctic’s fish and minerals,” said Dodds.

Similarly, drilling companies are eyeing seabed reserves of natural gas and oil while travel companies are preparing to send huge cruise liners into the region. The first of these trips, by the Crystal Serenity, has just been completed.

Enormous forces, political and commercial, are bearing down on the region although all have a common root – as was also highlighted last week. Summer sea ice, which once covered 7.5 million sq km around the North Pole, this year dropped to 4.13m sq km, its second lowest figure on record, it was announced. The rate of annual change – brought about by soaring fossil fuel emissions and rises in global temperatures – is now equivalent to a loss greater than the size of Scotland.

“Loss of sea ice has local to global effects, from animals and ecosystems to encouraging further warming by exposing ocean water,” said Twila Moon, at Bristol University. “We should all be shocked by the dramatic changes happening in the Arctic.”

Most scientists now expect that, at current emission rates, the Arctic will be reliably free of sea ice in the summer by the middle of the century. By “free” they mean there will be less than 1m sq km of sea ice left in the Arctic, most of it packed into remote bays and channels while the central Arctic Ocean over the North Pole will be completely open. And by “reliably”, scientists mean there will have been five consecutive years with less than 1m sq km of ice by the year 2050. The first single ice-free year will come much earlier than this, however.

Of all the Arctic nations, Russia has been the most determined to exploit the region as it warms, however. “You can see that determination in the way it responded to the Arctic 30 incident,” said Duncan Depledge, Director, All-Party Parliamentary Group for Polar Regions Secretariat. In 2013, Greenpeace activists attempted to scale the Prirazlomnaya drilling platform as part of a protest against Arctic oil production. Russians arrested them at gunpoint and charged the activists initially with piracy and later with hooliganism and only released them after two months of detention. “That is an indication of how seriously they take the Arctic,” added Depledge. This point was backed by Dodds: “The Russians are hell bent on showing the world they mean business here.”

Could that determination lead to an outbreak of hostilities? Byers suggests not. “The Arctic is a very expensive region in which to operate and Russia is not a wealthy country. The cost of militarising the Arctic would be prohibitive. They might want to police it so that they can control outfits like Greenpeace but I don’t see them having a war with another Arctic nation.”

The Antarctic Treaty bans all mining, oil drilling or the presence of the military and strictly monitors all environmental hazards around the South Pole. By contrast, although no nation owns the North Pole, the Arctic nations – Russia, Canada, the United States, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland and Denmark – have very different ideas about how to run the world’s most northerly regions.

“Arctic environmental protection is currently determined by individual nations, by politicians who often meet far from its borders: in Moscow, Copenhagen and Washington,” said Professor Michael Byers of the University of British Columbia. “They have very different levels of commitment to protecting the environment – with Russia at the bottom and the Nordic nations at the top.” Relations with indigenous people are one of the flashpoints that may trigger serious disputes in the region. Byers said. “I have enormous sympathy for the local peoples in the Arctic but they are few in number and have limited resources. They are trying to insert themselves into the decision-making of some of the most powerful companies and countries in the world.”