Guardian UK: A very cold war indeed

[gulfcoastliberal]

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Take, for example, the fighter planes. The Canadian army abandoned a year-round presence at Inuvik years ago, but now it's back, encamped in an anonymous building out by the airport; Dez Loreen, the 25-year-old editor and sole reporter for the Inuvik Drum newspaper, watches from his office window as F-16 jets and Hercules cargo planes speed overhead. Meanwhile, the silent, icy expanses off the shores of Tuktoyaktuk have been a little less silent lately: a Canadian icebreaker has been plying the coastline, making its presence felt and annoying Inuit polar bear hunters, who fare better when the ice is solid. Early-warning stations, used in the 50s to monitor for Soviet missiles, are in operation once more, keeping watch at the top of the world.

Similar things have been happening across the Arctic, in Russia and Greenland and Alaska: military manoeuvres, scientific research projects and other displays of territory-marking. Thanks largely to the catastrophic effects of global warming - which are far more acute in the Arctic than elsewhere, partly because of the angle at which the sun's rays hit the ice - the polar region has become newly accessible. And suddenly it is the target of a gold rush. According to the US Geological Survey, up to a quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas may lie beneath the polar seabed - far more than Saudia Arabia's total known reserves - along with vast mineral wealth. Moreover, the melting ice seems likely to open up the Northwest Passage, the fabled Arctic sea route linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, to year-round commercial shipping. Nineteenth-century explorers dreamed of such a route; were it to become a reality now, it would transform how goods are shipped around the world - halving, for example, the distance by water between Japan and northern Europe.

Of course, it's bitterly ironic that global warming, caused by burning fossil fuels, should unleash a new scramble for more fossil fuels. But irony doesn't count for much in the oil business, and it proved no obstacle last August when Russia, in the most audacious move so far, dispatched a nuclear-powered icebreaker and two submersible craft to plant a Russian flag, housed in a titanium tube, on the seabed directly beneath the North Pole. "The Arctic is ours," declared lead explorer Artur Chilingarov, thereby staking Moscow's claim to 460,000 square miles of ocean floor, more than five times the area of Britain. Canada, apparently taken by surprise, responded by pledging a major military build-up in the north.

It was by no means the first time a country had claimed ownership of the pole or the area around it. Canada has done so (and once tried to assert its rights by threatening to impose a littering fine on a pilot forced to abandon his plane there). Denmark has done so, too (though it based its claim partly on Oodaaq, a 30m-wide outcrop off Greenland, which is Danish territory; the Danes, along with The Guinness Book Of Records, argued that Oodaaq was the northernmost land on the planet, but problematically, according to several reports, it has since disappeared). The US and Canada, although allies, have been disputing the boundary between Alaska and Canada off the north coast. But the truth is that nobody really knows who should be allowed to own what, in the farthest reaches of the Arctic, because until the melting began to accelerate, there wasn't much point in asking. The high ocean was a legal no man's land. In 1909, two Inuit guides were accused of murdering an American adventurer near the pole, but the case had to be dropped: nobody could work out who had jurisdiction over the ice where the alleged killing occurred.

link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/05/poles.endangeredhabitats

Best article so far on the melting arctic's "gold rush". :puke: