The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future

by Laurence C. Smith

  Dream On

  So by 2050 will global trade flows be pouring through the Arctic Ocean, as they do today through the Suez and Panama canals?

  Impossible. Those operate 365 days per year with no ice whatsoever. At best the Arctic Ocean will become ice-free for a few days to a few weeks in summer and even then, there is no such thing as a truly “ice-free” Arctic Ocean. From autumn through spring, there will be expanding first-year ice cover, slowing ships down even with icebreaker escort. In summer, there will always be lingering bits of sea ice floating around, as well as thick icebergs calved from land-based glaciers into the sea (a glacier iceberg sank the Titanic, not sea ice). The Arctic Ocean will always freeze in winter—or at least we’d better hope so. If it doesn’t, that means our planet has become 40°F hotter and a lifeless scorched rock. Superimposed over all of this is ever-present natural variability, making the start and end dates of a part-time shipping season impossible to know with certitude.

  The global maritime industry cares about many other things besides geographic shipping distance. It also cares about shipping time, cost, and reliability. To be sure, routes are shorter across the Arctic Ocean, but the travel speeds, owing to the danger of ice, are lower.368 If the region’s emerging regulatory framework demands that only polar-class ships be allowed in, then those vessels will cost considerably more than ordinary single-hulled ships. And how attractive will a short, unpredictable shipping season really be for today’s tightly scheduled global supply chains? What about the relative lack of emergency and port services, environmental liability for oil spills, or fees charged by Russia and Canada should they reaffirm their positions that the Northwest Passage and Northern Sea Route are not international straits?369 Might the Suez and Panama canals lower their prices in response to the new competition? There are many other factors controlling the profitability of transnational shipping lanes besides a shorter geographic route, available for an uncertain few weeks to a few months out of the year.

  In imagining 2050, I do see many thousands of boats in the Arctic, but not humming through global trade routes as dreamed of in the fifteenth and early twenty-first centuries. Doubtless some international trade will be diverted through the region as the summer sea-ice retreats northward. It is happening now through the Aleutian Islands, Murmansk, Kirkenes, and Churchill. But few of the vessels I envision are giant container ships carrying goods between East and West.370 The thousands of ships I see are smaller, with diverse shapes, sizes, and functions. They are not using the Arctic as a shortcut from point A in the East to point B in the West. Instead, they are buzzing all around the Arctic itself.

  Look again at the maps of what actually happened in 2004. The action was not through the Arctic, but in the Arctic. There were tankers, tugs, barges, bulk carriers (for ore), small cargo ships, and fishing boats. There were coast guards, oil and gas explorers, science expeditions, and many pleasure cruises. They were bringing in supplies to villages and mine outfits. They were fishing, hauling out ore, or looking for hydrocarbons. They were moving goods up and down rivers and through the Bering Strait. They were bringing tourists from all over the world to see one of the last truly wild places on Earth.371

  With less sea ice, this diverse maritime activity will intensify. It will operate longer and penetrate deeper. It will become more economic to use boats to take food and heavy equipment north, and bring raw natural resources south to waiting markets. Mines located near a coast or an inland river will become increasingly viable. Already, South Korean shipbuilders, like Samsung Heavy Industries, are developing polar LNG carriers specially designed to work there. When those vast new offshore gas deposits are eventually developed, these ships will cruise right up to the wellheads. They will gorge on liquefied natural gas, then turn around and carry it to anywhere in the world.

  Ten “Ports of the Future” Poised to Benefit from Increased Traffic in the Arctic

  Shipping is the world’s cheapest form of transport. As its penetration grows and intensifies, we will see a growing maritime economy in the Arctic. On the opposite page is my qualified guess at ten ports that bear particularly close watching in the coming years. Other possible sleepers include Tuktoyaktuk, Iqaluit, and Bathurst Inlet in Canada; Nome in Alaska; Ilulissat in Greenland; and Varandey, Naryan-Mar, and Tiksi in Russia.

  When the Amundsen docked in Churchill, I knew exactly what to do. While everyone else was milling around, saying farewells or asking for directions to the town’s famous Portuguese bakery, I dashed straight to the train station to ask if the tracks were OK. Just as I’d feared, they weren’t. I went immediately to the airport and scooped up one of the last seats on a flight to Winnipeg. I felt guilty because I had beaten out my former friends and comrades, who I knew could be stranded a week or more. But I had just been to Churchill six weeks before, and I knew they would enjoy themselves.

  Churchill is famous for being the polar bear capital of the world—thousands of tourists descend on the town each October to watch them from heated buses out on the snowy tundra—but the place is even more incredible in summer. The snow is gone, the weather warm, and some three thousand white beluga whales move into the bay to feast on capelin and have babies. You can see the belugas distantly from the shore, but for eighty dollars a Zodiac tour will take you right out to them. The boil of white bodies leaping all around me, many with little gray calves hugging their backs, is one of the most spectacular sights I’ve ever seen in my life.

  Churchill’s other industry is shipping. It is the only northern deepwater seaport in Canada. It is also the closest port to her western provinces, where most of the country’s agriculture takes place. Wheat, durum, barley, rapeseed, feed peas, and flax from the prairies are loaded into train cars and sent to Winnipeg, where a spur line runs north for a thousand miles to Churchill on the shore of Hudson Bay. But despite its geographic advantage the port has never done very well. In 1997 the port, grain elevator, and 810 miles of railroad were bought for a pittance from the Canadian government by Denver-based OmniTRAX Inc., one of the biggest privately held railroad companies in North America. As part of the deal the company poured some USD $50 million in repairs and upgrades to its facilities and rail line.

  When I first visited Churchill ten years after OmniTRAX took over, the port still wasn’t running at full capacity. Its general manager and Churchill’s mayor both offered that the reason was at least partially political.372 There was also a lingering perception that the Churchill facility could not handle steel hoppers (the industry standard) even after the necessary upgrades had been made. But the biggest problem of all was the rail line linking the port to Winnipeg. Even after millions of dollars in improvements, it was still unreliable. Allowable speeds were slow, and the tracks had to be closed often for repairs. The reason was not bad design, but thawing permafrost.

  On Shaky Grounds

  Permafrost is permanently frozen ground. It is ubiquitous around the Arctic and high elevations of the world, and extends surprisingly far south in the cold eastern interiors of Canada and Siberia (see maps on pages x-xiii). The topmost part thaws inches deep each summer, but beneath this so-called “active layer,” the soil stays hard and frozen year-round. As such, it offers a solid base on which to build roads, buildings, pipelines, and other infrastructure—so long as it always stays frozen. The trick is to not warm it up.

  An entire subfield of civil engineering is devoted to building things on top of permafrost without somehow warming it. Houses are raised up off the ground on pilings, roads and railroad tracks are perched atop thick pads of insulating gravel, and so on. Oil pipelines require very careful design because flowing fluid generates a surprising amount of heat, and a ruptured pipeline is an environmental disaster. The world’s latest permafrost engineering feat, completed in 2006 at a cost of USD $4.2 billion, is China’s Qinghai-Tibet Railroad crossing the Tibetan Plateau from Golmud to Lhasa.

  But no amount of clever engineering can stop regional permafrost from thawing from milder, sn
owier winters (snow insulates the ground). When that happens, unless the geological substrate is firm bedrock, the built structures are compromised. The substrate returns to the structural strength of wet mud, or peat, or whatever else it is geologically composed of. The ground slumps, roads buckle, and foundations crack.373 Pipelines and train tracks become kinked and wavy when they ought to be straight. Even slight undulations force trains to slow down greatly or risk derailment. The sluggardly speeds I’d noticed for parts of the Hudson Bay Express, the otherwise lovely two-night passenger train voyage from Winnipeg and Churchill, was because of this. Deeper kinks require closing down the tracks for repairs. That’s what triggered the line’s closure six weeks later, when I bailed on the train (and my Amundsen shipmates) and caught a flight instead.

  Fortunately for OmniTRAX, only the last leg of its long railroad to Churchill lies over permafrost. But other built structures around the Northern Rim are not so lucky. From borehole thermometry and other measurements, we know that permafrost temperatures are generally rising.374 The endgame of this process is ground slumping, tilted trees, sinkholes, and other disturbances.

  Already we see evidence of this from space. Using satellites, my UCLA colleague Yongwei Sheng and I mapped out a strange phenomenon now transforming vast tracts of western Siberia. This region famously holds thousands of wellheads supplying natural gas to international markets in Ukraine and Europe. Less famous are the tens of thousands of lakes that dot its surface like so many spilled marbles. By comparing recent satellite pictures of this region with those from the early 1970s, we discovered a landscape mutating as the underlying permafrost thaws, with many of these lakes disappearing into the ground.375

  Theoretically, if all permafrost were to go away entirely, about half of the world’s northern lakes and wetlands might conceivably vanish.376 But permafrost thaw is a slow process, so that won’t happen anytime soon. Deep permafrost can extend hundreds of meters downward and requires centuries or millennia to defrost. But significant reductions are expected by 2050, with climate models projecting 13%-29% less permafrost area by then, and the depth of seasonal thawing increasing roughly 50%.377 These numbers are worrisome because from a practical standpoint, the settling and buckling problems commence even when permafrost first starts to thaw. Also troubling is the fact that permafrost ground is commonly stuffed with chunks and lenses of pure ice, which drain out, exacerbating the slumping. Already in Russia, damages to the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM) Railroad have more than tripled. The number of threatened buildings ranges from 10% of all structures in Noril’sk to as high as 80% in Vorkuta.378 At the center of this book is a photograph of an apartment building destroyed by thawing permafrost. Just days after the first wall cracks appeared, this building collapsed.

  The big message here is that climate warming presents a severe challenge to current and future physical infrastructure in northern permafrost areas. The structural strength of many soils will be reduced, threatening existing structures and making new ones more expensive to engineer and maintain. Some permafrost landscapes will slump, collapse, or suffer hydrological changes, rendering them even less appealing for human activities than they are now.

  Projected losses by 2050 in (1) the structural integrity of permafrost soils, a threat to buildings and other permanent infrastructure; and (2) suitably freezing temperatures for the construction of temporary winter roads over wet or soft areas.

  The map379 on the previous page illustrates the scale of this problem by midcentury. Part of it derives from a new model of permafrost load-bearing capacity developed by Dmitry Streletskiy, Nikolay Shiklomanov, and Fritz Nelson at the University of Delaware. Dark tones indicate reduced bearing capacities (structural strength) of permafrost soils associated with a middle-of-the road carbon emissions scenario, i.e., the “moderate” (SRES A1B) scenario described in Chapter 5. Widespread losses in Alaska, northern Canada, and most of Siberia suggest that problems of reduced ground strength to support pilings, building foundations, and other heavy installations will be particularly severe there.

  The hatched lines on the map are unrelated to permafrost. They illustrate another sort of change that will occur, in places where the ground surface freezes less long and hard during winter than it does now. The repercussions of this are quite different from the threat to infrastructure posed by warming permafrost, as we shall see next.

  Ice Road Suckers

  The second way in which rising temperatures will make remote northern landscapes less accessible is by reducing our ability to travel on them using winter roads.

  Winter roads, also variously called ice roads, snow roads, temporary roads, and other names, are a remarkably well-kept secret. As their name suggests, they are temporary features, requiring a hard, deeply frozen surface to work. Winter roads are used extensively in Alaska, Canada, Russia, and Sweden and are also used in Norway, Finland, Estonia, and several northern U.S. states. In truly remote areas they are the only kind of road at all. Yet, despite their importance, these transient travel lanes rarely show up on maps. Before the popular television series Ice Road Truckers was produced, few people even knew they existed. But in many parts of the North—especially wet, boggy areas—they are the only way to economically resupply villages, run construction projects, harvest timber, find oil and gas, or do just about anything. Away from rivers and coastlines the only other option is to use airplanes and helicopters, which are extremely expensive.

  In contrast to its biological life, economic activity on northern landscapes springs to action in winter, after the ground freezes and ground vehicles can be brought in. With remote distances and low population densities, the cost of permanent roads is rarely justified. In contrast, even the most expensive of winter roads—built up like an ice-skating rink by repeatedly glazing it with water—costs 99% less to build.380 So in many remote areas, the road network is not fixed but an ephemeral ghost, expanding briefly each winter, then melting away again in the spring.

  One famous winter road, featured in the first season of Ice Road Truckers, is the Tibbitt-Contwoyto ice road built each year in Canada’s Northwest Territories. It begins near the city of Yellowknife and runs six hundred kilometers northeast into Nunavut, supplying a string of highly lucrative diamond mines. This road traverses bog and lakes and can exist only for about two traffic-jammed months out of the year.381 During the other ten, the mines can be reached only by air.

  Since 2003 one of the richest diamond strikes served by this road has been the Diavik Diamond Mine owned by Rio Tinto, a multinational mining conglomerate. At Diavik’s headquarters in Yellowknife, manager Tom Hoefer explained that the Diavik mine yields four to five carats of diamonds per ton of ore, one of the highest grades ever found (the world average is one carat per ton). To get at the diamonds, the company spent $400 million just to dike back an overlying lake that was in the way.382 Together with one of its neighbors, this mine currently generates about half of the NWT’s gross domestic product. But despite its high grade, without the Tibbitt-Contwoyto road, this mine would be uneconomic. “If we didn’t have this winter road we wouldn’t have these mines,” Hoefer told me. “It’s as simple as that.”383 Imagine trying to bring in all the heavy equipment, construction materials, and thousands of tons of cement mix by airplane. It just couldn’t be done.

  For every Tibbitt-Contwoyto there are thousands of lesser winter roads vital to some economic activity or another. In Siberia I saw many long piles of deep sand running across the taiga. They are dormant winter roads and will lie there, useless and undrivable, until the deep freeze of winter returns so they can be graded again. Giant north-flowing rivers like the Ob’, Yenisei, and Lena in Russia, and Mackenzie River in Canada become ice highways in winter. In High Level, Alberta, I visited Tolko Industries—a major softwood producer for the U.S. building industry—and learned that their wood harvest relies on a fourteen- to sixteen-week winter road season. To the consternation of the company, that season has been gradually shortening over time. �
��We will lose our shirt” if the roads go away, their forester told me.384

  Most resource extraction operations in the North already face tight profit margins from chronic labor shortages, long distances to market, and an environment that is both too harsh and too delicate. For industries where an entire year’s worth of profit must be made in a matter of weeks, even a few days lost is a serious blow. Because northern climate warming is greatest in winter, it uniquely targets this sector. Warm winters mean shorter winter road seasons and/or lighter allowable loads. Deeper snow means more insulation of the ground, further reducing the depth and hardness of its freezing. For all but the most lucrative operations, many industries will become increasingly uneconomic and finally abandoned.

  The significance of this goes beyond the major Ice Road Trucker-type ice highways that are rebuilt in the same place each year. It means reduced access everywhere. Take, for example, off-road oil and gas exploration on the North Slope of Alaska. To avoid damaging thin tundra soil and vegetation,385 this can be done only in winter, when its soft, moist surface freezes hard. There’s simply no other way to drive on this environmentally sensitive ecosystem without tearing it apart. But since the 1970s the North Slope’s permissible off-road travel season has declined from over two hundred days per year to just over one hundred days,386 effectively cutting the energy exploration season in half.

  Put simply, this is not a good century to be out working the land in remote interiors of the North. In permafrost, permanent structures will become even trickier to build and maintain than they are now. Despite ways of prolonging the life of winter roads,387 there’s no getting around the fact that milder winters and deeper winter snow will shorten their seasons, making many of them pointless to build for all but the most lucrative projects—the NWT diamonds,388 for example, or natural gas pipelines. Already we see delayed openings and earlier closures harming smaller outfits operating on tight margins.