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

by Laurence C. Smith

  374 Borehole temperatures in permafrost are generally warming everywhere around the northern latitudes, but to varying degrees as a function of depth and location. In Alaska it has warmed as much as +3°C since the 1980s, but a more typical range is 0.5°-2°C. For a summary of observed permafrost temperature changes, see Table 6.8 and associated discussion on pp. 210-213, ACIA (2005).

  375 The presence of permafrost helps to hold water near the land surface. L. C. Smith, Y. Sheng, G. M. MacDonald, L. D. Hinzman, “Disappearing Arctic Lakes,” Science 308 (2005): 1429.

  376 North of 45° N latitude, the single most important determinant of northern lake abundance is glaciation history, followed by the presence or absence of permafrost. On average, glaciated landscapes contain about four times as many lakes as nonglaciated landscapes; permafrost roughly doubles lake numbers. From GIS analysis of northern hemisphere lake distribution, I estimate that in a “permafrost-free” world, the number of known, mapped lakes north of 45° N latitude would be reduced from roughly 192,000 to 103,000 (-46%) and their total inundation area reduced from about 560,000 to 325,000 km2 (-42%). However, that is an extreme scenario. More realistic for 2050 is an overall reduction of known lakes to 155,000 (-15%) and 476,000 km2 (-15%), respectively. These numbers are underestimates because the true number of Arctic lakes (i.e., unmapped) is in the millions. L. C. Smith, Y. Sheng, G. M. MacDonald, “A First Pan-Arctic Assessment of the Influence of Glaciation, Permafrost, Topography and Peatlands on Northern Lake Distribution,” Permafrost and Periglacial Processes 18 (2007): 201-208, DOI:10.1002/ppp.581.

  377 So-called “continuous” permafrost will decline even more, by 19%-53%. 2050 forecasts from the CGCM2, ECHAM4/OPYC3, GFDL-R30, HadCM3, and CSM climate models, ACIA (2005), Table 6.9. Seasonal thaw depth refers to the depth of the active layer at the ground surface, which thaws out in summer and refreezes in winter. Typical active layer depths are ten to one hundred centimeters.

  378 The percentage of dangerous buildings in large villages and cities ranges from 22% in Tiksi to 80% in Vorkuta, including 55% in Magadan, 60% in Chita, 35% in Dudinka, 10% in Noril’sk, 50% in Pevek, 50% in Amderma, and 35% in Dikson. On the Baikal-Amur Mainline railroad 10%-16% of the subgrade in permafrost was deformed by permafrost in the early 1990s, rising to 46% by 1998. ACIA (2005), pp. 935-936.

  379 This map is assembled from several types of data. The permafrost load-bearing capacity model (gray tones) is very new and will comprise the Ph.D. dissertation of D. Streletskiy, University of Delaware. Permafrost is warmed by rising air temperatures and/or deeper winter snowpack (deeper snow insulates the ground). In general, warmer permafrost means lower load-bearing capacity, but other factors like geology, ice content, and thermal properties are also important. These processes have recently been incorporated into Streletskiy’s semiempirical model, driven here by NCAR CCSM3 projections of surface temperature and snow depth averaged over fifteen-year periods, 2000-2014 and 2045-2059, assuming an SRES A1B emissions scenario. The map shows the projected changes occurring between those two time intervals. “Severe loss” is strength loss of >50%, “moderate” is 25-50%, and “mild” is under 25%. The hatched markings refer to increased travel cost from reduced winter road suitability, work done at UCLA by my graduate student Scott Stephenson. Winter roads may only be used for transport where climate provides suitable conditions for their construction and use. Winter road suitability is strongly correlated with freezing index, which is a function of temperature. Land area was classified as suitable for winter road use where mean temperature was 0°C or lower and snow depth exceeded 20 cm. Rivers and lakes were classified as suitable if they received at least 23 cm of freeze depth. Suitability losses were cumulated from November to March. Again, NCAR CCSM3 projections of surface temperature were averaged over fifteen-year periods 2000-2014 and 2045-2059 assuming a SRES A1B emissions scenario, with the map showing the projected change in areal extent of suitability occurring between those two time intervals. Note that this map does not require that winter roads are currently being used in these areas, but instead measures the climatic suitability for their potential use.

  380 Personal interview with D. Augur, assistant deputy minister, NWT Department of Transportation, Yellowknife, July 9, 2007. On average, permanent roads cost $0.5-$1.0 M/km to build, whereas winter roads average $1,300 M/km.

  381 The Tibbitt-Contwoyto is jammed with heavy trucks during its brief operating season. In 2007 it absorbed eleven thousand loaded trips in just seventy-two days. D. Hayley and S. Proskin, “Managing the Safety of Ice Covers Used for Transportation in an Environment of Climate Warming,” 4th Canadian Conference on Geohazards, May 20-24, 2008, Québec City, Canada.

  382 Geologically speaking, a kimberlite pipe. Diamonds form under extreme pressure deep in the Earth’s crust but can sometimes be found in kimberlite pipes, narrow chimneys of igneous rock that can reach the surface. In the NWT kimberlites are often found under lakes because they are softer than the surrounding granitic rocks, thus becoming eroded depressions that fill with water.

  383 Personal interview with Tom Hoefer, manager of external and internal affairs, Diavik Diamond Mines, Inc., Yellowknife, NWT, July 9, 2007.

  384 Personal interview with Divisional Forester Jeremy Beal, Tolko Industries Ltd., High Level, Alberta, June 4, 2007.

  385 Compared with other types of road, properly constructed and used winter roads have surprisingly low impact on the environment, especially over lakes and wetlands. See S. Guyer, B. Keating, “The Impact of Ice Roads and Ice Pads on Tundra Ecosystems,” National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, U.S. Bureau of Land Management, BLM-Alaska Open File Report 98 (April 2005), 57 pp.

  386 L. D. Hinzman et al., “Evidence and Implications of Recent Climate Change in Northern Alaska and Other Arctic Regions,” Climatic Change 72 (2005): 251-298.

  387 One of the ways to mitigate the climate-warming effect is to deploy sweepers to clear snow from the planned roadway, reducing its insulating effect on the ground.

  388 A $270 million proposal is pending to build a port road from Bathurst Inlet, which would help the diamond mines to offset decline of the Tibbitt-Contwoyto ice road as well as enabling other mining activity in the area. G. Quenneville, “Bathurst Inlet Project Reconsidered,” Northern News Services, June 15, 2009.

  389 Obviously, in terms of sheer numbers, most of the U.S. increase will be in southern states. However, the United States as a whole is still a NORC country and the +15 million figure for its northern states is probably conservative. Alaska today has fewer than a million people, for example, but is one of the fastest-growing U.S. states, projected to grow nearly 40% by 2030. In contrast, New York is projected to grow less than 3%. U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division, Interim State Population Projections, 2005, www.census.gov/population/www/projections/projectionsagesex.html. Table data are from United Nations Population Division: The 2008 Revision Population Database (medium variant), http://esa.un.org/u/npp (accessed July 26, 2009).

  390 This calculation is from GIS analysis for land area of the northern quarter of the planet, i.e., between 45° and 90° N latitude. About twenty-one million square kilometers is underlain by some form of permafrost, and eighteen million were glaciated in the last ice age, leaving a smoothed landscape (except in mountain belts) that is relatively easy to get around on. Adding in all the coastal and low-lying areas (here assumed simply as land elevations three hundred meters a.s.l. or less), because they are warmer and more accessible than high-elevation terrain, yields about twenty-seven million square kilometers, of which thirteen million is currently in some stage of permafrost. Subtracting the permafrost areas leaves roughly fourteen million square kilometers of ostensibly livable land.

  391 Unlike North America and northern Europe, Eurasia was not extensively ice covered during the last ice age. Most of modern-day Russia has been occupied by humans for at least the past forty to forty-five thousand years and perhaps longer. Even in the high Arctic, new archaeological discoveries at Mamonto
vaya Kurya and the Yana River indicate human activities thirty to forty thousand years old. See Pavel Pavlov et al., Nature 413 (September 6, 2001): 64-67, and Richard Stone, Science 303 (January 2, 2004): 33.

  392 They are loaded with ancient gene haplogroup U, especially U5B1B1, the so-called “Sámi motif,” dating back fifty-five thousand years to the Iberian Peninsula, from where they migrated north at the end of the ice age. T. Lappalainen et al., “Migration Waves to the Baltic Sea Region,” Annals of Human Genetics 72 (2008): 337-348.

  393 Country-averaged population densities for Canada, China, and India are 3,141, and 369 persons per square kilometer, respectively, equivalent to 82.4, 1.75, and 0.67 acres of land per person.

  394 This has to do with the generally clockwise rotation of gyres in the northern hemisphere oceans, transporting southern ocean water north along the western edges and northern ocean water south along the eastern edges of the Atlantic and Pacific Basins. Thermohaline ocean circulation is also vitally important, as we shall see shortly. Finally, prevailing wind directions are westerly for much of the northern hemisphere meaning advection of warm ocean air over the land moves generally from west to east rather than east to west.

  395 In the northern hemisphere. Ibid.

  396 For more on how physical geography can influence human settlement, see Harm de Blij, The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization’s Rough Landscape, (USA: Oxford University Press, (2008), 304 pp.

  397 This was done under the U.S. Lend-Lease program to supply massive amounts of military material to its allies during the war. P. 42, K. S. Coates, W. R. Morrison, The Alaska Highway in World War II (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 309 pp.

  398 All told, the United States poured at least $4 billion (in 2009 dollars) into the projects. U.S. expenditures from 1942 through 1945 were roughly $41 million for airfields, $20 million for the initial temporary highway, $133-$144 million for the Canol Road and pipeline, $131 million for the finished highway; no data for the Haines Road. K. S. Coates, W. R. Morrison, The Alaska Highway in World War II (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 309 pp.

  399 When a Japanese invasion became unlikely, the U.S. soldiers and contractors were recalled from northwestern Canada and the newly built infrastructure soon turned over as promised. Other northern bases were retained for decades, including a large military presence at Keflavík, not turned over to Iceland until 2006. Sondre Stromfjord (now Kangerlussuaq) was turned over to Greenland in 1992. Thule Air Base is still operated by the United States.

  400 A. Applebaum, GULAG: A History (London: Penguin Books 2003), 610 pp. Highly recommended.

  401 The acronym GULAG or Gulag comes from Glavnoe upravlenie legerei, meaning Main Camp Administration. Work camps had long antecedents in tsarist Russia and were implemented by Lenin almost immediately after the Russian Revolution. But Stalin’s expansion of the camp system in 1929 took it to a new level of scale and economic significance. For more, see A. I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 (New York: Harper Collins, 1974), 660 pp., and A. Applebaum, GULAG: A History (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 610 pp. See also F. Hill and C. Gaddy, The Siberian Curse (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2003).

  402 F. Hill and C. Gaddy, Ibid.

  403 Ph.D. dissertation of T. Mikhailova, “Essays on Russian Economic Geography: Measuring Spatial Inefficiency,” Pennsylvania State University, Department of Economics, 2004. See also F. Hill and C. Gaddy, Ibid.

  404 Geological evolution and other material for this section drawn from June 5, 2009, personal interview with John D. Grace of Earth Science Associates, Long Beach, California, and his superb book Russian Oil Supply: Performance and Prospects (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 288 pp.

  405 A primary reason for this is economic “discounting” of up-front capital, in which money is valued higher today than tomorrow. The anticipated future profits for a proposed project are weighed against the alternative profits that could be generated by placing the project’s up-front cost into some other interest-bearing investment today. If the second number is larger, it makes no financial sense to proceed. Massive projects with longtime horizons to profitability, like building a freeway system or developing West Siberia, are thus unattractive to private capital. The key parameter in these calculations is the “discount rate,” i.e., the interest rate. The steeper the discount rate (the higher the interest rate offered by alternative investments), the sooner a project must be completed to make sense. Economic discounting is extremely important in energy development: Whether a proposed oil or gas field will take five years or seven before production can make the difference between its making economic sense or not.

  406 I led a three-year National Science Foundation project to study peatland carbon dynamics in the West Siberian Lowland from 1998 to 2000. Its purpose was to drill cores across the region and involved dozens of Russian and American scientists and graduate students, including Olga Borisova, Konstantine Kremenetski, and Andrei Velichko at the Russian Academy of Sciences and David Beilman, Karen Frey, Glen MacDonald, and Yongwei Sheng at UCLA. For publications and results, see http://lena.sscnet.ucla.edu.

  407 The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) is the successor to the Soviet KGB and Russia’s main domestic security agency. Upon arrival, foreign visitors to West Siberian cities must register/interview with local FSB officers and surrender passports at hotels. Some towns are completely closed to foreigners.

  408 Including a CAD$1.2 billion bid for the rights to explore an offshore area of 611,000 hectares, p. 77, AMSA 2009.

  409 “Circum-Arctic Resource Appraisal: Estimates of Undiscovered Oil and Gas North of the Arctic Circle,” digital data and USGS Fact Sheet 2008-3049 (2008); D. L. Gautier et al., “Assessment of Undiscovered Oil and Gas in the Arctic,” Science 324 (2009): 1175-1179.

  410 More specifically, the other promising geological provinces for oil are the Canning-Mackenzie (6.4 BBO), North Barents Basin (5.3 BBO), Yenisei-Khatanga (5.3 BBO), Northwest Greenland Rifted Margin (4.9 BBO), the South Danmarkshavn Basin (4.4 BBO), and the North Danmarkshavn Salt Basin (3.3 BBO). Other promising geological provinces for natural gas are South Barents Basin (184 TCF), North Barents Basin (117 TCF), and again the Alaska Platform (122 TCF). P. 1178, D. L. Gautier et al., Ibid.

  411 Interview with Alexei Varlomov, deputy minister for natural resources of the Russian Federation, Tromsø, January 22, 2007.

  412 In 2008 Russia produced 602.7 billion cubic meters of natural gas and had 43.3 trillion more in proved reserves, both greater than any other country. Russia produced an average of 9,886,000 barrels of oil per day, second only to Saudi Arabia (10,846,000 barrels per day). BP Statistical Review of World Energy June 2009, available at www.bp.com/statisticalreview.

  413 See Chapter 3.

  414 J. D. Grace, Russian Oil Supply: Performance and Prospects (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 288 pp.

  415 At peak production West Siberia’s giant Urengoi, Yambur, and Medvezhye gas fields produced almost 500 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year; by 2030 production will decline to 130 billion cubic meters per year. E. N. Andreyeva, V. A. Kryukov, “The Russian Model—Merging Profit and Sustainability,” pp. 240-287 in A. Mikkelsen and O. Lenghelle, eds., Arctic Oil and Gas (New York: Routledge, 2008), 390 pp.

  416 Gazprom commenced laying pipeline across the floor of Baydaratskaya Bay in 2009, hoping to open the Bovanenkovo gas field for European markets by 2011. July 24, 2009, “Yamal Pipeline Laying Proceeds,” www.barentsobserver.com.

  417 Some producers skip the upgrading step to produce lower-grade bitumen. The described process is used by Syncrude, Canada’s largest tar sands producer. B. M. Testa, “Tar on Tap,” Mechanical Engineering (December 2008): 30-34.

  418 In 2008 a flock of about five hundred mallard ducks died after landing in a Syncrude tailing pond. “Hundreds of Ducks Die after Landing in Oil Sands in Canada,” Fox News, May 8, 2008. See als
o E. A. Johnson, K. Miyanishi, “Creating New Landscapes and Ecosystems: The Alberta Oil Sands,” Annals, New York Academy of Sciences 1134 (2008): 120-145; and M. J. Pasqualetti, “The Alberta Oil Sands from Both Sides of the Border,” The Geographical Review 99, no. 20 (2009): 248-267.

  419 T. M. Pavelsky, L. C. Smith, “Remote Sensing of Hydrologic Recharge in the Peace-Athabasca Delta, Canada,” Geophysical Research Letters 35 (2008):L08403, DOI:10.1029/ 2008GL033268.

  420 Oil sands operators self-report that a total of 65 square kilometers have been reclaimed in some form, or about 12% of the total disturbed area. According to the nonprofit Pembina Institute, only 1 square kilometer has been fully restored and certified by the government of Alberta. Regardless of this discrepancy both numbers are small compared with the 530 square kilometers disturbed.

  421 E. A. Johnson, K. Miyanishi, “Creating New Landscapes and Ecosystems: The Alberta Oil Sands,” Annals, New York Academy of Sciences 1134 (2008): 120-145.

  422 The Mackenzie Gas Project has been proposed since the early 1970s but was previously suspended pending settlement of aboriginal land claims. This obstacle is now settled and the project pending as is described in Chapter 8.

  423 Under the Kyoto Protocol, Canada pledged to reduce carbon emissions to -6% below 1990 levels by 2008-2012. Instead by 2009 her emissions grew +27% and will rise again in 2010 if Alberta tar sands development intensifies. “Canada’s northern goal,” in The World in 2010, special supplement to The Economist (2009): 53-54. Syncrude and Suncor, two of the largest tar sands operators, are the third- and sixth-largest emitters of greenhouse gases in Canada. M. J. Pasqualetti, “The Alberta Oil Sands from Both Sides of the Border,” The Geographical Review 99, no. 20 (2009): 248-267.

  424 The most promising current underground extraction technology is steam-assisted gravity drainage, in which pressurized steam is forced underground in long horizontal injection wells to heat the bitumen. After about six months of heating the bitumen begins to flow and can be pumped from a second, parallel recovery well to the surface.