Notes
1. Whalebone quickly developed into a popular byproduct of the hunt. Scoresby in An Account of the Arctic Regions, quotes one 1807 patent taken out for the adoption of whalebone: “hats, caps and bonnets for men and women; harps for harping or cleansing corn or grain; and also the bottoms of sieves and riddles; and girths for horse; and also cloth for webbing, fit for making into hats, caps &c; and for the backs and seats of chairs; sofas, gigs, and other similar carriages and things; and for the bottom of beds; and also whalebone reeds for weavers.”
2. Adolf Nordenskiöld, Voyage of the Vega Round Asia and Europe (London: Macmillian & Co., 1885), 231.
3. Ibid., 394.
4. Shortly after this despairing note, the greatly relieved De Long received word that Nordenskiöld had safely passed the winter and was continuing on his journey. De Long was now free to pursue his appointed mission without distraction.
5. Raymond Fisher, The Voyage of Semen Dezhnev (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1981), 562.
6. Jeannette Mirsky, To the Arctic! (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 200.
7. A non sequitur: Nansen’s thesis, The Structure and Combination of Histological Elements of the Central Nervous System, became a classic.
8. Fridtjof Nansen, The First Crossing of Greenland (London: Longmans, Green, 1890), 189.
9. One of Nansen’s inventions was a certain bottle that was capable of collecting a sample from a specific depth and retrieving it without compromise of waters from other levels.
10. Charles Emmerson, The Future History of the Arctic (New York: Public Affairs, 2010), 13.
11. Roald Amundsen, The South Pole: an Account of the Norwegian Antarctic Expedition in the “Fram,” 1910–12 (London: John Murray, 1912), 437.
12. Vilhjalmur Stefansson, The Friendly Arctic: The Story of Five Years in Polar Regions (London: MacMillan, 1922), 377.
13. Richard Vaughan, The Arctic: A History (Stroud, UK: Sutton Publishing, 1994), 234.
10
Canary in the Cage
THE ARCTIC OF YESTERDAY’S explorers and adventurers is not the Arctic of today. The seemingly limitless distances and the inhospitable climate those early hardies encountered, coupled with oppressive winter darkness and ever-changing and deadly ice conditions, remain unchanged. But the impact of climate change, the demand for natural resources — oil and gas above all — and political jockeying of nations for strategic advantage have brought dramatic transformations to the Arctic landscape. Nothing has changed; everything has changed. The song of the Arctic Siren has been deafened by the din of mining drills, the hum of oil pumps, and the drone of exploratory aircraft, ships, and submarines. Modern technology has immunized today’s explorers from her beguilement.
The pristine, unchanging Arctic we have inherited is on its deathbed — and the heart of the matter lies in man’s insatiable thirst for energy and in its abuse. Eighty percent of the world’s energy is derived from the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas, and the record of carbon dioxide fallout becomes locked in Antarctic ice cores. The analysis of these cores describes snowfall conditions over the millennia — reaching back as far as 160,000 years — and the evidence clearly demonstrates that since the industrial revolution concentration of atmospheric carbons has increased 35 percent. The Arctic is extremely vulnerable to observed and projected climatic change and what’s happening in the world at large is happening at twice the speed in those northern reaches.
While debate rages over the issue of fossil fuels, our civilization’s demands for them burgeon, deposits deplete, and pressures to secure fresh sources become almost frenzied. Historically, the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries (OPEC) has been the world’s principal purveyors of oil, joined by such countries as United States, Canada, and Norway. More recently, others have come onto the market — places such as Kazakhstan, Brazil, Mexico, and even Barbados and Ethiopia. But it seems never enough and the hunt for new sources is unflagging. The Arctic is known to be rich in oil and gas, although estimates of quantity do vary. In May 2009, the United States Geological Survey reported on its comprehensive review of the regions within the Arctic Circle, and using “probabilistic geology-based methodology,” it concluded that 30 percent of the world’s undiscovered gas reserves and 13 percent of the earth’s oil reserves lie within that boundary. If the estimates are correct, they are nearly equivalent to today’s proven reserves of Saudi Arabia and the nearby Gulf States combined. Additionally, USGS reported that 84 percent of this wealth lies offshore in shallow waters not exceeding 1,700 feet — accessibility is that much less arduous. Approximately sixty large oil and natural gas fields have been discovered in the Arctic, over half of which are in Russia, and 80 percent of them are already in production, while the remainder awaits development. Norway has developed a state-of-the-art processing plant 235 miles north of the Arctic Circle, which receives gas from huge off-shore platforms and then transports it on specially designed ships to feed American east coast pipelines. With sharp increases of demand, it is expected that by 2030, such imports will account for a fifth of that country’s needs.
The USGS survey encompasses the areas within the Arctic Circle only; “the Arctic,” in this case, falls within the narrower latitudinal definition, rather the broader isothermal definition. What the estimates of reserves might be for the greater Arctic region are not clearly defined, but certainly they exceed those of the immediate USGS survey. Venerable oil giants such as Royal Dutch Shell, Total, Exxon Mobil, and ConocoPhillips, joined by newcomers such as Russia’s Gazprom and Norway’s StatoilHydro, are exploring drilling possibilities in those far-off regions. “If you’re a serious oil and gas player … then this is a long-term, natural place to look,” gushed one enthusiastic oil executive. Oil deposits for the most part are centred in the western hemisphere — eastern Alaska, the Canadian North, and east Greenland, whereas an estimated 70 percent of gas deposits occur in the Barents Sea, western Siberia, and western Alaska.
The manifold problems of drilling in the Arctic are self-evident and costs of extraction are high. To transport and erect an oil rig and then to man and operate it in temperate, more readily accessible places, such as Venezuela or Nigeria is one thing — to accomplish the same in the far-off, forbidding Arctic is quite another matter. The real challenge, however, lies not in the extraction of the product, but in its transportation to the marketplace. Nothing new in this problem — Munk, Hudson, and scores of other lost their lives in seeking routes of transport through the Arctic, but despite heroic efforts, they were universally stymied by ice, ice, and more ice. But now the ice is disappearing at a startling rate and avenues are opening.
Under normal circumstances, the Arctic should have been undergoing a cooling over the past two thousand years because of a wobble in the earth’s orbit that causes a reduction in sunlight intensity reaching the polar region in the summer. This natural progression had indeed been taking place — hark back to the onset of the “new ice age” suffered by Greenlanders in the Middle Ages. But within the past century a sharp reversal has occurred and the Arctic has grown warmer, a turnabout that has man’s fingerprints all over it. The ten-year period 1999 to 2009 was the warmest of the past two millennia, with Arctic summer temperatures rising on average 6.8°F higher than might have been expected had cooling followed its natural progression. Tundra is thawing and trees are germinating, polar bears are becoming endangered, permafrost is melting, new species of fish are finding their way into warming northern waters. And Arctic ice has dramatically shrunk. Studies show that from 1979 to 1996, the average per decade decline in entire ice coverage was 2.2 percent. For the following decade it was 10.1 percent. The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), an organization partially sponsored by NASA, reports in its October 2010 findings that “the linear decline of September ice extending over the period 1979 to 2010 is now 31,400 square miles per year, or 11.5% per decade relative to the 1979–2000 average. NASA satellite measurements show that in one four-year
period of 2004–08 the decrease was 42 percent.”
The effect of the melting, coupled with technological advances in weather prediction, information-gathering, and ship construction, is making possible the prospect of commercial navigation through the top of the world. The elusive goal is being won not so much through man’s noble efforts, but through his careless disregard of the environment. Today icebreakers, research ships, drilling ships, cruise ships, and even private yachts sail through the Northwest Passage during summer months. In summer 2009, two German merchant ships loaded with construction material, MV Beluga Foresight and MV Beluga Fraternity, passed through Arctic waters from Ulsan, South Korea to Rotterdam — the first commercial transit of the Northern Sea Route. By completing that route rather than the 12,700-nautical-mile voyage around the Malay Peninsula, Suez Canal, and Mediterranean, the ships cut the distance by nearly 40 percent (and avoided the perils of Malay piracy). A voyage from Seattle to Rotterdam through the Northwest can be shortened by two thousand nautical miles, a 25 percent saving over a Panama Canal route. Marine engineers are busily developing new models of ice-capable ships, designed to avoid the necessity of accompanying icebreakers.
Exciting as these prospects may appear, a word of caution. Whatever the melt, experts tell us, there is no such thing as completely ice-free Arctic waters. Sailing distances may be shorter, but navigation through icebergs, floes, and “growlers” — dark-coloured, low-lying masses of ice that are difficult to spot — will inevitably be slower. Getting caught in the floes of late season or heavy fog is an additional risk. When the specially reinforced supertanker SS Manhattan journeyed through Arctic waters in 1969 to test the viability of the passage for oil transport, it required the assistance of a Canadian icebreaker. A free passage through those waters may one day come to be, but the Northwest Passage will not become a Panama Canal in the immediate future.
In addition to oil and gas, the Arctic offers a trove of minerals and ores. In Canada, operating mines or projected mines centre on copper, nickel, lead, zinc, and uranium. The country is the world’s largest producer of uranium, and the deposits at Kiggavik in Nunavut are especially promising. Since 1991, Canada has become the third-largest producer of diamonds from major mines in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. Just south of the Arctic Circle lie the two largest such facilities, Ekati and Diavik, each operating open pits that are among the world’s largest. Resolute, Canada’s northern-most community at 74°43' N is the springboard for scientific exploration, and in the summer months its airport and three hotels are beehives of activity as mining companies launch themselves into the deeper barrens in the search of fresh prospects. The developing sea lanes are encouraging not only to Canadian oil people, but to miners, as well.
The first successful well in Alaska was drilled in 1968 at Prudhoe Bay, four hundred kilometres north of the Arctic Circle. It sits on North America’s largest oil field, one that is double that of the East Texas Oil Field (which produces nearly a quarter of the country’s output). For the past four decades Prudhoe has fuelled the Alaskan economy. The state’s eyes are now turned on the nearby Chukchi Sea basin, shared jointly with Russia. Reserves here are so promising that Shell Oil has already spent $2.5 billion to establish itself there with a major global operating centre on offshore Alaska — the “new Gulf of Mexico.”
The United States Geological Survey estimates that northeast Greenland holds up to 31.4 billion barrels offshore of undiscovered oil and natural gas reserves, an amount on par with Alberta’s oil sands. Half a dozen oil giants are actively studying the economics of extraction in that highly inhospitable region. Mining operations in Greenland have long existed, and in the past they focused on cryolite (used in the manufacture of aluminum), lead, and zinc. By the 1980s, the reserves of cryolite had become exhausted, but the extraction of lead and zinc continues. Today’s receding glacial ice is laying bare parts of the country and fresh mineral deposits are being uncovered, including coal, platinum, palladium (a rare metal used in jewellery, dentistry, and watch-making), and molybdenum (aircraft parts, electrical contacts, and industrial motors).
Russia is the foremost player in the Arctic. Twenty-two percent of the country’s exports originate in those distant reaches, and the region accounts for an astonishing 11 percent of the country’s GDP. Gas is a principal commodity — in 2009, Russia provided Europe with a quarter of its natural gas needs, and although much of this originated in the country’s underbelly, particularly in the Caspian Sea area, the Arctic was a critical source. But mining is of no less importance — thirty-two major mines are scattered throughout the vast expanse. The Kola Peninsula mines large quantities of alumina, iron ore, mica, and titanium. The world’s deepest borehole lies between Murmansk and the Norwegian border — a vertical shaft toward the earth’s centre, which is 7.7 miles deep. In Siberia, nearly 1,800 miles from Moscow, stands the mining centre of Norilsk at 69°20' N with a population of three hundred thousand, the Arctic’s second-largest city. At one-time it was a Stalinist labour camp where over seventeen thousand prisoners died of harsh working conditions, starvation, and cold — the place is snow-covered over 250 days of the year and average annual temperatures are 14°F (with lows of -60°F not uncommon). Ninety percent of Russia’s nickel and 55 percent of its copper are mined here, as well as half the world’s supply of palladium, a vital element in the manufacture of catalytic converters. (Norilsk, incidentally, is among the top ten most polluted cities in the world.)
The Arctic shows promise of becoming a cornucopia of raw materials. While miners, oil people, and shippers chortle with satisfaction at the effect global warming is having on the region, the rest of the world weeps. The climatic change our fragile globe is encountering is universally felt, in some places with relatively minimum effect on the geography and ecosystems, and in others with profound consequence. In the Arctic, however, the change is robust and accelerating at a rate double or more to that of the earth’s average. In Siberia and Alaska, for example, temperatures in the past half century have risen a by a remarkable 3.5°F, and in some parts shrubs are beginning to sprout on the barren tundra. The great glaciers of western Alaska, some predict, will disappear by 2035.
Our globe has two polar caps, one a continental land mass surrounded by water, and the other a body of water surrounded by land masses. The grounded Antarctic ice is thick, over two kilometres deep in places; the floating Arctic ice is thin, just a few metres thick and therefore significantly quicker in melting. And melt it does: in the past three decades rising temperatures have reduced the areas of summer ice dramatically, as sequences of satellite images shockingly illustrate. In photos taken in September 1980, white summer ice is seen covering an expanse of 3 million square miles; in 2005, the area shrank to 1.9 million, and a mere three years later, to 1.8 million; the Arctic Ocean’s summer ice pack today covers a little over a half of its reach three decades ago. Yesterday’s white ice is today’s black water surface. And here is the rub: 80 percent of the heat from the sun’s rays falling onto white ice is reflected back into space, but only 5 percent of rays are reflected by dark water, with the balance being retained. It’s a vicious circle — less heat is reflected, temperatures rise, regeneration of ice in winter is injuriously retarded, darker surface increase, less heat reflected. By definition, global warming is a wordwide phenomenon, but in the northern polar region the effect of ice melt accelerates temperature rise causing quickened climatic and ecological change — an effect known as Arctic amplification.
Little wonder that climatologists and environmentalists consider the Arctic “the canary in the global coal mine.”[1] The sustainability of the world’s present condition may be judged by the welfare of the Arctic — if the caged canary droops or falls dead, it’s a signal for the coal miners that gas levels are dangerously high and that the tunnel is no longer safe. That the Arctic ice cap will someday disappear seems a foregone conclusion. It could happen by the end of the century, with one study having it by 2050, and when it does,
the canary might well be found belly-up on the floor of its cage.
Some labour under the impression that melting ice caps cause ocean levels to rise. This is as untrue as with the melting process of ice cubes in a glass of water — as the cubes melt, water volume in the glass does not increase. If — better yet, when — low-lying places such as the Maldives disappear through flooding, it will not be because of melting ice caps, but through the runoff of melting glaciers. Climatic warming is indeed global, and glaciers everywhere are retreating because of it — as in Antarctica, Alaska, Africa, and Argentina, so in parts of India, the United States, and Switzerland.
But it is the change in the Greenland glacier that gives pause for concern. Satellite imagery show that in some places the ice is noticeably receding, whereas in other spots it appears to be surging forward. Taken together, however, it is clear that a reduction in its mass is taking place. A team of twenty-six specialists from eight Arctic countries was brought together in 2004 by the University of Alaska to develop an Arctic Climate Impact Assessment. The report notes that the surface-melt area of the Greenland ice sheet averaged 16 percent from 1979 to 2002, “an area roughly the size of Sweden,” It goes on to note that in the twenty-year period prior to the study, global average of sea level rise was 3.2 inches. Some estimates have it that if the enormous Greenland glacier was to melt overnight, the globe’s ocean levels would rise in excess of twenty feet. Terrifying to consider which parts of the earth’s surface would be affected. Mark Lynas in Six Degrees writes
Arctic Obsession Page 25
