The world is grappling with the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, the civil war in Syria, the rise of China and middle-class stagnation in the United States, and Mother Nature is poised to deal us another strategic curveball: a race to own the Arctic, the last great untapped source of hydrocarbon energy on Earth.
That’s right, the home of Santa’s workshop is being inundated with exploration vessels, drill ships, freighters and military patrols as never before.
For those who haven’t been paying attention, the Arctic has been warming at a prodigious rate over the past couple of decades. In the process of doing so, it has become the poster-child region for anthropomorphic climate change.
From 1981 to 2001, the rate of warming in this region was eight times greater than the average recorded for the previous 100 years. There is a current pause in the rise of temperatures around the globe, except in the Arctic region, which has continued to exhibit all the signs of a changing, warming climate.
The ice cap that covers the Arctic Ocean, for instance, has been shrinking in extent and thickness for years, threatening wildlife adapted to living on the sea ice and opening up Arctic waters to some very limited, exploratory amounts of international shipping. In Alaska, America’s northernmost state, average temperatures have risen, affecting everything from pest infestations of the state’s vast forestlands to the stability of the ground on which many of the state’s major cities are built. These changes aren’t only being felt in Alaska, though. Similar changes are also taking place in Siberia and much of Canada, strongly indicating that the polar region as a whole is heating up.
The future implications of all this are rather profound. First, in terms of the dynamics of global warming itself, a melting Arctic region will have a pronounced effect on warming in two ways. Sea ice, for example, is lighter than the ocean waters it covers, so it absorbs less heat than open water would if it were exposed to sunlight. Consequently, heat from sunlight is reflected back into space and not added to the terrestrial heat budget – the amount of heat our planet retains after sunlight is reflected back into space.
With the ice disappearing, however, darker ocean water is exposed. This darker water, in turn, retains more heat, increasing temperatures while also increasing the pace at which the sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean melts. With just a few degrees of temperature change, in other words, a powerful feedback loop is created wherein more and more heat is retained until a new, ice-free temperature equilibrium is reached.
Even worse, ice melt is not limited to the ice covering the sea. The Arctic’s vast amount of permafrost — much of which has large deposits of methane locked up in its icy grip — is also severely threatened by global warming. Rising polar temperatures melt this ice, too, which releases methane into the air. Methane is a greenhouse gas that is about 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. As with the sea ice albedo effect, the impact of methane release, which has only just begun, will have a huge feedback effect that will dramatically impact regional and global temperatures.
The science of global warming tells us that the Arctic is about to have significantly less ice coverage and become a lot warmer in the coming decades. This, in turn, means that the region is set to become much more important in the geopolitical calculations of the world’s great and powerful. The countries bordering the Arctic Ocean – Russia, Norway, Denmark (via Greenland), Canada and the United States – are already positioning themselves to claim as great a share of this virgin maritime territory as possible.
The race to stake a claim began in 2007, when Russia, which claims roughly half of the Arctic as its own, planted a titanium Russian flag on the seabed beneath the North Pole. Other countries reacted bemusedly to the stunt, but it was part of a broader, very serious research effort directed by Moscow to determine whether the seafloor of the North Pole was geologically connected to Russia’s offshore continental shelf. If this were the case, Russia could then claim the North Pole – and any subsea resources it contains – as part of its economic exclusion zone under the United Nations Law of the Sea.
The other powers surrounding the Arctic were quick to respond. In the years since Russia planted its flag, Canada and the United States have sent competing research teams to the Arctic and upped their military presence – at great expense – in the forbidding, isolated region. Norway, which borders Russia and has competing, overlapping maritime claims with Moscow, has also moved its military command center above the Arctic Circle to better orient its military forces defending its interests in the far north. Even tiny Denmark, which controls Greenland, has sought to keep up by claiming new maritime territories for its own.
This new rivalry over the Arctic hit a crescendo in December, with Canada officially claiming the North Pole as its own. Russia, meanwhile, responded to the Canadian claim by announcing a substantial buildup in its military infrastructure and force projection capabilities in its Arctic territories, including the creation of a unified Arctic-region military command for all Russian forces in the region. Now that Russian troops have forcibly occupied the Crimean Peninsula in response to a revolution that recently ousted Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, this northern buildup will no doubt be taken much more seriously by Russia’s Arctic neighbors.
Finally, even non-Arctic powers are growing more interested in the geopolitical happenings around the North Pole. In May 2013, for instance, the Arctic Council, an international organization that hosts meetings on regional issues, agreed to allow six non-Arctic countries — China, Japan, India, South Korea, Singapore and Italy– entry into the club as observers. Each of these observer states has expressed greater interest in the far north as the ice retreats, with energy-hungry Asian states — China and India, in particular — eager to participate in the eventual economic development of the Arctic.
Indeed, Chinese military officials have gone so far as to say that “the Arctic belongs to all the people around the world as no nation has sovereignty over it” — clearly indicating that Beijing sees the top of the world as a strategic interest.
China has also done more than hint that it fully intends to pursue its strategic interests in the Arctic. It has, for instance, announced several scientific expeditions to the northern polar region and the acquisition of the country’s second sea-going icebreaker. Beijing has engaged in a substantive round of dollar diplomacy in the far north, too, penning a trade pact with Iceland — a country strategically located in the near Arctic — while Chinese firms, which will be inevitably connected to the Chinese Communist Party and government, are expected to be a major partner in the development of Greenland’s mineral resources.
What’s driving all this, of course, is the immense amount of energy, minerals and lucrative commercial trade routes expected to open up as the Arctic melts. In the next 50 years, for instance, the diminishing ice cover could open the Arctic Ocean to a large amount of shipping during the summer. This would dramatically cut transshipment time and costs between China and Europe. Obviously, whoever can create or stake claim to polar shipping infrastructure in the meantime will be well-positioned to take advantage of these new trade routes.
Oil and gas opportunities, however, are most eagerly sought. The U.S. Geological Survey, for instance, estimated in 2008 that territory north of the Arctic Circle could contain as much as 90 billion barrels of oil and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, or about “22-percent of the undiscovered, technically recoverable resources in the world.” While these resources are located in what can only charitably described as an extremely harsh operating environment, major Western oil players and state-owned national oil companies such as Norway’s Statoil have already launched survey ships and prospecting missions to the Earth’s far north in the hopes of uncovering some of these riches. Shell even tried to begin drilling operations in 2013, but harsh conditions forced the oil giant to suspend operations after its drill ships suffered weather-related accidents while operating off of the northern coast of Alaska.
What all of this means is that a region of the world that was once mostly an afterthought in global politics has gained prominence. Nations are now eyeing both territorial arrangements and economic claims in the far north with a degree of seriousness that is usually reserved for much hotter, dustier climes.
The Arctic is even being militarized, as Russia and competing nations build up the capacity to project force there. This doesn’t mean that clashes over the frosty waterways of the Arctic are inevitable — much more is to be gained from cooperation than conflict — but it’s a possibility that can’t be ruled out, either.