Putin

The Arctic is an ocean surrounded by continents, unlike Antarctica, which is a continent surrounded by ocean. The Arctic was discovered by Phoenician sailors, who named the region after the northern star they had followed, called “Arktos” by the Greeks, meaning near the Great Bear (constellation Ursa Major). The larger Arctic Circle, which includes the northernmost parts of the five Arctic states, has bear—most famously, polar bear—musk oxen, reindeer, caribou, foxes, wolves, hare. The teeming plant and animal life under the ice sheet of the Arctic Ocean includes plants, plankton, and fish.

The ice that forms the polar ice cap in the Arctic Ocean is frozen sea water and is usually ten to thirteen feet thick, though some ridges reach heights of sixty-five feet. The ice cap is about the size of the continental United States and has typically lost about half its size with the summer, but quickly reacquired it with the coming of winter.

But recently something has happened. Over the last fifty years about 50 percent of the Arctic ice cap has melted away. As Scott G. Borgerson, international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, put it in “Arctic Meltdown: The Economic and Security Implications of Global Warming”:

The Arctic has always experienced cooling and warming, but the current melt defies any historical comparison. It is dramatic, abrupt, and directly correlated with industrial emissions of greenhouse gases…. The results of global warming in the Arctic are far more dramatic than elsewhere due to the sharper angle at which the sun’s rays strike the polar region during summer and because the retreating sea ice is turned into open water, which absorbs far more solar radiation. The dynamic is creating a vicious melting cycle known at the ice-albedo feedback loop.

This loop is defined as “the process whereby retreating sea ice exposes darker and less reflective seawater which absorbs more heat and in turn causes more ice to melt.”

The breakup of Arctic ice has sent polar bears southward and onto land. There they have encountered grizzlies fleeing north from Canadian mining and construction sites. Mating, they have produced a new hybrid now known informally as the “pizzly” or nanulak, which combines the Inuit word for polar bear, nanuk, with the word for grizzly, aklak.

In a paradox both obvious and painful, it was the burning of fossil fuels that caused the climate change that is melting the Arctic ice cap, thereby making its vast deposits of oil and gas accessible now for the first time. The U.S. Geological Survey and Norway’s Statoil jointly estimate that the Arctic contains one-fourth of the world’s remaining oil and gas deposits. The territory claimed by Russia alone holds up to 586 billion barrels according to the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources. The world consumes something like 90 million barrels of oil per day and so the estimate for the Russian deposits could keep the entire planet chugging along for almost eighteen years. At $50 a barrel that’s almost $30 trillion worth of oil.

Geological surveys also indicate that the Arctic seafloor, shallow at many points, also contains abundant high-grade copper, zinc, diamonds, gold, silver, platinum, manganese, and nickel.

The fishing stocks represent another bonanza with 25 percent of the world’s whitefish, from the cod in the Barents Sea to the pollack in the Russian Far East. The Atlantic has been so fished out of cod that the great fishing town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, is practically moribund. In addition, “polar invertebrates represent a valuable resource for the chemical and pharmaceutical sectors as they are used in the production of analgesics and other types of medication, as well as for food and drink preservation.”