by Curt Stager
Some of the likely losers among terrestrial Arctic mammals are caribou, reindeer, pika, and lemmings. Competition with newcomers for food and transmission of parasites and diseases from invasive species are only some of the problems that they face; warming itself is yet another. More frequent cold-season rains and thaws destroy the protective insulation and oxygen flow necessary for winter-active rodents to survive in their under-snow tunnels. They also encase edible mosses and lichen with impenetrable ice, and hard crusts within and upon formerly loose snowpacks make travel and digging for food more difficult. A single October rain-on-snow event killed 20,000 musk oxen on Banks Island in the Canadian Arctic in 2003. On the other hand, longer and warmer growing seasons might make life easier on those animals who make it through the cold months.
Warming even reshapes the land itself. Where smooth bedrock underlies seasonally frozen water bodies, the lengthening of summer open-water periods is driving some of those lakes into oblivion. My friend John Smol, a specialist in the history and ecology of lakes at Queen’s University, Ontario, is now losing some of his study sites to a process that he calls “crossing the final ecological threshold” of human impact.
For thousands of years, shallow depressions in the glacially smoothed granite of Cape Herschel on Ellesmere Island have contained frozen ponds that thawed only briefly during summer. In an earlier study, Smol and his colleagues used sediment cores to show that the ponds were becoming icefree for longer and longer periods since the nineteenth century; sunlight-loving algae were common in the most recent layers of mud but rare or absent in the older ones. They were criticized at first for being alarmist, but the trend has now become undeniably clear. “The longer these lakes stay ice-free in summer,” he explained to me, “the more water they lose to evaporation in the twenty-four-hour sunlight. Some of them have now dried out completely, and the rest are heading in that direction, too.”
Scientists from Queen’s University, Ontario, collecting the last samples from what used to be a pond at Cape Herschel, Arctic Canada, now drying out as a result of recent climate change. John Smol
I asked John if he has noticed other signs of change, as well. “Sure,” he replied. “Native ice-dependent species are losing out, but lots of other stuff is moving up from the south. We’re now seeing robins on Baffin Island, and bees are showing up on the tundra flowers. The Inuit have no traditional names for some of these new species, and they’re even having trouble telling when to harvest the local berries because the growing seasons are changing so much.” Among the more unpleasant differences is the arrival of biting insects. “Our study site is so far north that we never had much trouble with mosquitoes before; it was just too cold up there. But now we’re starting to run into them in the field.” One win for the bugs, one more loss for the scientists.
Is he depressed about these changes, or just “scientifically concerned” about them? “Depressed,” he answered without hesitation. “But not quite despairing, either. I still rage about what’s going on, but that’s because I still have hope that we can stop things from getting a lot worse.”
Elsewhere, hard permafrost soils are thawing, turning vast stretches of tundra into quagmires. Such places are seeing new meltwater ponds appear, quite the opposite of the situation at rocky Cape Herschel. And much of the northern coast is low-lying, so newly ice-free ocean waves cut deeply into soft, formerly protected shores. Few maps of the expected encroachments of sea level on the world’s ports and beaches show the circumpolar regions clearly, so it can be difficult to envision exactly what this means for Arctic geography. But it appears likely that the changes will be large, especially where loosely consolidated land slopes most gently upward from the sea.
Horrifying examples of this process are already under way, not so much from rising sea levels but simply from the warming of frozen soils and the loss of protective coastal ice. Many native settlements along the shores of northern Alaska and Canada were built upon permafrost-cemented sediments close to the beach, but what was once a firm foundation is now becoming loose and waterlogged. That is a serious problem in and of itself; some folks now have to wait until nocturnal cold solidifies local roads before traveling between villages. But in the face of an unsheathed ocean, the softening earth also becomes easy prey for the hungry waves, particularly when storm winds pile them high and heavy against the shore. Parts of the Beaufort Sea coast retreated by 43 to 46 feet (13 to 14 m) per year between 2002 and 2007, dumping exposed villages and archaeological sites into the water from steep, crumbling permafrost bluffs.
As disturbing as they are to watch, these scenes of buckling roads, house-eating potholes, and collapsing coasts are temporary signs of a polar world that is currently in transition. The rising surface of an open Arctic Ocean—and, much later on the Anthropocene carbon curve, falling sea levels—may keep vulnerable coastal settlements in a chronic state of flux for centuries. But eventually much of the water that now soaks the spongy surfaces of peatlands may evaporate or drain away, allowing the land to settle into a drier, more stable condition that can better support forests, fields, roads, and towns. Shipyards, refineries, and storage facilities will turn formerly remote outposts into busy transport hubs and ports of call. Pole-crossing marine shortcuts are already being mapped between Iceland and Alaska and between Murmansk and the Hudson Bay settlement of Churchill, which is now linked to the rest of North America primarily by air and rail.
As polar habitats continue to evolve, more people will move up there as well, especially where new industries take root. As traditional indigenous hunters of caribou and whales face the loss of familiar patterns of weather and ice stability, others will aim to join the list of winners, and not all of them will be outsiders. Nature correspondent Quirin Schiermeier recently quoted Frank Pokiak, chair of the Inuvialuit Game Council in Tuktoyaktuk, Alaska, as saying, “People need to understand that we’ve been living with changes all our lives. Climate change is just another thing we have to adapt to. We may need to harvest other species, perhaps grizzly bear, perhaps caribou, but we won’t quit existing.” Aiding such people in their adaptive efforts will be a host of warming-related factors, from lowered heating costs to easier open-water travel to longer and more job-rich construction seasons.
With clear passages more and more reliably open in summer, more ships will sail the coastlines of the polar ocean. Unfortunately, not everybody agrees upon who owns what in that new frontier, and territorial disputes are heating up even faster than the air overhead.
A case in point is Hans Island, a wedge-shaped half square mile of stone in the narrow strait between Greenland and Ellesmere Island. Both Denmark and Canada consider these to be private territorial waters, and their originally claimed boundary lines overlap to an uncomfortable degree. In the past, such differences of opinion didn’t threaten much more than nationalistic pride, but the stakes are higher now.
A tit-for-tat struggle over the ridiculously tiny islet commenced during the 1980s when a Canadian oil company began to reconnoiter the area. In response to the perceived challenge, the Danish minister for Greenland helicoptered over to Hans Island to plant a flag along with a bottle of liquor and a note that reportedly read “Welcome to the Danish island.” In the years that followed, alternating military patrols of Canadians and Danes took turns pulling each other’s flags down and erecting nationalistic markers of their own. Though amusing, this dispute was also potentially quite serious. In 2005, Canada’s Conservative Party called the latest Hans Island incident “an invasion of Canada,” and another politician threatened to use naval vessels to “protect our territorial integrity” up north. The flag war finally ended peacefully when precise satellite imagery convinced officials in Canada and Denmark that the international border actually splits the island rather than sidestepping it.
The increasingly ice-free Arctic is a potentially valuable new resource for northern nations. The expansion of shipping lanes into the polar ocean, with open water in summer and only thin seaso
nal ice in winter, will revolutionize the geography of Russia, Canada, Scandinavia, and Alaska. The newly opened Northwest Passage and today’s patchwork of isolated “seas”—the Laptev, Beaufort, and Barents Seas, the Chukchi and East Siberian Seas—will fuse into one continuous water mass, and the pole, once a barrier, will become a gateway. Ships hauling cargo and passengers between Europe and Pacific nations will bypass the Panama Canal for much or all of the year, depending on how iceworthy the ships are. A Northwest Passage route from Rotterdam to Seattle is 2,000 nautical miles shorter than the current one through Panama, and tracing a “Northern Sea Route” along Russia’s coast rather than using the Suez Canal cuts 4,700 nautical miles from the trip between Rotterdam and Yokohama.
Some in Canada are trying to claim the Northwest Passage for their homeland by citing the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which pushed national boundaries 200 miles (320 km) offshore and therefore may put most of that lucrative coastal route within the economic sphere of Canada. Russia and Norway are arguing over rights to the Barents Sea, and Russia, Canada, Norway, and Denmark are all trying to stretch their northern claims as far offshore as possible. Most nations seem willing to leave the central high seas free and open to international navigation, but it’s what lies beneath the waves that’s becoming most problematic.
In June 2007, Russian geologists returned from studying the Lomonosov Ridge, a narrow fence of faulted seabed that splits the deep central basin of the Arctic Ocean between Siberia and Greenland. Normally, such an expedition would go unnoticed by the general public, but this one ignited a political firestorm.
The flash point was the geologists’ claim that the ridge is, geologically speaking, a direct extension of the Russian mainland. In an instant, long-standing perceptions of the North Pole as being a landless realm of floating ice evaporated. There’s plenty of land up there after all; it’s just that it lies under several vertical miles of frigid seawater.
Two months later, a Russian minisub took territorial disputes to new heights—or depths—by planting a rustproof titanium flag on the seafloor beneath the pole. Was it merely a prank, or did it amount to claiming the top of the world along with roughly half of the Arctic Ocean bottom? Canada and Denmark were neither amused nor convinced; the other end of the Lomonosov Ridge joins their own territories of Ellesmere and Greenland. At the time of this writing, the Russian claim still awaits confirmation or rejection by the United Nations, which faces a lengthening list of similar territorial dustups.
That so many parties are caught up in a polar land grab attests to the reality and importance of climate-driven changes in the Arctic. Some may still deny that global warming is upon us, but they’re certainly not among those who are now maneuvering to cash in on it. The whole situation seems rather unfair, though. Most of the nations that are slated to reap the greatest rewards from this new north are already among the world’s wealthiest, and they’re also among the carbon emitters who are most responsible for these changes to begin with.
The bedrock north of Great Slave Lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories is thought to represent one of the richest mineral deposits on Earth. The Ekati and Diavik mines already produce more than 10 percent of the world’s natural gem-quality diamonds and even as northern access routes that depend on stable permafrost and lake ice crossings liquify, engineers and industrialists are envisioning a future spiderweb of new dryland roads and tracks to connect new mines to new marine ports. Both Canada and Russia are preparing for further intensification of a diamond-driven “cold rush” once the roads can support it more effectively. Baffin Iron Mines Corporation is reportedly developing its own Arctic railway and port to service its operations, and uranium miners in Nunavut are poised to spark a new northern “glow rush.”
Published estimates vary, but between a tenth and a third of the world’s untapped oil reserves are thought to lie in the Arctic, particularly on the broad, shallow continental shelves. There may also be far more natural gas there than oil. North America’s largest oil fields lie in Alaska’s
Prudhoe Bay, huge quantities of gas and coal underlie the North Slope, and Canada has major reserves in the Mackenzie Delta and elsewhere in the high Arctic. Russia claims valuable deposits along its Siberian shores; close to three-quarters of its oil and gas already come from its Arctic territories. Reliable open-water routes will make those resources more accessible and profitable. They will also increase the risk of oil spills, which could be horrendously difficult to clean up if the black goo slips beyond reach under what remains of the floating ice.
The new fossil fuel bonanza could also drive the sum of our greenhouse gas emissions even higher than it already is, but convincing people to shut those wells down in order to stop the climatic changes that bring them so much wealth will be difficult. Even in countries that currently express interest in controlling carbon pollution, the temptation of short-term monetary gains from Arctic fuel production and trade may outweigh concerns about climate among those who stand to benefit from them.
Ironically, we who brought this new world into being will also be responsible for its eventual demise. As atmospheric CO2 concentrations finally sink back closer to today’s levels thousands of years from now, the Arctic Ocean will begin to freeze over again. But when? Sediment cores collected from the Lomonosov Ridge by an international team under the leadership of Norwegian researcher Catherine Stickley reveal the first appearance of ice-loving algae in layers that date back to 47 million years ago. Atmospheric CO2 levels are thought to have fallen to 1,100 to 1,400 ppm by then from their earlier Eocene highs, so perhaps 1,100 to 1,400 ppm represents an approximate threshold to Arctic ice formation in the darkness of winter. In that case, the slow recovery from an extreme 5,000-Gton carbon emissions scenario might permit winter sea ice to re-form between 2,000 and 5,000 years from now, and a moderate scenario might not stop winter ice formation at all.
But allowing the Arctic ice cap to persist in summer as well would be another matter. Several sources report that permanent year-round coverage of the pole began 14 to 10 million years ago, when CO2 concentrations were similar to those of today. If we take the modern value of 387 ppm CO2 as an approximate benchmark for the transition between frozen and ice-free conditions in summer, then a relatively moderate emissions scenario could delay year-round sea ice cover to some time between 50,000 and 100,000 AD. And by this same reasoning, an extreme 5,000-Gton scenario might delay it for as long as half a million years.
From our perspective in a time period when solid ice cover is still considered to be a normal feature of the Arctic Ocean, it is easy to think of the temporary opening of the ice cap as a shocking environmental wound inflicted by our carbon pollution. But for countless generations of people who will grow up accustomed to ice-free conditions in the deep future, the situation will probably seem quite different. Far out on the fading tail of the Anthropocene’s carbon pollution curve, they may well shudder at the incremental shrinkage of the polar sea lanes and the gradual demise, species by species, of what will by then have become familiar, even ancient marine ecosystems. Those ecosystems will have become unique in their own right, having developed in the context of the future Arctic’s unique combination of open waters and long, alternating stretches of seasonal darkness and light. Traditional native skills of living on an icebound sea may also be long lost to history by then, so life in a fully frozen north might seem undesirable, if not impossible, even to the descendants of today’s seal and whale hunters.
And later still, perhaps some time close to 100,000 AD if we follow the moderate 1,000-Gton emissions scenario, or several times later than that in the more extreme case, the polar seas will lie, like Snow White, encased once more in a glassy tomb. The once-thriving Arctic fishery will fade, along with the Northwest Passage, back into the realm of dreams. And great white bears, if any remain then, may once more wander the spring snowdrifts, pressure ridges, and floes in search of seal blubber. One can only hope that the ringed seals will also be t
here to share the floating ice with them if they ever do return.
9
The Greening of Greenland
Han kallade landit, pat er hafde fundit, Grœnland,
puiat han kuat, pat mundu fysa
menn pangat, er landit heti vel.
—Eirik’s Saga Rauda (transcription by Aaron Myer, Northvegr Foundation)
He named the land that he had found “Greenland”
because, he said, it might draw more people there
if it is well-named.
–Translation by Curt Stager
In 986 AD, Eirik the Red sailed from Iceland as the leader of more than two dozen boatloads of Norse colonists. Their destination: Granland, an indented rocky coast whose thin soils supported enough grass and shrubby browse to keep small herds of sheep, goats, cattle, pigs—and their owners—alive. Eirik had recently killed several of his countrymen over property disputes, and for him the journey was more than a quest for adventure; it was both a banishment and a chance to redeem himself with a successful economic venture. He’d had little trouble convincing several hundred farmers and their families to join him in the settlement effort, thanks in part to a recent famine, the relatively poor quality of most Icelandic soils, and the appealingly lush-sounding name that Eirik himself had given to the new country. The open-water trip was also more attractive than it might otherwise have been because a centuries-long spell of natural warming, what many historians have called the Medieval Warm Period, kept the route unusually free of sea ice.