Calling the Arctic “Mecca” implies that the Arctic will save Russia not only economically, but spiritually as well. The identity that failed to crystallize in the decades after the fall of the USSR will finally coalesce around a great new national enterprise where heroic boldness, economic feats, and patriotism will merge. For grandeur and complexity the Arctic project is often compared to the mastery of outer space, and from the societal point of view, it has the advantage of allowing many more people to participate.
Russia made its Arctic intentions fully explicit on August 2, 2007, when Artur Chilingarov, scientist, polar explorer, and politician, startled the world by descending to a depth of some fourteen thousand feet in a submersible and planting a titanium Russian flag on the seafloor beneath the North Pole. His courage was admirable. Chilingarov was sixty-seven at the time. There was no guarantee that he would find his way safely back to the hole on the surface, and the submersible could not break through the ice on its own. In quite un-Soviet fashion, the entire proceedings were broadcast live.
Staking a claim by planting his nation’s flag like explorers of old elicited derision closely followed by alarm. “This isn’t the fifteenth century…. You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say ‘We are claiming this territory,’” mocked Peter MacKay, Canadian foreign minister at the time.[297]
But the Canadians changed their tune quickly, dispatching their prime minister to the Arctic. As a senior official put it: “The Russians sent a submarine to drop a small flag at the bottom of the ocean. We’re sending our prime minister to reassert Canadian sovereignty.”[298] (From the wording, it wasn’t clear if they were also sending him to the bottom or whether a photo-op stroll on an ice floe would suffice.) Upon his arrival he announced the establishment of two new military bases in the region to defend that sovereignty.
Beyond the politics and the posturing a lot is at stake. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet and is now ice-free long enough that its vast deposits of oil, gas, and precious minerals could conceivably be extracted. Passages for shipping have been opened up over Russia and Canada, which reduces distance, time, and costs by significant amounts. Potentially, the melting will make enormous fish stocks available for commercial harvesting. All this makes the Arctic a place worth exploiting and worth fighting for.
Most of us have maps rather than globes, which are already acquiring a sort of retro chic like typewriters. Maps are slightly absurd, of course, as are any two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional phenomena, especially when it comes to depicting Earth as a whole. A globe, when viewed from above, is a much better guide to the relative presence and proportion of the five Arctic countries—the United States, Canada, Russia, Denmark (as the foreign-affairs representative of Greenland), and Norway. It is there where all the lines of longitude converge in zero that the fate of Putin’s Russia will play out sometime in midcentury.
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.[299]
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.”[300]
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.”[301]
Estimates of the wealth the Arctic holds clearly vary widely, even wildly. Partly this is simply due to a lack of information. It’s been said that we know more about the surface of Mars than about the Arctic Ocean’s floor. Still, two things seem fairly certain. One is that even the most conservative estimates of the gas and oil deposits make them attractive except in the worst of markets. The other is that the melting of the Arctic ice cap has opened the fabled, long-sought Northwest Passage across the top of Canada to commercial shipping, making it a “trans-Arctic Panama Canal,” as Icelandic president Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson has called it.[302] Russia’s equivalent, the Northern Sea Route (NSR), has itself already been compared to the Suez Canal, with which it intends to compete. Not all the money is to be made underwater.
There are several advantages to these two major new shipping routes. Shorter is cheaper. The Northern Sea Route reduces a voyage from Hamburg to Yokohama from 18,350 kilometers to 11,100. The story is much the same with Canada’s Northwest Passage. Previously a ship traveling from Seattle to Rotterdam would have to pass through the Panama Canal. The direct Northwest Passage route cuts 25 percent off the distance, with commensurate savings in fuel and labor costs, though insurance costs can run higher.
298
Lawrence Daina and Daniel Dombey, “Canada Joins Rush to Claim the Arctic,”
302
Christoph Seidler and Gerald Trauletter, “Boon to Global Shipping: Melting of Artic Ice Opening Up New Routes to Asia,”