WHAT connects oil at $135 a barrel with last month's discovery of huge cracks in the Ward Hunt ice shelf off Ellesmere Island at the top of Canada's Arctic archipelago? And what might connect those two things with a new, even colder, war?
The cracks in the ice, further evidence that the ice cover on the Arctic Ocean is melting, were discovered by scientists tagging along with a Canadian army snowmobile expedition, officially called a "sovereignty patrol." The army was present because
Canada, like other Arctic countries, suspects that valuable resources will become accessible once the ice melts. The most valuable of those are oil and gas.
The strongest evidence for accelerated melting is the fact that more and more of the Arctic ice is thin "first-year" ice. Only about a metre thick, it spreads across the ocean each winter, but tends to melt in the summer.
Melting has taken big bites from the edge of the much thicker "permanent" ice in recent summers, and unless some of the first-year ice that replaces it lasts through the following winter, then melting will speed up. Everybody is watching to see what happens this summer, explains Dr Jim Maslanik of the University of Colorado: "If we see all the first-year ice melt out again, then probably we will have another record reduction in ice cover.
"If we see this a couple of years running, that tells us … that we are about 20 or 30 years ahead of where we are supposed to be based on the climate models."
If we are heading for an Arctic Ocean that is mostly ice-free in the summer, then drilling for gas and oil can soon begin. Hardly a week goes by without reference to the US Geological Survey's report that the Arctic basin contains a quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas. But the event that did most to trigger new concern about sovereignty was Artur Chilingarov's publicity stunt last summer.
Chilingarov is a polar explorer of the old school (he was a Soviet hero for saving an ice-bound ship in Antarctica), but is now deputy speaker of the Russian parliament and Vladimir Putin's personal envoy to the Arctic. Last summer he took a submarine down to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean precisely at the North Pole, and planted a Russian flag in the seabed.
"The Arctic is Russian. We must prove that the North Pole is an extension of the Russian landmass," he said afterwards, affecting surprise that other countries with an Arctic coastline saw this as a challenge. Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper, for example, flew to the Arctic the following week and announced that Canada would build six to eight new ice-strengthened warships for Arctic patrols.
Moscow claims that the Lomonosov Ridge, the subsea mountain range that goes straight across the middle of the Arctic Ocean, is an extension of the Russian territorial shelf, and therefore belongs to Russia. Even if the Law of the Sea tribunal does not accept that claim, Moscow may have an even broader claim in reserve.
In the early 20th century, seven countries laid claim to parts of Antarctica on the basis of sectors: pie-shaped slices running along lines of longitude that converge at the poles. The width of those slices depended on where the various claimants owned territories near Antarctica, mostly islands in the Southern Ocean.
Those claims are dormant because of a subsequent treaty banning economic development in Antarctica, but the precedent has not been forgotten.
By this principle, Russia could lay claim to about half the Arctic Ocean, and in 1924 the Soviet Union did precisely that.
Nobody accepted that claim then, and they wouldn't now if Russia raised it again. But Russia has the big Arctic ports and the nuclear-powered ice-breakers to make its claim stick, unlike anybody else.
That is where the current panic comes from. It probably won't end up in a new Cold War, but it has certainly stirred up the hens in the chicken coop.
As is often the case with hens, they are over-reacting. Russia is in a more assertive mood than it was a decade ago, but there are no signs that it intends to pursue its claims by force.
Moreover, there is no serious basis for the claim that a quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas reserves lie under the Arctic Ocean.
It always seemed implausible, given that it only accounts for slightly less than 3 per cent of the Earth's surface, but in fact, the US Geological Survey did not say anything of the sort.
Neither has any other authoritative source, yet this factoid has gained such currency that it even influences government policy. Isn't it interesting how readily people will believe something when they really want to?
The full article contains 818 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
