The Arctic is changing. And not just for polar bears.
So we’d better pay attention. Because it is changing into a budding battleground of major powers. A battleground for shipping lanes, a battleground for fuels, a battleground for fisheries, a battleground for national security, a battleground for superpower supremacy.
The Arctic may often be dark, rarely visited, and ice-cold, but it is now a potential combat zone where economies and armies could conceivably clash.
If you’re surprised that it is taking on such importance— if you’re surprised that I’m even writing about it— you’re surely not alone. Up there at the top of the world, the Arctic has long been ignored. It wasn’t navigable and, when the Cold War ended, it wasn’t strategic.
But now, because of climate change, mammoth amounts of ice are melting, which is opening the Arctic. In the most recent measurements just last year, ice had melted down to an area of less than 1-½ million square miles. That still sounds like a lot, but it’s the second-smallest measurable Arctic ice mass since they started recording it more than 40 years ago.
— Photo from NASA —
The most obvious impact, and the one to which people have paid any attention at all in recent years, will be on the elevation of our oceans. As the ice melts down, the seas rise up. The Arctic Council, comprised of the eight nations with land mass above the Arctic Circle (which includes us, because of Alaska), predicts that by the end of this century, Arctic ice melt will raise ocean levels between seven and almost ten inches. Add that to other sources of sea level rise and according to the council, we’re looking at oceans 20 inches higher at best, almost 30 if nothing changes.
No one has to spell out what that means for the coastlines of nations all over the planet. Including ours.
But we don’t have to wait until the end of the century to see how the Arctic— economically, politically, militarily— is in play.
Begin with shipping lanes. No one navigated the Northwest Passage until 1906. Yet a hundred years later, for the first time, it was ice-free. Now, cargo and even passenger ships, accompanied by ice-breakers, are cruising through. For goods that would otherwise traverse the Panama Canal, this can save about 2,500 miles on a trip between Europe and Asia— or in terms of cost, about four days sailing.
What’s more, much of the Russian fleet— its fishing fleet and its naval fleet— is based above the Arctic Circle. So Russia craves easier passage to and from both the Pacific and the Atlantic. The U.S. goal to protect freedom of navigation, without a fleet of its own that far north, can be an empty threat.
Exhibit A for international competition, and potential conflict.
Then there are undersea fuels. We’ve always known about oil and gas up there. Our own Prudhoe Bay oil fields, where I’ve spent 24-hour nights, have been among the most bountiful on earth. The rigs so far are all on land— tundra— yet geologists believe there’s far more oil and gas in the waters just to the north. Maybe four times as much. The U.S. Geological Survey has estimated reserves of some 90-billion barrels of oil, 1.6-trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and 44-billion barrels of liquid natural gas. But it’s mostly all offshore. Now, in an increasingly ice-free Arctic, it is easier, and cheaper, to drill.
But we’re not the only ones who see that. About 15 years ago, a Russian sub planted a flag on the Arctic seabed, 2-½ miles below the ice. It has no international legal force but it’s a sign of what’s at stake. Others have their eye on the same prize.
Exhibit B for international competition, and potential conflict.
As for fisheries, another consequence of climate change is warmer water temperatures, so fish are flocking to the north, looking for colder waters in which they thrive. Fishermen in Maine say that lobsters, their bread and butter, already are moving toward Canada. The fisheries in the Arctic, rarely even reachable before, now are not just accessible, but richer than ever.
Exhibit C for international competition, and potential conflict.
Now we come to national security: ours, and the other nations in the Arctic. Russia has 15,000 miles of Arctic coastline. For a country whose economy depends on oil and gas and whose military defenses are largely concentrated above the Arctic Circle— an estimated two-thirds of Russia’s strategic nuclear deterrents are Arctic-based— it cannot afford to take a back seat to anyone.
But China wants to be a player too. Although it’s a stretch— China is about 900 miles from the Arctic Circle at its closest point— it calls itself a “near Arctic state,” and already is building infrastructure to support its own oil and gas and rare-earth mineral exploitation, as well as inroads with shipping lanes and fish. What concerns the U.S. is that China might convert some of that infrastructure from civilian uses to military.
Exhibit D for international competition, and potential conflict.
What some analysts fear the most though isn’t what’s under Arctic water or on it, but what’s above it. In other words, the sky. Both Russia and China are testing hypersonic offensive missiles, missiles that can move at five times the speed of sound or more. What’s worse, they might not just move at hypersonic speeds but be capable of zig-zagging rather than traveling in a straight and predictable trajectory.
— Photo from Russian Defense Ministry —
The United States has a network of listening posts— I once did a story at one in Turkey near the then-Soviet border with a dish half as big as a baseball diamond. But if either nuclear power were to launch a surprise attack over the Arctic, virtually all American listening posts are in the wrong places and pointed in the wrong direction for Arctic warfare. The U.S. has satellites designed to spot the flames of enemy missiles being launched, but tracking them over the Arctic is still an elusive goal.
Exhibit E for international competition… for superpower competition, and potential conflict.
In the wake of this week’s climate change conference in Scotland, new agreements hopefully will slow, if not reverse, the environmental damage. But when it comes to keeping the peace, both economically and militarily, there are no formal protocols. So the questions become, as nations reach for the riches of the Arctic, will there be diplomacy or intransigence? Will there be cooperation or conflict?
Hopefully Antartica serves as a role model for cooperation. There are regions of influence there, but no international borders. For the U.S. and Russia, the International Space Station is another. The chief of the Russian Space Agency “Roscosmos” once told me that even in times of high tension between the two governments, those tensions never reached space, and the head of NASA then confirmed it. One might even look to the DMZ between North and South Korea. Sometimes it gets rough, but if something like a DMZ could be established in the Arctic, it might serve a beneficial peace-keeping purpose.
They say that what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. They can’t say that about the Arctic. What happens now in the Arctic has ramifications worldwide. It might still often be dark, rarely visited, and ice-cold, but it’s vital that we no longer ignore it.
For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Some of his writing also appears on a website he co-founded, BoomerCafe.com.
And here I was just getting over the Nautilus going under the North Pole just before my birthday in 1958 . . . .