The word arctic comes from the Greek arktikos, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), which means “near the bear,” Ursa Major, whose last two stars point toward the North Star:
The Arctic Ocean is 5.4 million square miles; this might make it the world’s smallest ocean but it is still almost as big as Russia, and one and a half times the size of the United States.
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The Arctic region includes land in parts of Canada, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States (Alaska). It is a land of extremes: for brief periods in the summer the temperature can reach 26 degrees Celsius in some places, but for long periods in winter it plunges to below minus 45. There are expanses of rock scoured by the freezing winds, spectacular fjords, polar deserts, and even rivers.
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The first recorded expedition was by a Greek mariner named Pytheas of Massalia in 330 BCE who found a strange land called Thule. Back home in the Mediterranean, few believed his startling tales of pure white landscapes, frozen seas, and strange creatures, including great white bears; but Pytheas was just the first of many people over the centuries to record the wonder of the Arctic and to succumb to the emotions it evokes.
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As for the first person to reach the North Pole, well, that’s a tricky one, given that even though there is a fixed point on the globe denoting its position, below it, the ice you are standing on is moving, and without GPS equipment it is hard to tell exactly where you are. Sir William Edward Parry, minus a GPS, tried in 1827, but the ice was moving south faster than he could move north and he ended up going backward; but he did at least survive.
Captain Sir John Franklin had less luck when he attempted to cross the last non-navigated section of the Northwest Passage in 1848. His two ships became stuck in the ice near King William Island in the Canadian archipelago. All 129 members of the expedition perished, some on board the ships, others after they abandoned the vessels and began walking south. Several expeditions were sent to search for survivors, but they found only a handful of skeletons and heard stories from Inuit hunters about dozens of white men who had died walking through the frozen landscape. The ships had vanished completely, but in 2014, technology caught up with geography and a Canadian search team using sonar located one of the vessels, HMS Erebus, on the seabed of the Northwest Passage and brought up the ship’s bell.
The fate of Franklin’s expedition did not deter many more adventurers from trying to find their way through the archipelago, but it wasn’t until 1905 that the great Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen charted his way across in a smaller ship with just five other crew. He passed King William Island, went through the Bering Strait and into the Pacific. He knew he’d made it when he spotted a whaling ship from San Francisco coming from the other direction. In his diary he confessed his emotions got the better of him, an occurrence perhaps almost as rare as his great achievement: “The Northwest Passage was done. My boyhood dream—at that moment it was accomplished. A strange feeling welled up in my throat; I was somewhat overstrained and worn—it was weakness in me—but I felt tears in my eyes.”
Twenty years later, he decided he wanted to be the first man to fly over the North Pole, which, although easier than walking across it, is no mean feat. Along with his Italian pilot, Umberto Nobile, and fourteen crew, he flew a semirigid airship over the ice and dropped Norwegian, Italian, and American flags from a height of three hundred feet. A heroic effort this may have been, but in the twenty-first century it was not seen as one giving much legal basis to any claims of ownership of the region by those three countries.
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The melting of the ice cap already allows cargo ships to make the journey through the Northwest Passage in the Canadian archipelago for several summer weeks a year, thus cutting at least a week from the transit time from Europe to China. The first cargo ship not to be escorted by an icebreaker went through in 2014. The Nunavik carried twenty-three thousand tons of nickel ore from Canada to China. The polar route was 40 percent shorter and used deeper waters than if it had gone through the Panama Canal. This allowed the ship to carry more cargo, save tens of thousands of dollars in fuel costs, and reduced the ship’s greenhouse emissions by 1,300 metric tons.
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The northeast route, or Northern Sea Route as the Russians call it, which hugs the Siberian coastline, is also now open for several months a year and is becoming an increasingly popular sea highway.
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In 2009, the US Geological Survey estimated that 1,669 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, 44 billion barrels of natural gas liquids, and 90 billion barrels of oil are in the Arctic, with the vast majority of it offshore. As more territory becomes accessible, extra reserves of the gold, zinc, nickel, and iron already found in part of the Arctic may be discovered.
ExxonMobil, Shell, and Rosneft are among the energy giants that are applying for licenses and beginning exploratory drilling. Countries and companies prepared to make the effort to get at the riches will have to brave a climate where for much of the year the days are endless night, where for the majority of the year the sea freezes to a depth of more than six feet, and where, in open water, the waves can reach forty feet high.
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The claims to sovereignty are not based on the flags of the early explorers but on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). This affirms that a signatory to the convention has exclusive economic rights from its shore to a limit of two hundred nautical miles (unless this conflicts with another country’s limits), and can declare it an exclusive economic zone (EEZ). The oil and gas in the zone are therefore considered to belong to the state. In certain circumstances, and subject to scientific evidence concerning a country’s continental shelf, that country can apply to extend the EEZ to 350 nautical miles from its coast.
The melting of the Arctic ice is bringing with it a hardening of attitude from the eight members of the Arctic Council, the forum where geopolitics becomes geopolarctics. The “Arctic Five,” those states with borders on the Arctic, are Canada, Russia, the United States, Norway, and Denmark (due to its responsibility for Greenland). They are joined by Iceland, Finland, and Sweden, which are also full members. There are twelve other nations with Permanent Observer status, having recognized the “Arctic States’ sovereignty, sovereign rights, and jurisdiction” in the region, among other criteria. For example, at the 2013 Arctic Council, Japan and India, which have sponsored Arctic scientific expeditions, and China, which has a science base on a Norwegian island as well as a modern icebreaker, were granted Observer status.
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Moscow has already put a marker down—a long way down. In 2007, it sent two manned submersibles 13,980 feet below the waves to the seabed of the North Pole and planted a rust-proof titanium Russian flag as a statement of ambition. As far as is known, it still “flies” down there today. A Russian think tank followed this up by suggesting that the Arctic be renamed. After not much thought, they came up with an alternative: “the Russian Ocean.”
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Russia and Norway have particular difficulty in the Barents Sea. Norway claims the Gakkel Ridge in the Barents as an extension of its Economic Exclusion Zone (EEZ), but the Russians dispute this, and they have a particular dispute over the Svalbard Islands, the northernmost point on earth with a settled population. Most countries and international organizations recognize the islands as being under (limited) Norwegian sovereignty, but the biggest island, Svalbard, formerly known as Spitsbergen, has a growing population of Russian migrants who have assembled around the coal-mining industry there. The mines are not profitable, but the Russian community serves as a useful tool in furthering Moscow’s claims on all of the Svalbard Islands.
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Norway, a NATO state, knows what is coming and has made the High North its foreign policy priority. Its air force regularly intercepts Russian fighter jets approaching its borders; the heightened tensions have caused it to move its center of military operations from the south of the country to the north, and it is building an Arctic battalion.
Canada is reinforcing its cold-weather military capabilities, which includes five new navy warships with moderate ice-breaking capability to be delivered between 2018 and 2022. Announcing the increase in the spring of 2015, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said, “Canada has a choice when it comes to defending our sovereignty over the Arctic. We either use it or lose it.”
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Russia meanwhile is building an Arctic army. Six new military bases are being constructed and several mothballed Cold War installations—such as those on the Novosibirsk Islands—are reopening, and airstrips are being renovated. A force of at least six thousand combat soldiers is being readied for the Murmansk region and will include two mechanized infantry brigades equipped with snowmobiles and hovercraft.
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The Murmansk brigades will be Moscow’s minimum permanent Arctic force, but Russia demonstrated its full cold-weather fighting ability in 2014 with an exercise that involved 155,000 men and thousands of tanks, jets, and ships. The Russian Defense Ministry said it was bigger than exercises it had carried out during the Cold War.
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As Melissa Bert, a US Coast Guard captain, told the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC: “They have cities in the Arctic, we only have villages.”
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The Russians know that NATO can bottle up their Baltic Fleet by blockading the Skagerrak Strait. This potential blockade is complicated by the fact that up in the Arctic their Northern Fleet has only 180 miles of open water from the Kola coastline until it hits the Arctic ice pack. From this narrow corridor it must also come down through the Norwegian Sea and then run the potential gauntlet of the GIUK gap to reach the Atlantic Ocean. During the Cold War, the area was known by NATO as the Kill Zone, as this was where NATO’s planes, ships, and submarines expected to catch the Soviet fleet.
Fast-forward to the new cold war and the strategies remain the same, even if now the Americans have withdrawn their forces from their NATO ally Iceland. Iceland has no armed forces of its own and the American withdrawal was described by the Icelandic government as “short-sighted.” In a speech to the Swedish Atlantic Council, Iceland’s Justice Minister Björn Bjarnason said: “A certain military presence should be maintained in the region, sending a signal about a nation’s interests and ambitions in a given area, since a military vacuum could be misinterpreted as a lack of national interest and priority.”
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It takes up to $ 1 billion and ten years to build an icebreaker. Russia is clearly the leading Arctic power with the largest fleet of icebreakers in the world, thirty-two in total, according to the US Coast Guard Review of 2013. Six of those are nuclear-powered, the only such versions in the world, and Russia also plans to launch the world’s most powerful icebreaker by 2018. It will be able to smash through ice more than ten feet deep and tow oil tankers with a displacement of up to seventy thousand tons through the ice fields.
By contrast, the United States has a fleet of one functioning heavy icebreaker, the USCGC Polar Star, down from the eight it possessed in the 1960s, and has no plans to build another. In 2012, it had to rely on a Russian ship to resupply its research base in Antarctica, which was a triumph for great-power cooperation, but simultaneously a demonstration of how far behind the United States has fallen.