More than two decades ago, at the height of the Cold War, Arctic scholar Oran Young proclaimed that the world was “entering the age of the Arctic, an era in which those concerned with international peace and security will urgently need to know much more about the region, and in which policy-makers in the Arctic-rim states will become increasingly concerned.” Indeed, a glance at any Cold War-era map of the polar region showed the two superpowers standing face to face across their common polar frontier. The logic of geopolitics placed the North Pole at the very centre of the world, making the Arctic Ocean appear to be the modern-day equivalent of the Mediterranean of ancient times.
And yet, the age of the Arctic did not come. There was one seemingly immutable factor preventing the “age of the Arctic” from starting: the harsh climate and permanent polar icepack made large-scale polar development largely an exercise in futility, keeping development of the region limited to just a few large-scale energy, natural resource or military projects. Apart from nuclear submarines passing silently beneath, and exceedingly expensive heavy icebreakers crunching their way across, polar sea ice remained largely impenetrable.
But now, two decades after Oran Young introduced the concept of the “age of the Arctic” to the lexicon of northern studies, something transformative is finally happening up along our last frontier: The long-frozen, seemingly impenetrable polar sea is starting to thaw, unexpectedly rapidly, opening up larger and larger portions of the Arctic Ocean to seasonally ice-free conditions for longer and longer periods.
So quickly is the ice melting that the prospect of a navigable, ice-free Arctic Ocean is no longer the stuff of fanciful imagination, and has been the topic of two National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Ice Centre-sponsored conferences (Naval Operations in an Ice Free Arctic symposium, April, 2001; Impact of an Ice-Diminishing Arctic on Naval and Maritime Operations symposium, July, 2007).
Within our lifetimes, and possibly in less than a single generation, we may witness the opening up of Arctic sea lanes that are fully navigable year-round: The strategic, economic and diplomatic consequences will be enormous.
According to scientists from the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free by 2060 if current warming trends continue. NSIDC research last summer found that the Arctic was “experiencing an unprecedented sixth consecutive year with much less sea ice than normal,” and that “the extent of Arctic sea ice for 2007 [was] currently on pace to set a new record minimum that may be substantially below the 2005 record.”
Indeed, the 2005 record was broken “as Arctic sea ice extent shrank through the summer of 2007 to its record-setting minimum in September.”
According to a new World Wildlife Fund report released on April 24, “recently observed changes are happening at rates significantly faster than predicted,” and the melting of Arctic sea ice and the Greenland ice sheet “was found to be severely accelerated, now even prompting the expert scientists to discuss whether both may be close to their ‘tipping point.'.”
The impacts of global warming and the resulting Arctic thaw will be profound. Michael T. Klare, a professor of peace and world-security studies at Hampshire College and defence correspondent for The Nation, explained that “global warming will affect resource competition and conflict profoundly” in coming years – and while “global warming's effects cannot be predicted with certainty, it is likely to produce diminished rainfall in many parts of the world, leading to a rise in desertification in these areas and a decline in their ability to sustain agriculture,” which may, in turn, “force people to fight over remaining sources of water and arable land, or to migrate in large numbers to other areas, where their presence may be resented by the existing inhabitants.”
