The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future

and the United States—recently banded together to issue the “Ilulissat Declaration,” an assertion that existing international laws are perfectly sufficient for working out their territorial disputes in the region. Everything’s cool, no new Arctic treaties are needed—or wanted. Now, would everyone else—like the European Union—kindly butt out? ³⁵⁴

These five powers are signaling that UNCLOS is the law of the Arctic Ocean, just like any other ocean. They are heeding its procedures for sovereignty claims to its seafloor, in the same manner as the many other Article 76 claims inching forward around the world. None are interested in relinquishing their existing right to make these claims. There will be no new “Arctic Treaty” with shared international governance, as exists in Antarctica. And centuries of legal precedent tell us that once the boundary lines get set, they will stay set. In Southern California today, property lines set by early ranchos have persisted through centuries of rule first by Spain, then Mexico, then the United States.

So how will it all pan out? The bathymetric and geological data are still being collected, but Russia has the longest coastline and the broadest continental shelf in the Arctic Ocean. This optimal geography will win sovereignty over very large tracts of seabed and most of the natural gas promised by the U.S. Geological Survey assessment.³⁵⁵ Canada is positioned to more than double its offshore holdings northwest of Queen Elizabeth Island. The United States will expand dominion in a triangular wedge extending due north of Alaska’s North Slope, winning control of some of the Arctic Ocean’s most promising oil-bearing rocks. Norway has secured chunks of the Norwegian and Barents seas and will share claims with Russia in the gas-rich Barents Sea.

But Norway has no shot at the North Pole and neither does the United States. That prize—if it is a prize— hinges on the Lomonosov Ridge mentioned earlier in the chapter. This thousand-mile undersea mountain chain, roughly bisecting the abyss of the central Arctic Ocean, is the only hope for a continental shelf extension claim extending as far as the geographic North Pole. Russia, Denmark, and Canada are busily mapping it.³⁵⁶ But the importance of the North Pole seabed, a distant, heavily ice-covered area and unpromising oil and gas province at that, is primarily symbolic. Personally speaking, if it’s really necessary for any country to control the North Pole, then it seems only fair that it be Russia. Russia’s first hydrographic surveys date to 1933. No surface ship ever reached the North Pole until the Soviet nuclear icebreaker Arktika accomplished it in 1977. By the end of 2009 the feat had been accomplished just eighty times: Once each by Canada and Norway, twice by Germany, thrice by the United States, six times by Sweden, and sixty-seven times by Russia. Her Sibir icebreaker completed the first (and only) voyage to reach the North Pole in winter back in 1989. As far as I’m concerned, Russia has earned it.

Whether the science will reveal the Lomonosov Ridge to be geologically attached to Russia, or to Greenland (Denmark), or to Canada, or none of them, is unknown. What is known is that no one is bristling missiles over this. And there’s little reason to think that anyone will.

The Five-Century Dream

The dream is a northern shipping route between the Atlantic and Asia’s Far East, a quest spanning over five centuries since the English, Dutch, and Russians first began looking for it. The only alternative, until the Suez and Panama canals were built, was to sail all the way around the southern horns of either Africa or South America. Many intrepid souls died looking for a shorter route over the North American or Eurasian continents. Probing northwest (the Northwest Passage), their ships got stuck like bugs to flypaper in Canada’s perennially frozen northern archipelago, en route to the Bering Strait. Others died trying northeast (the Northern Sea Route), attempting to trace Russia’s long northern coastline to reach the Bering Strait from the other direction. Both routes have now been traversed many times but neither is a viable commercial shipping lane. However, a small amount of international traffic is stirring between Canada’s port of Churchill (in Hudson Bay) and Europe, and occasionally Murmansk.

Since the 2007 and 2008 sea-ice convulsions, the prospect of global trade flows streaming through the Northwest Passage, the Northern Sea Route, or even straight over the North Pole has become one of the most breathlessly touted benefits of global climate change. After all, those fifteenth-century navigators were geographically correct: Even after the Panama and Suez canals were made, the shortest shipping distances between Asia and the West would still lie through the Arctic Ocean.³⁵⁷

Lest we get carried away with visions of colorful sailboat regattas in the Arctic Ocean, keep in mind just how formidable sea ice is to the maritime industry. Only the largest heavy class of icebreaker like the Rossiya can break through it confidently.³⁵⁸ Canada has just two heavy icebreakers, the United States three. Russia—by far the world leader in this domain—is expanding its fleet to around fourteen. Seven are nuclear-powered, the largest and most powerful in the world.³⁵⁹ But icebreakers are costly and few. They require a strengthened hull, an ice-clearing shape, and serious pushing power, features not possessed by normal ships.³⁶⁰ There are barely a hundred of them operating in the entire world. The world’s other vessels, of course, number in the hundreds of thousands, but cannot navigate safely through sea ice.

However, there is a very real possibility that by 2050, if not sooner, the Arctic Ocean will become briefly free of sea ice in September, by the close of the northern hemisphere summer. The ice will always return in winter (much like the Great Lakes today), but this is nevertheless a radical transformation, one that will dramatically increase the seasonal penetration of shipping and other maritime activities into the region. For part of the year, it would change from being the domain of a handful of heavy icebreakers to that of thousands of ordinary ships.

One doesn’t need a fancy climate model projection to appreciate this. It’s already obvious today. On the following two pages, consider the seasonal cycle of shipping activity that already happens each year in the Arctic. When sea ice expands in winter, ships retreat. When it shrinks in summer, they advance.

Note the profound restriction that sea ice imposes upon shipping activity. Few, if any, vessels dare to enter the ice pack, but there are thousands of them poking and probing around its southern periphery (there were at least six thousand ships operating in the Arctic in 2004, the year that these two maps capture).³⁶¹ In January, sea ice confines them to the Aleutian Islands, northern Fennoscandia, Iceland, and southern Greenland. Even the icebreakers retreat then. Only Russia did any serious icebreaking—to and from Dudinka, a port for the Noril’sk mining complex on the Yenisei River. But in July, when the ice melts, the ships pour in.

The Arctic Ocean will never be ice-free in winter, but summer shipping will last longer and penetrate more deeply. If it really does become ice-free by late summer, it should be briefly possible to sail a ship right over the top of the world.

Not all shipping companies are thrilled about the prospect of this. Take, for example, Northern Transportation Company Limited, northern Canada’s oldest Arctic marine operator. Since 1934 NTCL has been providing cargo transport down the Mackenzie River and all across North America’s western Arctic coast, from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Taloyoak in Nunavut. The bulk of their business is cargo transport to villages, oil and gas operations, mines, and offshore energy exploration. The company’s vice president, John Marshall, was kind enough to show me around their port in Hay River, on the shore of Great Slave Lake.

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I was impressed. There were a hundred barges in operation, acres of other vessels parked, and a Syncrolift to raise huge ships entirely out of the water. Workers were swarming all over the barges to load them up and move them out. The company moves fast to capitalize on their short shipping season—only about four months—before the ice returns in October. But when I bounced the long-term climate model projections for sea ice off my host, I was surprised to learn he hopes to never see their simulations materialize. A longer shipping season on the Mackenzie would be wonderful, but an open Northwest Passage would allow competition in from the east. The sea ice blocking that passage, Marshall told me, was keeping his southern competitors out.³⁶³

If the Arctic Ocean becomes ice-free in summer, it will also affect maritime activities in at least one other important way. It spells the disappearance of so-called “multiyear ice,” the more obstructing of two forms of sea ice currently present there. “First-year” ice, as the name implies, is baby ice, less than twelve months old. It is one or