As Polar Ice Turns to Water, Dreams of Treasure Abound

CHURCHILL, Manitoba - It seems harsh to say that bad news for polar bears is good for Pat Broe. Mr. Broe, a Denver entrepreneur, is no more to blame than anyone else for a meltdown at the top of the world that threatens Arctic mammals and ancient traditions and lends credibility to dark visions of global warming.

Still, the newest study of the Arctic ice cap - finding that it faded this summer to its smallest size ever recorded - is beginning to make Mr. Broe look like a visionary for buying this derelict Hudson Bay port from the Canadian government in 1997. Especially at the price he paid: about $7.

By Mr. Broe's calculations, Churchill could bring in as much as $100 million a year as a port on Arctic shipping lanes shorter by thousands of miles than routes to the south, and traffic would only increase as the retreat of ice in the region clears the way for a longer shipping season.

With major companies and nations large and small adopting similar logic, the Arctic is undergoing nothing less than a great rush for virgin territory and natural resources worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Even before the polar ice began shrinking more each summer, countries were pushing into the frigid Barents Sea, lured by undersea oil and gas fields and emboldened by advances in technology. But now, as thinning ice stands to simplify construction of drilling rigs, exploration is likely to move even farther north. 

Last year, scientists found tantalizing hints of oil in seabed samples just 200 miles from the North Pole. All told, one quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas resources lies in the Arctic, according to the United States Geological Survey. 

The polar thaw is also starting to unlock other treasures: lucrative shipping routes, perhaps even the storied Northwest Passage; new cruise ship destinations; and important commercial fisheries.

"It's the positive side of global warming, if there is a positive side," said Ron Lemieux, the transportation minister of Manitoba, whose provincial government is investing millions in Churchill.

If the melting continues, as many Arctic experts expect, the mass of floating ice that has crowned the planet for millions of years may largely disappear for entire summers this century. Instead of the white wilderness that killed explorers and defeated navigators for centuries, the world would have a blue pole on top, a seasonally open sea nearly five times the size of the Mediterranean.

But if the Arctic is no longer a frozen backyard, the fences matter. For now it is not clear where those fences are. Under a treaty called the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, territory is determined by how far a nation's continental shelf extends into the sea. Under the treaty, countries have limited time after ratifying it to map the sea floor and make claims. 

In 2001, Russia made the first move, staking out virtually half the Arctic Ocean, including the North Pole. But after challenges by other nations, including the United States, Russia sought to bolster its claim by sending a research ship north to gather more geographical data. On Aug. 29, it reached the pole without the help of an icebreaker - the first ship ever to do so.

The United States, an Arctic nation itself because of Alaska, could also try to expand its territory. But several senators who oppose any possible infringement on American sovereignty have repeatedly blocked ratification of the treaty.

Indeed, not everyone agrees that warming of the Arctic merits concern. No one knows what share of the recent thawing can be attributed to natural cycles and how much to heat-trapping pollution linked to recent global warming, and some scientists and government officials, particularly in Russia, are dismissive of assertions that a permanent change is at hand.

"We are not going to have apple trees growing in Vorkuta," said the mayor of that coal-mining city, Igor L. Shpektor, who is also the president of Russia's union of Arctic cities and towns.

But the current thaw is already real enough for the four million people within the Arctic Circle, including about 150,000 Inuit. "As long as it's ice," said Sheila Watt-Cloutier, leader of a transnational Inuit group, "nobody cares except us, because we hunt and fish and travel on that ice. However, the minute it starts to thaw and becomes water, then the whole world is interested."

Increasingly, big corporations, the eight countries with Arctic footholds and other nations farther south are betting on the possibility of a great transformation. Energy-hungry China has set up a research station on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen and twice deployed its icebreaker Snow Dragon, which normally works in Antarctica, to northern waters to conduct climate research.

Interest in Arctic-hardy vessels has picked up so much that in January, Aker Finnyards, a giant shipbuilder based in Helsinki, created a subsidiary just to develop ice-hardened ships. Its new double-ended tanker slips smoothly through open water bow first but can spin around and use an icebreakerlike stern to smash through heavy floes. A Finnish energy company bought two for about $90 million apiece, and after buying one Russia licensed the design and is building two more.

In January, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research held a closed two-day meeting to hear from experts on the implications of a warming, opening Arctic.

"There are likely to be a number of foreign-policy issues that must be addressed by the United States and other nations" if the climate trends persist, said a summary of the meeting. "These issues include the availability and potential for exploitation of energy, fisheries and other resources; access to new sea routes; new claims under Law of the Sea; national security; and others."

A look at a map of the globe with the North Pole at its center explains why a new frontier matters. Some countries that one might think of as being half a world part appear as startlingly close neighbors, and relatively speaking, they are.

In the days of empire, Rudyard Kipling called jockeying among world powers in Central Asia the Great Game. Christopher Weafer, an energy analyst with Alfa Bank in Moscow, says this new Arctic rush is "the Great Game in a cold climate."

The Petroleum Rush

To understand the practical terms of this new competition for territory, opportunity and resources, a good place to begin is Hammerfest, Norway, one of the northernmost towns in the world and one of 12 Arctic settlements visited over six months by correspondents of The New York Times preparing this series of articles.

Hammerfest, once an austerely beautiful fishing village burned to the ground by the Nazis in World War II, is starting to swell with young people from other parts of Norway, Finland, Russia and Asia, as well as with highly trained technical workers from Europe and North America. They are drawn by Snohvit (in English, Snow White), a mammoth complex being built to receive natural gas piped from the Barents Sea and liquefy the gas for shipping.

The Norwegian government, which controls Snohvit in part through its majority ownership of the energy company Statoil, is desperate for Snohvit to be a success and put the country in the forefront of Arctic energy exploration. Being first, however, has had its challenges in the severe operating environment of the High North, as Arctic areas are called in Norway. Overruns have put the price of Snohvit at $8.8 billion, almost 50 percent above its original estimate.

The project has a firm backer in John Doyle Ong, the blunt United States ambassador in Oslo. Snohvit is scheduled to start sending liquefied natural gas to the Cove Point port in Maryland in 2007, just as American imports of liquefied gas from competing sources in the Middle East and Africa are set to rise rapidly. Importing natural gas from a stable country like Norway - already the world's third-largest oil exporter, after Saudi Arabia and Russia - is a rare option these days.

"Norway's importance to the United States in terms of our national energy policy is increasing with every passing year," Mr. Ong said.

But the United States' interests go beyond that - too far beyond for many in Norway. In September, the opening of frontier areas in the Barents and Norwegian Seas emerged as a central issue in elections that brought a leftist coalition to power, with some coalition members favoring a ban on Arctic oil and gas exploration in environmentally sensitive areas.

And besides supporting Snohvit, Mr. Ong, a former energy executive, has stepped into disputes between Norway and Russia over a large gray zone in the Barents. His insistence that Arctic-related matters be "trilateral" rather than bilateral is viewed as belligerent by some Norwegians.

In private, Norwegian officials welcome the heft of the United States in its negotiations with Russia. Norway is eager to resolve the territorial dispute so that some order, and Norwegian drilling expertise and environmental standards, can be imposed on Arctic exploration. Because as large as Snohvit is, it is dwarfed by a far bigger gas field to the east in Russian waters. That field, called Shtokman, is being developed by Gazprom, Russia's gas behemoth.

In September, Gazprom selected five companies - Statoil and Norsk Hydro from Norway, Total from France and Chevron and ConocoPhillips - as finalists in a search for partners to develop Shtokman, in the Barents Sea, 350 miles north of Russia's Kola Peninsula. The development costs are estimated at $15 billion to $20 billion. The field is reported to hold more than double all of Canada's gas reserves.

"They're going to find more of them," Mr. Weafer, the Moscow-based energy analyst, said of Arctic gas deposits. "It's the next energy frontier."

And while natural gas is certainly valued, the prize that is generating the biggest interest is oil. Virtually every large international energy company is studying how eventually to win permission from Norway and Russia to explore in the Barents, and the Norwegian Polar Institute has been contacted repeatedly by oil companies to explore the feasibility of drilling in the icier waters north of Spitsbergen.

Jan-Gunnar Winther, director of the institute, said the seasonal melting of the polar cap might allow access to more petroleum deposits but also create more challenges.

"A warmer climate in the north would mean more icebergs, rather than less," he said. "There will be obstacles in getting to the petroleum, but if oil prices stay high there will be enticements as well."

A push into the Barents Sea could help redraw the politics of energy allegiances, and gas in particular puts Russia in a strong position. "It has a good chance of becoming a more effective counterbalance to OPEC," Mr. Weafer said.

As for Norway, the warming world gives it the chance to seek influence far beyond its size. Energy-hungry countries that might have written off the Arctic not long ago are showing considerable interest in Norway's opening of the Barents; one visitor to Oslo in September was India's oil minister, seeking a role in exploration. And if a route farther north opens just four or five months of the year, Norway could even become a major supplier of oil and gas to China, said Sverre Lodgaard, director of the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs.

Norway is trying to position itself as "a dwarf among giants," Mayor Alf Jakobsen of Hammerfest said. "We're attracting young people to Hammerfest instead of sending them away, for the first time in years. The opportunity to become a springboard into the Arctic is upon us."

Fisheries Head North

Charlie Lean easily recalls when he realized that big changes were sweeping the fish stocks along the northern shores of Alaska.

Just over 10 years ago, when Mr. Lean was the state's fisheries manager for the northwest region, a call came in from the tiny Eskimo outpost of Kivalina, on the Chukchi Sea 150 miles northeast of the Bering Strait. A village elder was reporting "a massive fish kill" in the Wulik River, Mr. Lean said. Everyone assumed it was from some toxic spill upriver at the giant Red Dog zinc mine.

"I rounded up a plane and blasted off and flew up there," he said. "Flying overhead I could see right away it was the end of a pink salmon run. They were dying of natural causes as they always do once they spawn."

The elders had never seen a run of this salmon species. But they have shown up every year since.

The colonization of new rivers by pink salmon is just one of many changes in fish and crab stocks that appear linked to retreating sea ice and warming waters in the Chukchi Sea and, farther south, the Bering Sea. The changes are important because the Bering is rich with pollock, salmon, halibut and crab, already yielding nearly half of America's seafood catch and a third of Russia's.

Recent studies have projected that in a few decades there could be lucrative fishing grounds in waters that were largely untouched throughout human history.

In a 2002 report for the Navy on climate change and the Arctic Ocean, the Arctic Research Commission, a panel appointed by the president, concluded that species were moving north through the Bering Strait. "Climate warming is likely to bring extensive fishing activity to the Arctic, particularly in the Barents Sea and Beaufort-Chukchi region where commercial operations have been minimal in the past," the report said. "In addition, Bering Sea fishing opportunities will increase as sea ice cover begins later and ends sooner in the year."

But problems could emerge, as well, as stocks shift from the waters of one country to those of another. Snow crabs, for example, appear to be moving away from Alaska, north and west toward Russia, as the sea ice retreats. They depend on nutrients that sink to the bottom from algae growing under the ice. The valuable fishery could eventually move entirely out of American waters, some federal fisheries scientists said.

The fishing industry, a business where surviving one year to the next is the main worry, has largely not taken notice of the changes, although American crab boats are finding they have to steam farther and farther to haul in a decent catch.

"If the crabs move over into the Russian zone," said Glenn Reed, the president of the Pacific Seafood Processors Association in Seattle, "there's not much to be done about that except hope they come back someday."

Who Governs What

"Stalin once just drew a line from Murmansk to the North Pole and then to Chukchi and said, 'U.S.S.R. Polar Region' - and nobody worried about it," said Artur N. Chilingarov, an Arctic explorer and deputy speaker of Russia's lower house of Parliament.

Now, instead of Stalin, the lines will be drawn by an international commission and the geography of the seabed itself.

That means that the Arctic land grab could be decided in part inside a lab at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. There, at the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping, scientists are studying sonar scans of the seabed from a 2002 expedition on a United States Coast Guard icebreaker in waters north of Barrow, Alaska.

In the lab, Larry Mayer, the center's director, gave a reporter a joystick-driven virtual tour of the seabed two miles beneath the ice. The ocean appeared on a wall-size screen as a basin with ridges and valleys dropping into the depths around the edges, representing oceanographers' best guess at the topography before the expedition. Then Dr. Mayer pushed a button, adding depth data from the survey, which used new multibeam sonar. Suddenly a giant underwater mountain sprouted up 10,000 feet where the old chart had shown only a vague bump.

One of the old depth-sounding voyages had passed within a few miles but missed it. "That's the state of our knowledge," said Dr. Mayer, who named the undersea mountain Healy, after the icebreaker.

Such physical features matter enormously to nations seeking to expand their undersea territory under a murky clause, Article 76, in the Law of the Sea. With only fragments of the Arctic ever surveyed, by icebreaker or nuclear submarine, various countries are mounting new mapping expeditions to claim the most territory they can.

The exclusive economic zone controlled by a country generally extends 230 miles from its shores. But under Article 76, that zone can expand if a nation can convince other parties to the treaty that there is a "natural prolongation" of its continental shelf beyond that limit.

The shelf is the relatively shallow extension of a landmass to the point where the bottom drops into the oceanic abyss. But in many places, the drop-off is a gentle slope or is connected to long-submerged ridges that, if precisely mapped, might add thousands of square miles to a country's exploitable seabed.

Claims of expanded territory are being pursued the world over, but the Arctic Ocean is where experts foresee the most conflict. Only there do the boundaries of five nations - Russia, Canada, Denmark, Norway and the United States - converge, the way sections of an orange meet at the stem. (The three other Arctic nations, Iceland, Sweden and Finland, do not have coasts on the ocean.)

"The area does get to be a bit crowded," said Peter Croker, chairman of the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, which assesses claims. It is composed of experts appointed by countries that ratified the treaty.

Disputes over overlapping claims must be worked out by the countries involved, but the commission weighs control over areas that would otherwise remain international waters.

Countries that ratified the treaty before May 13, 1999, have until May 13, 2009, to make claims. Other countries have 10 years from their date of ratification.

Russia adopted the treaty in 1997, and four years later laid claim to nearly half the Arctic Ocean. The commission's technical panel rejected the claim, and now Russia hopes the recent voyage of its research ship Akademik Fyodorov to the North Pole will yield mapping data in its favor.

In June, Denmark and Canada announced that they would conduct a joint surveying project of uncharted parts of the Arctic Ocean near their coasts.

Denmark is particularly interested in proving that a 1,000-mile undersea mountain range, the Lomonosov Ridge, is linked geologically to Greenland, which is semiautonomous Danish territory. If it finds such a link, Denmark could make a case that the North Pole belongs to the Danes, Danish officials have said.

Canada could also claim a huge area, and then face challenges from the other Arctic nations. The United States could petition for a swath of Arctic seabed larger than California according to rough estimates by Dr. Mayer and other scientists. But while the government financed Dr. Mayer's survey, it has not made a definitive move toward staking a claim.

American ratification of the Law of the Sea treaty has repeatedly been blocked by a small group of Republican senators, now led by Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma. They say, among other things, that the treaty would infringe on American sovereignty.

In a Senate hearing last year, Mr. Inhofe said, "I'm very troubled about implications of this convention on our national security." The deadlock has persisted even though the Bush administration in 2002 described ratification of the Law of the Sea and four other treaties as an "urgent need."

Many proponents of the treaty, including the Pentagon, the American Petroleum Institute and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, say this paralysis leaves the United States on the sidelines while others carve up an ocean.

"We need to be in the game, at the table, talking about fisheries management, mineral extraction, freedom of navigation," said Adm. James D. Watkins, a retired chief of naval operations who is chairman of the United States Commission on Ocean Policy.

Mr. McCain said, "I think what it would require really is a hard push from the president."

Treaty or no, territorial disputes ultimately imply questions about a country's ability to defend its interests. Here, too, the United States has shown less urgency while Canada has acted more aggressively to ensure sovereignty over a fast-changing domain it had long neglected.

Already, oil tanker traffic is rising and fishing boats are going farther north. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police is concerned that melting seaways could make it easier for narcotics traffickers to reach indigenous communities, and for organized crime to exploit the growing diamond trade. And the United States, which disputes Canada's control over parts of the petroleum-rich Beaufort Sea, has in the past sent vessels unannounced through other Arctic waters that Canada claims.

Three years ago Canada began patrolling the most remote Arctic reaches with army rangers, a mostly Eskimo force of 1,500 irregulars. Next year the military plans to launch Radarsat 2, a satellite system that will allow surveillance of the Arctic and sea approaches as far as 1,000 miles offshore.

The military is also buying three reinforced tankers to supply ships patrolling the north. The fleet of Twin Otters, the primary surveillance and transport planes in the north since the 1960's, will be replaced with bigger, faster transports. And senior officials are touring places that offer little but symbolic value.

Canada's aim is not only to tighten control of its territory, but also to establish a strong posture in future talks over the Northwest Passage, the long-sought shortcut from Europe to Asia across the top of Canada.

Bill Graham, the defense minister, said, "I don't see the Northwest Passage as something for another 20 years, but at the rate of present global warming, we know that it will be within 20 years and we have to get ahead now." This summer he made a point of visiting Hans Island, a two-mile-long rock claimed by both Canada and Denmark.

The Pentagon has focused elsewhere. The Navy spent up to $25 million a year on polar research in the 1990's, and in April 2001 produced a report warning that weapons and ships were not designed with arctic conditions in mind, and that charts, navigational systems and support networks were inadequate for the north.

"Safe navigation and precision weapons delivery capability," the report said, "may be significantly constrained unless these shortfalls are addressed."

But in the budget shake-up after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Navy severely reduced spending for polar research.

At the same time, America's three large icebreakers are deteriorating. One of them, the Polar Sea, is inoperable and docked in Seattle, where it is being readied for a year or two of repairs. No replacements are planned.

Three Shipping Passages

Churchill, Manitoba, and Murmansk, on the Russian Arctic coast, are unlikely sister cities.

Churchill is not a city at all, but a barren outpost of 1,100 people on the western shore of Hudson Bay. It survives on the 15,000 tourists who visit each year for the chance to see and photograph migrating polar bears.

Murmansk, by contrast, has a population of 325,000, making it the biggest city inside the Arctic Circle. Founded in 1916 as Romanov-on-Murman, just before the revolution wiped out the Romanovs, it is a place of stolidly attractive old buildings, newer high-rises, wide boulevards and green parks. Though it lies north of Churchill, which is ice-bound up to eight months a year, Murmansk's harbor is kept free of ice by the Gulf Stream, the ideal base for the Russian Arctic fleet and commercial shipping.

One thing the communities have in common, however, is hard times. Churchill, never much to begin with, lost most of its population when Canada finished phasing out the Fort Churchill military base in the 1980's. Murmansk, like much of the rest of Russia, lost economic ground with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the more relevant connection is an accident of geography and a shared dream: that the thawing of the Arctic Ocean would help create the so-called Arctic Bridge, a shipping route with their ports as the logical terminals.

The advantage of maritime shortcuts across the top of the world can be startling. For example, shipments from Murmansk to midcontinental North America by the well-worn route through the St. Lawrence Seaway and Great Lakes to Thunder Bay, in western Ontario, typically take 17 days. The voyage from Murmansk to Churchill is only 8 days under good conditions, and from Churchill, rail links snake down through Manitoba, the American Midwest and points south all the way to Monterrey, Mexico.

For Murmansk, an extended shipping season in Arctic ports that are now frozen much of the year could mean a boon in traffic - to the west and, perhaps once again, to the Far East.

The city was once the anchor of the Soviet Union's Northern Sea Route, which stretched to nearly 3,500 miles to the rich nickel mines at Norilsk and on to newly established Arctic colonies at Dikson, Khatanga, Tiksi and Pevek before reaching the Bering Sea.

At its height, in 1987, more than seven million tons of cargo traversed the icy route. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, so did the Northern Sea Route. Today it handles only 1.5 million tons.

The Murmansk Shipping Company, newly privatized, now uses its icebreakers for tourist cruises to the North Pole - $15,000 to $20,000 a ticket, depending on the cabin.

The same way an Arctic Bridge could drastically cut the distance to Canada, a revived Northern Sea Route could shorten the journey for goods and raw materials from Northeast Asia to Europe by 40 percent.

Vladimir M. Chlenov, the transportation minister from the Siberian republic of Sakha, a vast region that borders the Laptev Sea, envisions dozens of ships carrying gold, timber and other resources up the Lena River to the port of Tiksi, and from there through ice-free seas to Europe and Asia.

The waters near the Siberian shore - when free of ice - are too shallow for giant cargo ships, and the infrastructure needed for navigation has deteriorated. But a study conducted from 1993 to 1999 by researchers from Russia, Norway and Japan found that a route once sustained by Soviet diktat could also be viable for private enterprise.

There is, of course, a third Arctic shipping route besides the Arctic Bridge and the Northern Sea Route: the Northwest Passage. It would be the last of the three main routes to succumb to the thaw. But some Canadian officials, eyeing what will happen in 20 years, say it is all the more justification for investing in the rebirth of Churchill.

"We're gearing up for the future," said Mr. Lemieux, the Manitoba transportation minister. "We look to be the gateway, the logistical hub of the world for circumpolar navigation."

A lucky winner would be Pat Broe, the American who bought the Port of Churchill in 1997 almost as an afterthought, for a token $10 Canadian. Looking to expand his railroad company, OmniTrax, he had already paid $11 million for 810 miles of denationalized tracks in Manitoba. He acquired the port at auction, figuring he would rather own it than have someone else use it as a "toll booth" for his railroad.

Mr. Broe, a private man, declined to be interviewed for this article.

Since his acquisitions, OmniTrax estimates it has spent $50 million modernizing the port to accommodate big ships carrying exports like grain and farm machinery to Murmansk, and incoming Russian products, including fertilizer and steel. By some hopeful estimates, Churchill's shipping season could eventually grow to 8 or even 10 months a year, compared with the current 4.

Michael J. Ogborn, OmniTrax's managing director, said he could see a future for Churchill when "the activity at the port will be as busy as an anthill, with machines, people, freight and ships at dock."

For now, though, there is a problem. While the port has continued to ship grain to Europe and North Africa, it is still waiting for its ship to come in - any ship from Russia, to demonstrate the advantages of the Arctic Bridge.

"There is still a huge marketing effort needed to educate shippers why they should ship through Churchill," Mr. Ogborn conceded.

And in an arena where sharp elbows are often the norm, there is great cooperation between Canada and Russia, not least through Russia's ambassador to Canada, Georgy E. Mamedov. A spreader of good will, the ambassador has even suggested using decommissioned nuclear submarines to transport cargo under the ice. On a visit to Churchill last year, he appointed his local driver honorary Russian consul, and stopped at the "jail" for polar bears that wander into town, laying his hand on the big black nose of one anesthetized inmate and addressing it fondly in Russian.

In the months since, Mr. Mamedov has talked ebulliently of the Arctic Bridge in meetings with Canadian officials, business groups and reporters. "Go to Churchill," he said in one interview. "Go there."

Clifford Krauss reported from Canada for this article, Steven Lee Myers from Russia, Andrew C. Revkin from New Hampshire and Washington, and Simon Romero from Norway. Craig Duff contributed reporting from Canada, Norway, Russia and Alaska.

New York Times 10 Oct 2005

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Sea Ice May Be on Increase in the Antarctic

 

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The pods can be moved periodically to avoid drifting out to sea.

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The whole station has ‘optional’ interior walls so labs can become bedrooms and vice-versa

Gaia Vince

The British Antarctic Survey’s new base will be built on skis so it can be moved around and escape the fate of its predecessor – which is drifting out to sea.

The new base, called Halley VI, will consist of a series of pods, each atop six mechanical legs on skis. The contract to build the new base was announced on Tuesday.

The skis will allow the entire building to move position on the ice several times per year – essential, since it will be built on the floating Brunt Ice Shelf, which drifts 400 metres per year towards the ocean and consists of ice 150 m thick. Halley V, the current Antarctic station, is already so far out to sea it risks being calved off the shelf onto an iceberg unless it is dismantled soon.

Peter Ayres, project director at Faber Maunsell, the firm who developed the winning design with Hugh Broughton Architects, says the concept needed to be highly creative to meet the challenges of the harsh Antarctic climate and to comply fully with the Antarctic Treaty Environmental Protocol.

“It is extremely cold and windy there with about 1.5 metres of snow per year, in addition to the constantly moving ice shelf. So we built the pods in an aerodynamic shape, on legs, to channel the wind underneath and minimise snow build-up,” he explains.

Leg lifting

The legs can be periodically raised, pair by pair, as the snow builds up, allowing the entire pod to then be lifted so that it does not get buried – the fate of the first four Halley stations. To move the station along, the legs must be fully lowered, crampons that grip the skis to the ice loosened, and the whole building can then be pulled along the ice by bulldozers.

The building was designed to withstand low temperatures of -60°C and also heat of up to 50°C since transporting the components from the UK to the pole involves passing the equator. It has meant using particularly ductile steels. “All the materials we’ve used have been tried and tested at the Poles,” Ayres says.

Some of the modular design will have been built in the UK before being shipped out, but getting to the Antarctic site involves crossing a long sheet of fragile sea ice on sleds. The weight limit for carriage across the sea is 6 tonnes on the 3.5 tonne sleds.

But, again, the team has come up with a novel approach: by incorporating the skis into their design, they can transport a full 9.5 tonnes of prefabricated material across. It means that in the narrow two-month Austral summer, when building is possible, they will be able to put together a more complex station, more swiftly.

Any colour you like

Much attention has been paid to the living conditions of those who will be working there. The 16 scientists who spend many months in wintry isolation will have a gym, sauna, climbing wall and other recreational facilities.

“We used a colour psychologist to help give vibrancy to a building surrounded by whiteness. And we’ve designed the whole station with optional internal walls, so that bedrooms can become labs and vice versa, according to optimum usage,” Ayres says.

They have tried to minimise the environmental impact of the project too. All waste will either be stored for return home, incinerated or reused. Waste cooking oils will be used as fuel for the incinerator, for example. Liquid waste will be fully treated for the first time on a BAS base, and only released into the pristine Antarctic waters when it is “swimming pool grade”. And solar panels will supplement the building’s energy requirements during the summer months.

New Scientist 19 Jul 2005

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EDMONTON (CP) - Canada's Arctic research interests could be shuffled to the back of the bush plane as funding deadlines for a major international polar research program approach without monetary commitment from Ottawa.  Canada has already missed one target for announcing its intentions for 2007's International Polar Year, one of two years of global scientific focus expected to quadruple the number of international researchers in Canada's Arctic. As a final September deadline approaches, officials admit they're trying to cobble together whatever funding they can, likely to be much less than originally hoped. And they warn the delay is already hampering Canadian access to up to $1 billion in matching funds from international sources.

"If we wait too late, we're going to be led by the rest of the world on their priorities," said Russell Shearer, acting director of northern science at the department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development.

"It's a huge missed opportunity because of the unprecedented level of activity that's going on in the North."

The problem, said Shearer, is that no allowance was made for International Polar Year funding in the most recent federal budget. That left science agencies scrambling to find money from wherever they can. As a result, Shearer said Canada's contribution will be nowhere near the $350 million scientists had hoped would be earmarked for research and infrastructure.

"We're trying to cobble together whatever we can to produce a respectable program," he said.

That spending could range from a low of $20 million to just over $100 million, he said. An early funding announcement could have allowed Canadian researchers to set the agenda by leveraging in money from other countries. Shearer said that opportunity is slipping away.

"Acting later will result in Canada likely taking a huge back seat in an issue that Canada should be a world leader in," he said.

Canadian scientists have already submitted a multitude of research proposals on topics from climate change to the cumulative environmental and social impacts of development, said David Hik, head of the International Polar Year secretariat at the University of Alberta. Researchers need to know how much money will be available and which projects will receive funding well in advance, he said. Northern research often requires 18 months lead time to book space on ships and planes, plan camp logistics, hire assistants and assemble research teams. As well, prospective international partners from the U.S. to China need to know Canada's plans.

"We need an answer on this fairly soon," said Hik.

One deadline for logistics-heavy proposals passed on June 30 without Canadian scientists knowing how much support they'll receive. The final deadline for full research proposals is Sept. 30, but it'll be hard to meet that without knowing what resources are available, said Jean-Marie Beaulieu of the Canadian Polar Commission.

"We don't even know if there is money or how this money will be disbursed."

Shearer points out that 25 per cent of the Arctic is claimed by Canada. As well, between climate change and industrial and social development across the Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, there's never been more reason to study what's happening at the poles.

"So much is going on and it's so active," Shearer said. "There's so much of a need to do work in the North - now more than ever."

Winnipeg Free Press 17 Jul 2005

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Concept Antarctic vehicle unveiled

The vehicle, called "Ninety Degrees South", uses novel technology to keep drivers safe, warm and protected from the high levels UV exposure that occur under the Antarctic ozone hole. Designed to fit into the small Twin Otter aircraft that BAS use for working in remote deep field locations, Moon’s two-person vehicle has a combination of tracks and wheels allow it to operate anywhere on the continent over hard ground, snow or ice surfaces. The designer believes the versatility of his concept vehicle has commercial potential.

He says, “The challenge was to design an environmentally-friendly vehicle specifically for Antarctica that could be used also in other cold regions. I’m particularly interested in overcoming the dangers of travelling across crevassed areas of ice. Unknown terrain limits the speed of any journey over the ice - the faster you can detect crevasses the quicker you can travel. I’m using unmanned pathfinder technology which travels on a GPS controlled route ahead of the main unit. The pathfinder is secured by a 30m umbilical cord, and uses ground-penetrating radar to assess risk. I believe this technology serves as a prototype for future, entirely automated, expeditions in the Antarctic and on other planets.”

David Blake, British Antarctic Survey Head of Technology & Engineering says, “The large tracked vehicles (Snocats) and snowmobiles we use have been developed over several years and work reliably in the extreme Antarctic environment, supporting our field and base operations. James Moon’s concept is very novel and a vehicle built to his design could enable new areas of activity to be undertaken in Antarctica, including ground based deep field surveys. I am sure that should the vehicle be developed, it could also be used as a personnel carrier in Arctic regions. James's vehicle is innovative and challenging and I am delighted at his enthusiasm and drive in developing his concept vehicle.”

PhysOrg.com 20 June 2005

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Antarctic Telescope High On Australian New Wishlist

by Judy Skatssoon - Canberra

Astronomers hope to kick-start their long-running push to build a telescope in Antarctica in the latest 10-year plan for Australian astronomy.

A draft version of the so-called decadal plan will be discussed at the annual scientific meeting of the Astronomical Society of Australia in Sydney next month.

One of the key recommendations is to go forward with what's now being called the PILOT project in Antarctica.

The proposed 2 metre infra-red telescope was originally scheduled to be completed at Antarctica's Dome C this year. But lack of funds have stalled the project and frustrated astronomers.

Astronomer Dr Michael Burton of the University of New South Wales, a member of a working group for the decadal plan, says Australia risks being left behind by the international astronomy community.

What's happened to infra-red astronomy?

He says Australia's strength in astronomy has traditionally been founded on its radio and infra-red capabilities.

But there are concerns it has fallen behind in infra-red astronomy, which studies infra-red radiation emitted by objects in space.

Infra-red is superior to traditional optical or radio astronomy in detecting the most distant objects in the universe, which have a high 'redshift', a change in the wavelength of light where the wavelength is longer than it was at the source.

"Clearly we have fallen behind in the last decade or so from being one of the major players in that field to just another group with a small facility," Burton says.

"We haven't become a major part of any of the big projects which have developed over the last decade and that's definitely a worry."

Burton says Australia is currently a 5% member of the international Gemini Observatory consortium, which gives it access to two of the world's biggest telescopes in Hawaii and Chile.

This compares to a decade ago when it was a 50% member of the Anglo-Australian Observatory, which at the time hosted what was then one of the world's eight biggest telescopes.

"The problem is that we don't have the really good sites for doing [infra-red] in mainland Australia," he says.

Why Antarctica?

Burton says it's hoped that PILOT, which will cost about A$10 million (US$7.7 million), will put Australia in the position where it can eventually build an extra large telescope in Antarctica.

"What we're trying to do in Antarctica at the moment is build the telescopes there that can put us in a position where we can build the big ones," he says.

"[PILOT] really is a pathfinder for what could be the ultimate ground-based telescope."

Antarctica is the driest continent on Earth and its elevated inland plateau, along with its stable clear weather and absence of daylight in winter, make it ideal for watching the stars.

Is Australia really falling behind?

Professor Warrick Couch, head of physics at the University of New South Wales and another decadal plan working group member, disagrees that Australia is falling behind in infra-red astronomy.

He says Australia is capable of doing "very useful", albeit limited, infra-red astronomy from facilities at the Anglo-Australian Observatory at Siding Spring and the Australian National University.

"The argument for a thing like PILOT ... is that we would [have] something that's pretty much solely Australian owned," he says.

"It's not that we don't have an infra-red astronomy going on because we certainly do. It's really another opportunity to build on what we're doing at the moment."

Going ahead with PILOT will increase Australia's ability to study how stars and galaxies form and find previously undetected planets, Couch says.

Space Daily 24 Jun 2005

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Ice Man Kept His Cool

Scientist hung onto life by a thread in an Arctic storm. Now he wants to go back

By Judith Lavoie

Not much padding protects Humfrey Melling's 165-pound frame and he admits his nose sticks out at an angle which invites frostbite.

So, why, after a near-death experience in the Arctic, is he itching to get back to the barren stretches of ice between Greenland and Ellesmere Island?

For a start, the equivalent of $3 million in buried treasure remains under the ice -- even though the treasure, in the form of instruments measuring ice characteristics, is valuable only to Arctic research scientists.

"Until we get those instruments back we get nothing," said Melling, a research scientist at the Institute of Ocean Sciences in North Saanich, of a project that was scuttled by weather conditions less than a day after it began.

"And, I really like the Arctic," he said.

Melling and seven team members, made up of U.S. and Canadian scientists and a cook, were stranded for two days on the ice in mid-April, desperately holding down a single tent, after a ferocious gale blew away the others. Two other team members -- technicians Ron Lindsay and Scott Rose -- are also from the institute.

"The gusts were up to about 70 knots and that was what did us in," said Melling. The temperature was -25, but much colder with the wind-chill. "It would have been very threatening to have been out in the open."

No one had expected icy gales on that scale. "The things that we thought were going to be a problem like polar bears and plane crashes weren't a problem," Melling said.

The weather was fine when the team was dropped off at 6 p.m. by a U.S. icebreaker and, as they started to put up five sleeping tents, a kitchen/eating tent, two storage tents and a workshop, a huge parachute drop of 50 tonnes of fuel and equipment for the two month project was made.

The wind started about 4 a.m. and the storage tent disintegrated, rapidly followed by one of the sleeping tents. Pieces of plywood, which make up the floor, ricocheted around in the wind along with the supplies. The group tied down one tent and piled into another and arranged guy ropes so each person was sitting on a rope.

Then they listened as the other tents blew away.

With each roaring, banging gust, they'd wonder if the tent could withhold the onslaught.

"There was lots of time to think about it. It's strange, you can sit in a tent where you're stuck and pick up the satellite phone and phone home or call the experts and get advice," Melling said. "You could be breathing your last and chatting on the phone to people thousands of miles away. You get the benefit of reassurance and comfort, but they can't do anything."

For 24 hours the group barely shifted position as they held on to the tent. "You can't fall asleep because you'd fall off the rope," Melling said.

"You talk most about what's going on and practical things. Sometimes people would crack jokes and tell stories. I thought a lot about the project. It was a bit of a shock for me that this project I'd put all the time and effort into since 2002 was likely to go belly-up."

As the wind lessened, volunteers went on food foraging expeditions, digging through boxes covered in snow to find something edible. "We had tomato striped ravioli stuffed with lobster for breakfast, Melling said.

As soon as there was a longer lull in the wind, a Twin Otter on skis managed to land and ferry the group back to Resolute Bay.

The team then spent three weeks flying in and out on a daily basis as they chopped through the ice to recover debris.

No more winter attempts will be made to retrieve the scientific equipment, but the multi-national funding agencies have not scrapped the project and Melling will head back in August 2006. The challenge is to find a ship that can do the job and enough money to pay for it, he said.

"This spring about $750,000 has been spent with no result except being wiser people. Polar science is expensive."

ARCTIC TREASURE:

VITAL GEAR TAKES pulse of climate

Too much fresh water is not good for the Arctic Ocean.

So, scientists from the Institute of Ocean Sciences make regular trips to the Canadian Arctic to keep an eye on water temperatures and salinity.

Scientific equipment was moored in the water in the extreme northeast of the Arctic archipelago in 2003 as part of a project looking at global warming.

Research scientist Humfrey Melling was hoping to retrieve the equipment and data this spring.

But, after his team was stranded on the ice when a gale blew away their tents, the retrieval was put off until August 2006.

The information could have huge implications for the climate of northern Europe, so the project has attracted international interest, he said.

"An increased amount of fresh water in the North Atlantic could cause northern Europe to get cooler," he said.

Global warming is likely to mean increasing precipitation in the north and that could affect the Gulf Stream, Melling said.

"The climate on earth is getting warmer, but maybe not everywhere," he said.

Victoria Times-Colonist 12 Jun 2005

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Arctic Waits for New Icebreakers

MOSCOW. (Yury Zaitsev, for RIA Novosti.) - Two thirds of Russia's hydrocarbon resources are concentrated in its northern regions.

They account for 90% of the natural gas and 75% of the oil produced in the country, 20% of the national income and 60% of the exports. Adjacent is a vast oceanic shelf, which covers 2.5 million square kilometers and contains immense mineral resources.

Most general estimates show that Russia's shelf areas in its northern seas currently contain about 100 billion tons of equivalent fuel, including 16.7 billion tons of oil and condensate and 78.8 trillion cubic meters of gas, or 20-25% of the world's hydrocarbons. There is no doubt that the shelves of the northern seas will become the main source of increasing Russia's oil and gas potential in the 21st century.

However, this northern wealth is hard to access and huge money needs to be spent to improve this situation. A 1,300km railway from Vorkuta to Igarka remains half-built, even though construction began before World War II.

When the rail route failed, Russia started building a fleet of nuclear icebreakers. In 1959, the world's first nuclear-powered icebreaker, the Lenin (44,000 horsepower), was commissioned and the navigation period increased from one and a half to seven months a year.

A series of less powerful ships were later built, which made it possible not only to turn the Northern Seaway into a permanently functioning waterway, but also to start a regular development of the Arctic zone.

Large linear icebreakers - the Arktika, Sibir, Rossiya and others - could give their captains more than 75,000 hp and accomplish missions in the harsh conditions of the ice-covered sea, far away from ports for a long time. They showed that nuclear power had indisputable advantages over the organic fuel used by other ships, including diesel icebreakers.

Apart from the Lenin, seven nuclear-powered icebreakers and oceanic nuclear lighter carriers and container ships were built between 1975 and 1992. A project to build a new linear icebreaker, 50 Let Pobedy (50 Years of Victory), which was suspended during perestroika, is now nearing completion. New generation reactors are being designed for future nuclear icebreakers, which will succeed the present ships after 2015.

According to Transport Minister Igor Levitin, the first new-generation icebreaker should set sail in 2014. The preliminary design costing 60 million rubles ($2 million) should be completed in 2005-2006, while the technical design should be concluded in 2006-2007 at a price of 236 million rubles (just under $8 million). To ensure stable navigation along the Northern Seaway, the minister said it would be necessary to have five nuclear icebreakers permanently in service and one more under scheduled repairs. (Today Russia has 36 icebreakers, eight of which are nuclear-powered.)

In the past, the building of a nuclear icebreaker fleet was, in fact, an act of converting military production to civilian usage. At that time, in contrast with conversion projects in the past few years, science-intensive products were made without disrupting main production under military contracts, which meant both the Navy and the civilian fleet benefited from the conversion. The latter received modern unique ships, while the Navy had an opportunity to check out new shipbuilding ideas on civilian ships working in harsh northern conditions for about 7,000 and sometimes even up to 10,000 hours a year.

The nuclear icebreaker fleet does no harm to the Arctic environment. It neither contaminates ports nor dumps liquid or solid waste into the sea. The health of the crews is thoroughly assessed. Interestingly, tests revealed that the highest sickness rate was not among sailors servicing the nuclear reactors but among navigators who experienced major stress during their work. Statistics show also crewmembers on board nuclear-powered ships suffer from illnesses far less often than their counterparts on diesel ships.

In the opinion of Academician Nikolai Khlopkin, who has made a great contribution to the development of nuclear-powered ships, Russia has to modernize its icebreakers in the next few years if it wants to preserve its status in the Arctic. Above all, the service life of the existing icebreakers and their nuclear reactors must be extended. And at least two new icebreakers should be built. The first should be a double-draft ship, capable of operating on the main sea routes and entering the mouths of Siberian rivers. The second one should be a superpowerful leader that can come to rescue of a ship in distress or deliver goods to any area of the Arctic Ocean.

Khlopkin also believes every effort must be made to prevent a reform of the icebreaker fleet that would see a re-distribution of property among oligarchs. This should be avoided at least because such icebreakers have nuclear power plants, which must be serviced by highly qualified experts. Nobody wants another Chernobyl, especially in the Arctic.

If these problems are solved, the Russian icebreaker fleet will remain the only civilian nuclear fleet in the world capable of reaching any part of the Arctic.

Yury Zaitsev is an expert at the Space Research Institute

RIA Novosti 01 Jun 2005

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Scaremongers shun scientific findings of no global warming

BY JAY LEHR

In early May, newspapers across the country reported that a team of "adventurers" from Minnesota was setting off to "document climate change" at the North Pole.

According to newspaper reports, they aim to "draw [attention to] the gradual warming of Earth's climate" and "hope to convince skeptics, especially in the Bush administration, that global warming is real...."

In other words, this summer will bring a barrage of misinformation about the Earth's ice structures provided by non-scientists who make casual observations and then claim they know what caused the situations they are observing.

Scientists, of course, do not operate this way. They don't start their work with a political ax to grind, with the aim of "drawing attention" to something. They don't make a few observations and then jump to conclusions about causation. And they don't ignore the work of scientists who have gone before them.

Scientists, these Minnesota two are not. And yet we'll no doubt hear more about their "research" than we have about the work that really matters -- the science.

A few years ago, R.J. Braithwaite's peer-reviewed article in Progress in Physical Geography described a "mass balance analysis" he conducted of 246 glaciers sampled all around the world between 1946 and 1995. That's 50 years of data. Braithwaite found some glaciers were melting, while a nearly equal number were growing in size, and still others remained stable. He concluded, "There is no obvious common or global trend of increasing glacier melt in recent years."

But if your goal is to frighten the public into thinking humans are causing global warming with potentially catastrophic consequences, there is no shortage of melting glaciers to report upon. By some estimates, 160,000 glaciers exist on Earth. Only 63,000 have been inventoried, and only a few hundred have been studied in the detail described by Braithwaite.

For example, a favorite melting glacier of the global warming activists sits atop Mt. Kilimanjaro in northern Tanzania, near the equator. Satellites have been measuring temperatures near its summit for more than 25 years, finding no warming at all, yet the global warmers trot out Kilimanjaro as a poster child for their cause.

A scientific study published in Nature in November 2003 explained that deforestation of the mountain slopes -- not warming temperatures -- explains the melting. But the scaremongers don't particularly care why Kilimanjaro is melting, only that it is. Any other facts get in the way of their lobbying and fund-raising efforts.

The scaremongers also point out as many as seven ice shelves have broken off the Antarctic continent over the last 50 years. They blame global warming, rather than address the inconvenient confounding evidence -- that the continent is actually cooling dramatically. Between 1986 and 2002, the continent cooled by 0.7 degrees Celsius per decade. There also has been a statistically significant increase in sea ice area, as well as an increase in the length of the sea ice season, since 1990.

Sea ice plays a key role in regulating the surface exchange of heat, moisture, and salt between the atmosphere and the oceans. It is a high-latitude phenomenon found only in the Arctic Ocean and in the oceans around Antarctica. The local amount changes with the season, but at any given time, sea ice worldwide covers an area larger than the North American continent.

In the Arctic Ocean, floating sea ice (as opposed to ice shelves, which generally remain attached to the glacier that produced them) covers on average 14 million to 16 million square kilometers in late winter and 7 million to 9 million square kilometers at the end of summer. In Antarctica, sea ice covers from 17 million to 20 million square kilometers in late winter; only about 3 million to 4 million square kilometers remains at the end of summer.

The seasonal sea ice cycle is a natural phenomenon that affects biological habitats and human activities alike. It's important that scientists study and understand the cycle, which is affected a lot more by the sun and the Earth's orbit around it than by human activities.

It's pretty easy, as the Minnesota duo will no doubt show us, to grab a few short-term observations of changes in sea ice or glaciers and allege catastrophic global warming is taking place. The facts are a lot less convenient, as facts often are ... but it's high time the scaremongers and their allies in the media face up to them.

Jay Lehr is science director for the Heartland Institute. E-mail: lehr@heartland.org

Chicago Sun-Times 09 May 2005

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Development of Arctic areas to bring trillions dollars of profit to Russia

Russia should get the Arctic ready for global warming

By Irina Burakova

World oil prices are continuing to rise steadily despite recent statements by OPEC regarding production quota increases. The warmer days of spring seem to have no effect on the upward trend of the world oil market. According to certain pessimistic forecasts, Russia's reasonable assured and profitable reserves of strategic natural resources may be exhausted in ten years. However, Russia may gain benefit from the exploration of the Arctic's vast vaults would be unlocked by global warming. The freeze-up period on the Northern Sea Route is expected to shorten significantly in the next 10-15 years and therefore mineral resources of the North will be much easier to carry both to Europe and Asia. The estimated value of the Arctic's minerals totals $1.5-2 trillion. The Russian government has recently started drawing up a law on the Arctic economic development to boost the economy of northern regions.

The concept of industrial development of the Arctic area is likely surprise a lot of people. The authorities have unfairly neglected Russia's northern regions in the last few years. Besides, the Russian legislation lacks a clear-cut definition for the Arctic and its boundaries. High taxes and transport costs impede the economic development of the area. The volumes of cargo shipped by the Northern Sea Route decreased considerably since the 1980s.

The threat looming over Russia's security in the area of raw materials made the Kremlin put the above issue on the agenda last year. Speaking at a meeting with Russian polar explorers in the fall of 2004, President Putin stressed the importance of the Arctic for Russia's economic and political system. He said: "I hope that all our investments in the Arctic including funds, equipment and an enormous amount of human effort, will not be wasted. Instead, everything that Russia invested in the Arctic before and during the Soviet era will be used as a good basis for developing our new projects in the Arctic."

Following the president's comments, the government stepped up its efforts in drawing new laws relating to economic development of the Arctic. Russian Ministry of Economic Development and Trade is working on a law to change the distribution mechanism of budget subsidies for northern regions. The government is also taking steps for developing an international strategy applicable to economic activity in the territories located north of the polar circle. The amount of mineral resources concentrated in the Arctic zone is huge. For example, 91% of natural gas production and 80% of Russia's explored reserves of industrial-grade natural gas are amassed in that region. It also contains 90% of all Russian extractable offshore reserves of hydrocarbons.

The hydrocarbon deposits in a deep-water area of the Arctic Ocean are estimated in 15-20 billion tons. The Arctic also has deposits of nickel, copper, wolfram, gold, silver, manganese, chromium, and titanium. 11% of Russian GDP and 22% of Russian exports are produced in the Arctic. The Northern Sea Route, a major national transportation route, links the Russian Far East to western areas of the Russian Federation. Its length is 5,600 kilometers.

Russia took the chair of the Arctic Council last year. The organization was founded in 1996. Apart from Russia, the council comprises Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. Until recently it was mostly concerned over environmental issues of the arctic zone. The northern countries also tried to take steps aimed at protecting the Arctic against the effects of global warming. Being the only northern country involved in active development of mineral resources in the Arctic, Russia shares the concern about the environment.

In particular, the thawing of arctic ice could cause soil erosion. It could even do damage to the infrastructure of buildings, industrial facilities, and pipelines built on the permafrost. On the other hand, the global warming could be quite beneficial to Russia. Speaking at a meeting of the Arctic Council in Yakutsk, Vladimir Morgunov, assistant to the Russian Economic and Trade Minister, said: "The Arctic Council states should take steps that would enable them to minimize the damage caused by potential negative effects while taking maximum advantage of positive effects of the global warming." The Northern Sea Route may be completely ice-free by 2020-2035 if arctic ice continues to thaw at a present pace. In that case a short transportation route going across Russia will connect Europe with Southeast Asia. According to Mr. Morgunov, "the route will have great potential for cargo traffic."

Experts say that modernization of arctic ports should be regarded an issue of high priority in terms of the development of the Northern Sea Route. All those ports save port of Dudinka are still one of the weakest components of the transportation system. The owners have been unable to overhaul and upgrade port equipment since 1990 due to lack of funds. The majority of the ports are in need of repair or restoration of their mooring facilities. The same applies to the facilities for collection and utilization of vessel's waste materials. The ports have no equipment whatsoever to combat oil spills. Besides, the fleet of nuclear-powered and motor-driven icebreakers should be upgraded. The navigational and hydrographic services should have state-of-the-art equipment and efficient personnel.

It is necessary to put a few things straight prior to improving financing of the northern regions. As it turned out, two thirds of Russia's territory were officially ranked among the northern regions. They receive special subsidies from the state budget (the so-called "northern allowances" to increase regular salaries of those who are employed with state-funded organizations). According to Mikhail Zhukov, director of All-Russian Research and Coordination Center under the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, 13 out of 41 subsidized regions have nothing to do the Russian North regions. Those bogus northern regions get the biggest subsidies. In 2002, the central government allocated 55 billion rubles to the regions whose "northern status" did not even meet geographic requirements. In the meantime, residents of the northern and arctic areas received only 38 billion. New methods for zoning the whole country have been recently produced by research institutes at the request of the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade. Russia will be divided into six zones on the basis of nature and climate. Only the regions lying entirely or in part north of the 60th parallel are to be listed as "northern regions." Defining the boundaries of the Arctic zone will help resolve many economic and social problems of the regions pertaining to the area. 

Pravda 21Apr 2005

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Int'l Bidding Due for Vessel for Antarctic Studies

By Na Jeong-ju Staff Reporter

South Korea will invite foreign bidders early next year for the construction of a 7,000-ton ship, which will be used to break the ice in the South Pole to build the country’s second research center for Antarctic studies.

The Ministry of Maritime and Fisheries Affairs (MOMAF) said Thursday it plans to spend 200 billion won on building the ship. It will choose a bidder through an international bidding process after completing the initial design of the vessel.

``The ship will be dispatched to the North and South Pole for maritime environmental research,’’ an MOMAF official told The Korea Times. ``Local scientists have gathered several times to discuss the design of the research ship. The result will come out this year and an announcement inviting bidding will follow.’’

The vessel will be built by 2008 and be sent there immediately to help with the construction of the research center, the official said.

South Korea earlier said it would set up a second research center in the South Pole by the end of 2009. The second, as yet unnamed, center will be located in a central area of the Pole for easier research access, according to ministry officials.

South Korea built a research center called King Sejong Station on King George Island in 1983, but the center has many limitations for research activities because it is located in a peripheral area of Antarctica, the official said.

``We’ve decided to build another center because the location of the King Sejong Base is not good for various studies,’’ the official said on condition of anonymity.

``South Korea will be able to conduct better astronomical studies and research on the movement of glaciers and physical changes of the earth at the second center.’’

The initial studies show that the government needs some 70-100 billion won over the next few years to build the second center. Ground breaking for the center is scheduled for 2007.

MOMAF officials said the ministry is conducting a feasibility study to meet demands of international treaties for the construction of a research center at the Pole.

The South Korean mission in Antarctica was established in February 1988, two years after the country signed the Antarctic Treaty. A total of 15 South Korean researchers are studying the environment and natural resources of the Antarctic at King Sejong Station.

 Korea Times 14 Apr 2005

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Prep time dwindles as scientists await Polar Year funding

IQALUIT - Canadian scientists say they need Ottawa to commit soon to funding for an upcoming international year of research on the world's polar regions.

International Polar Year, which begins in 2007 and lasts for two years, is meant to deepen the world's understanding of the polar regions. It's held every 50 years and involves co-ordinated international research in the Arctic and Antarctica.

The IPY is expected to generate $1 billion in major international research projects, with the United Kingdom, Japan, the U.S. and many other countries taking part.

• LINK: International Polar Year

Scientists say polar year events present a unique opportunity to tackle some important challenges, such as climate change, contaminants, and health and social issues.

But Canadian organizers say they still don't have a major part of the budget needed to pay for it.

They were expecting money for the event in the last federal budget, but none was announced.

This is the time when researchers in other countries are writing proposals, selecting projects, purchasing equipment, organizing teams, and planning travel and research goals.

David Hik, director of the Canadian International Polar Year Secretariat, says the lack of funding is a problem.

"Clearly, it's hard to take these things to the next step until there is secure funding for those activities," he says.

Peter Johnson, who has just completed his term as chair of the Canadian Polar Commission, says organizers are now hoping some of the funds set aside for the Northern strategy will come their way.

"That's one of our main hopes, that it will be seen as one of the ways to put in place the science components of the northern strategy, that this will be a way to kick start northern science," he says.

At the Nunavut Research Institute in Iqaluit, Jamal Shirley says as time ticks down to 2007, his group's getting worried.

"Researchers have to apply for permits to do their studies," he says. "If we have a doubling in the number of permit requests and applications coming in, we're going to have a doubling in the administrative burden. So we're going to need resources to accommodate all this new research activity."

Shirley hopes there will be a decision soon on funding, so northerners can get involved, and communities will have time to prepare.

CBC North 06 Apr 2005

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Science ; Global warming may boost oil industry:

[Science News] A top level report on artic climate change spurred by global warming has outlined possible oil industry benefits, but also many potential pitfalls.

A new report, Impacts Of A Warming Arctic, by a multi-government-backed scientific group, acknowledges the deep problems faced by humanity regarding global warming.

But it also points to possible benefits for oil exploration, extraction and shipping with possible energy industry advances for the artic "sub region", including Alaska and western Canada.

The Arctic Council is an intergovernmental forum comprising Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States. The International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) is a non-governmental organisation that facilitates cooperation in all aspects of arctic research.

Their report says: "Extensive oil and gas reserves have been discovered in Alaska along the Beaufort sea coast and ... offshore oil exploration and production are likely to benefit from less extensive and thinner ice."

They also note that the Canadian "northwest passage" is likely to offer opportunities for oil and commodity shipping. "The costs and benefits of a longer shipping season in the Canadian arctic areas are likely to be significant."

Siberia will also see "the opening of the Northern Sea Route to commercial shipping. Summertime access to most coastal waters of the Eurasian arctic is projected to be relatively ice free within a few decades, with much more extensive melting later in the century."

Greater access

This means that the "oil and natural gas industries are likely to [have] improved access by sea".

Norway's oil industry, traditionally one of the biggest in the world, will also see benefits from this unprecedented climatic change as "marine access to oil, gas and mineral resources is likely to improve as sea ice retreats".

But this is where the "good news" ends.

The report draws less than positive conclusions about global warming and its effects on the artic wilderness. Rather than assuming a positive note, much of the effects of increased access to oil deposits are in fact negative.

Oil spills will increase and access by land may be harder. In fact any possible benefit that the oil industry may receive will be outweighed by the deep disadvantages global warming will bring.

Some of those dangers are already here.

As ice roads melt "access to resources by land is likely to be hampered in many places due to a shortening of the season during which the ground is sufficiently frozen for travel", the report says.

Locals adversely affected

Local economies, local culture, health and the diversity of arctic nature are all likely to be adversely affected.

"Tidal forces" are likely to be much stronger, erosion and damage along coastlines will probably be significantly greater.

Infrastructure, including oil pipelines, rigs and associated buildings are going to falter and fail as the ground underneath them starts to melt.

"Coastal erosion will pose increasing problems for some ports, tanker terminals and other industrial facilities. Some towns and industrial facilities are already facing severe damage and some are facing relocation as warming begins to take its toll."

Foreshadowing

In Russia, there are signs of what may be to come. Oil works built on the softening, eroding land are no longer safe from the elements. In fact their very existence may be their undoing.

"The [Russian] oil storage facility at Varandei on the Pechora Sea was built on a barrier island. Damage to the dunes and beach due to the facility's construction and use have accelerated natural rates of coastal erosion. The reduction in sea ice, thawing coastal permafrost, rising sea level are projected to exacerbate the existing erosion problem," the report says.

As a result, the rusting Russian storage tanks now sit just metres from the raging tides.

As the ice caps melt a litany of new problems will be brought by the oil industry. Oil spills in the arctic "last much longer and are far worse than first suspected", the committee warns.

These spills will be hampered by political questions, such as those over shipping lane sovereignty, which country will own the new shipping, who will clean up the spills and will the tax payers of the arctic nations be prepared to pay for oil industry spillage in difficult to access areas?

Costs outweigh benefits

As well as the political, there are practical questions.

Oil spills in icy areas are much harder to clean up than those in open seas. A study of the oil spills from the Exxon Valdez in 1989, quoted by the IASC, show that the "oil is like it was two or three weeks after the spill." These spills will cause "chronic problems that will continue for some species for many years".

Meanwhile obvious problems associated with broken oil pipelines are becoming readily apparent, even now.

"Structural failures of industrial infrastructure are becoming more common ... oil and gas pipelines are breaking, causing accidents and spills that have removed large amounts of land from use because of soil contamination," the report warns.

So, even if the oil industry can benefit from increased sea borne access, it may well find the benefits are outweighed by the costly collapse of its land facilities.

While a select number of oil businesses may profit, the report makes clear that the environmental catastrophe will not benefit the wider human or natural community.

Instead, arctic global warming will bring about expensive and far reaching damage to the societies ranged along it, something the eight governments who commissioned the report may well have to take on board.

Keralanext.com 31 Mar 2005 http://www.keralanext.com/news/readnext,1.asp?id=169771&pg=2

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Polar history shows melting ice-cap may be a natural cycle

IAN JOHNSTON

THE melting of sea ice at the North Pole may be the result of a centuries-old natural cycle and not an indicator of man-made global warming, Scottish scientists have found.

After researching the log-books of Arctic explorers spanning the past 300 years, scientists believe that the outer edge of sea ice may expand and contract over regular periods of 60 to 80 years. This change corresponds roughly with known cyclical changes in atmospheric temperature.

The finding opens the possibility that the recent worrying changes in Arctic sea ice are simply the result of standard cyclical movements, and not a harbinger of major climate change.

The amount of sea ice is currently near its lowest point in the cycle and should begin to increase within about five years.

As a result, Dr Chad Dick, a Scottish scientist working at the Norwegian Polar Institute in Tromso, believes the next five to ten years will be a critical period in our understanding of sea ice and the impact, if any, of long-term global warming.

Concern has been expressed recently that animals such as polar bears could become extinct because sea ice is disappearing. The new research by Dr Dick and a colleague, Dr Dimitry Divine, gives rise to hopes the melting will stop soon.

However, Dr Dick warned that if the ice carried on melting, it would mean that man-made global warming had disrupted the natural process - with potentially disastrous results.

He said: "Cycles of 60 to 80 years have been identified before in atmospheric temperature records in the Arctic. The old records that we recovered from ships’ logs and other sources may show that similar cycles are present in sea ice.

"I’ve this gut feeling that within ten years from now we’ll know for certain whether we’re losing sea ice long term or whether it’s coming back.

"If it doesn’t come back it shows we are in serious trouble. Sea ice has a whole lot of effects on climate and it is pretty important."

Sea ice protects the northern coastlines of Canada, Russia and the United States from erosion caused by storms. If it melted, waves crashing on to the shoreline could release vast stores of carbon dioxide stored in permafrost, which would increase global warming still further.

Dr Dick said the research did not suggest that global warming was not a reality.

"You couldn’t say, ‘The sea ice is coming back so therefore there’s no global warming’. It’s never going to be that simple," he said. "But the question now is the extent of global warming, how fast it will happen and whether there are any surprises on the way.

"We know there is warming and that it’s caused by humans, but it will be a great relief to many people if the ice comes back as opposed to going away."

He added that some people might be pleased to see less ice in the Arctic as it would finally open up the North-west Passage trade route - sought by many of the explorers whose log-books were used in the study - between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

"If the sea ice continues to disappear it could cut something like 5,000km off the sea route from Europe to Japan and China. There are people who think that’s a good thing," Dr Dick said.

"Humans are great at adapting to change. We might lose polar bears and some species of seal, but most people don’t worry about that, it doesn’t affect them. And if it means their stereo can be shipped from China more quickly, they are happy with that."

Among the hundreds of mariners whose records were examined by Dr Dick were the noted Scottish arctic explorer Sir John Ross and his nephew Sir James Clark Ross.

Sir James discovered the magnetic North Pole in 1831 after earlier accompanying his uncle to the Arctic in 1818. He then began to explore the Antarctic, giving his name to the Ross Sea, Ross Island and the Ross Ice Shelf.

The polar explorer Clive Waghorn, who lives in Limekilns, Fife, said the idea of regular periodic changes in sea ice was "entirely credible".

"You read stories of the old whalers and sailors in the Arctic in some seasons coming back with no catches at all because they weren’t able to get as far north as they could in other seasons," he said.

"Whalers were always rather secretive about where they had been because they didn’t want people knowing where they had been if they had a successful trip, but I would say as the record [of log-books] goes, it’s pretty objective."

He said he shuddered to think what would happen if the Arctic lost its sea ice.

"I think ecologically it would be a bit of a disaster. It would also open the Arctic up for mineral and oil exploration, which would be another disaster," Mr Waghorn said.

In January, the international Climate Change Task Force warned that global warming could reach a "point of no return" in ten to 20 years by which time atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations would be so great that any attempt to reduce them would be futile.

Robin Harper, a Scottish Green Party MSP, said that while he hoped Arctic sea ice would return, it could actually be a false sign of hope that global warming was not as serious as previously thought.

"All it would prove is that global warming doesn’t affect that particular cycle," he said.

"There would be no reason for us to be complacent if it comes back."

Gulf Stream could be ‘switched off’

THERE are fears that the disappearance of polar ice could have a catastrophic effect on the world’s climate.

The presence of large areas of ice helps to moderate the world’s temperature by reflecting the sun’s rays and keeping the planet cool.

As the ice sheets reduce, this exposes more areas of water, which absorb more heat from the sun, warming the planet and reducing areas of ice still further.

Perhaps the biggest fear is that cold melt-water could "switch off" the Gulf Stream and even the Earth’s system of hot and cold currents, known as the Ocean Conveyor.

The Gulf Stream has a major effect on Britain’s climate, allowing palm trees to grow on the west coast of Scotland. Without it, Scotland’s climate would be more like Canada’s.

The Ocean Conveyor has stopped flowing in the past - 8,200 years ago and 12,700 years ago - in an event associated with the start of an ice age. Melting sea ice will not have an impact on sea levels as it already displaces its own weight of water. Large land-based ice sheets on Greenland and in the Antarctic are the main sources of concern.

Huge quantities of carbon - a major greenhouse gas - are stored frozen on the ocean floor and in permafrost in Siberia and Canada particularly. Melting ice would release this into the atmosphere, further increasing global warming.

This is one reason why scientists fear the world could reach a "tipping point" in about ten to 20 years time when we will not be able to reverse global warming.

Sea ice has a calming effect on the water, as waves cannot travel very far. This protects northern Arctic circle coastlines from erosion which would release carbon stored in permafrost.

In a warmer world, more water from the sea will evaporate. Greater evaporation actually helps increase the amount of sea ice as fresh water running off the land freezes more easily than salt water in the sea.

But, as always in climate studies, the situation is complex, because while some of the water vapour will form clouds which reflect sunlight, it also helps to retain warmth, particularly at night.

The Scotsman 09 Mar 2005

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As Arctic Ice Melts, Rush Is on for Shipping Lanes, More

By John Roach
The melting Arctic ice is fueling a rush for the North Pole region's resources.

Governments are jostling for political control over new passages for ships between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The disappearing sea ice could also open the way to exploit a bounty of oil, gas, minerals, and fish once protected by their inaccessibility, scientists and environmentalists caution.

The Arctic sea ice has receded by about 40 percent since 1979. By the end of this century the region could be ice free during the summer months, according to Michael Oppenheimer, a geoscientist at Princeton University in New Jersey.

Oppenheimer is an expert on the science and policy of global climate change and its impacts. He said Arctic nations have noted the economic potential presented by the melting ice and are jostling for control in the region.

"Countries these days tend to work out economic competition peacefully," he said. "On the other hand, that doesn't mean it will be worked out in a way that's beneficial to the Arctic environment or the people who live there."

As the Arctic ice recedes, ships will be able to ferry loads between Europe and Asia using sea routes that hug the Arctic coasts of Canada and Russia. The new routes should be more than a third quicker for some shipments that now pass through the Suez or Panama canals.

It may take several decades for these trans-Arctic shipping routes to be safely opened. In the near term, though, less ice means commercial fishing fleets and the oil, gas, and mining industries can access a bounty of unexploited resources, environmentalists say.

Samantha Smith is the director of the WWF (formerly World Wildlife Fund) Arctic Programme in Oslo, Norway. She said the potential economic windfall to the countries that control access to the Arctic has prompted a significant uptick in interest in the region.

"Everyone, including governments and definitely including organizations like the WWF, are now aware that the sea ice that has been protecting the Arctic seas for centuries is now in danger because of our addiction to fossil fuels," she said.

Melting Ice

Scientists say the climate is warming and the ice is melting because cars and smokestacks continue to pump carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. These gases act like a blanket, trapping heat radiated by the Earth.

Even if humans ceased pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere tomorrow, some melting of the Arctic ice would continue, owing to the residual warming effect of the gases already in the atmosphere, Oppenheimer said.

Environmentalists are concerned that the rush to develop the Arctic for resource extraction and shipping will negatively impact Arctic wildlife and native peoples. But political leaders are concerned about access and control, Smith said.

According to Smith, there are four ongoing maritime boundary disputes over shipping and resource access in the Arctic: between Norway and Russia in the Barents Sea; Russia and the U.S. in the Bearing Sea; the U.S. and Canada in the Beaufort Sea; and Canada and Denmark in the Davis Strait (Greenland is a semi-independent Danish territory).

In October 2004 Denmark joined Canada and Russia in staking a claim to the North Pole. Denmark announced a 25-million-U.S.-dollar project to prove that the seabed beneath the North Pole is a natural extension of Greenland's seabed. If successful, it could give Denmark the right to the Pole's abundant resources.

"It is far too early to say whether a claim north of Greenland will be successful," said Bente Olsen of Denmark's Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation in Copenhagen.

Oppenheimer said he expects to see more Arctic territory claims in the years ahead and that regardless of what countries are in control, the Arctic can expect a flood of people from the south who will likely squeeze out the native people.

"It will take some effort to ensure the invasion winds up differently than other widespread population movements," he said. "But history isn't very encouraging."

Cautious Approach

The WWF's Smith said Arctic nations ought to negotiate a treaty that regulates access to the region's resources and shipping routes to prevent an environmental catastrophe due to overdevelopment.

But first, she added, the world ought to make aggressive cuts in carbon dioxide emissions to slow or halt the pace of global warming and thus head off any widespread migration to the Arctic.

High energy prices, ongoing political instability in the Middle East, and a booming economy in China are all economic forces that increase pressure to open the Arctic to increased resource extraction and ship traffic, Smith said.

"But our view is that before anything happens, governments and people who have rights to the coastal areas should set aside the most valuable and important areas simply because they can still be a heritage for future generations," she said.

National Geographic News 25 Feb 2005 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/02/0225_050225_arctic_landrush.html

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Arctic tragedy at butcher’s shop

EXTRACTS FROM a new documentary examining an ill-fated British Arctic expedition were filmed in a Dundee butcher’s shop yesterday.

The programme focuses on Sir John Franklin’s 1845 expedition to chart a navigable route through the north-west passage in the Canadian Arctic.

The expedition was to become the “biggest Arctic maritime disaster known” when both ships under Franklin’s command—Erebus and Terror—were lost along with their combined crew of 134 men.

The ships were last seen moored to an iceberg on the east side of Baffin Bay in July 1845. They continued to Beechey Island before taking a westerly course through Victoria Strait, where they became icebound in September 1846.

The ships were abandoned and the men headed south on foot toward mainland Canada.

None survived the trip, which later sparked one of the largest and most expensive search missions in naval history.

Documentary makers Crossing the Line Films are trying to shed a new light on the tragedy and contacted forensic anthropologist Professor Sue Black, of Dundee University, to give her expert opinion on bone samples of crew members that feature unusual cut marks.

Professor Black, who worked for six years as a Saturday girl in a butcher’s shop, visited G. & B. Grossett Ltd in Arbroath Road yesterday to demonstrated on a leg of pork how the cut marks might have occurred.

Her expert opinions will be revealed when the documentary is aired on Channel 5 later this year.

Tim Altmann, of Crossing the Line Films, said the story of the Franklin expedition endured in Canada and elsewhere but had been all but lost to generations of Britons.

He said, “Some of the more recent search expeditions brought bone samples of the men with unusual cut marks on them.

“Various theories have been attributed to these marks including polar bears, Eskimo attacks and cannibalism. Professor Black is going to talk about what might have caused these marks.”

The Courier 01 Feb 2005

"The Lost Expedition"

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CNG favoured for High Arctic

Energy researchers say option easily offers greater economic value than GTL or LNG, but calculates all three schemes could generate 15% minimum return

Gary Park - Petroleum News Calgary Correspondent

For combined capital and operating costs of up to C$6.8 billion it should be economically feasible to use one of three options to develop natural gas in Canada’s High Arctic at some point in the next four to 15 years and stretching through to 2040, a Canadian Energy Research Institute study has concluded.

It said each of three schemes — liquefied natural gas, compressed natural gas or gas-to-liquids — would generate more than the required 15 percent minimum rate of return to exploit two fields on Melville Island with total gas-in-place of 10.2 trillion cubic feet.

The study — commissioned by Canada’s Department of Indian and Northern Affairs and the Nunavut government — said the Drake Point and Hecla fields on Melville’s Sabine Peninsula could be developed in harness in a single onshore/offshore project.

A previous study by the institute in March 2004 concluded that production and ship-borne transportation gave CNG a significant economic margin over the GTL and LNG alternatives.

CNG avoids costs of liquefaction facilities

In an updated analysis, institute researchers Luke Chan, George Eynon and David McColl said CNG shipments to a Mackenzie Corridor pipeline avoided the larger capital costs of liquefaction facilities needed for LNG.

Because CNG vessels have only about one-third of the capacity of LNG tankers, they are better-suited to short-haul routes, making transportation from Melville to the Mackenzie Delta commercially feasible, the study said.

LNG would offer two options — one using a fleet of icebreaking LNG tankers to carry shipments to third party regasification facilities in Nova Scotia or New Brunswick, which are both dealing with applications for LNG terminals; the other would transship LNG from icebreaking tankers to conventional vessels in West Greenland, thus minimizing capital costs for vessels and offering greater flexibility in the choice of markets.

GTL, although presenting several options to U.S. East Coast refineries, is relatively inefficient because 35 percent of the input energy is consumed in the conversion process, the authors said.

Earlier study proposed LNG

The study noted that an Arctic pilot project application in 1981 proposed deliveries from Melville to Quebec and Nova Scotia using LNG carriers.

That plan called for delivering 320 million cubic feet per day of gas from the Drake Point field to a barge-mounted liquefaction facility at Bridgport Inlet on Melville. From there two vessels would deliver the LNG to regasification terminals in Quebec and Nova Scotia, about 3,120 miles away.

A second phase would increase throughput to 550 million cubic feet per day, using four LNG carriers.

Finally, development of the Hecla field would transfer 1.375 billion cubic feet per day to nine LNG carriers.

The institute based its near-term findings on two baseline Henry Hub prices of US$4.50 and US$5.67 per thousand cubic feet for the 2005-2015 period.

The study said the development of Melville gas with its shipping option for the production stream “might well be seen as more environmentally sensitive than conventional offshore exploration and development of Beaufort Sea resource potential and could well have an impact on the timing of that activity.”

In weighing important socio-economic and environmental issues, it said the GTL option offers three potential benefits: a home-grown substitute for the volumes of diesel that are currently imported into Nunavut communities, improving economic conditions in the region and reducing greenhouse gases.

Petroleum News 28 Jan 2005

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Race is on to Claim the Arctic Circle

Deep inside the Arctic Circle, hundreds of kilometres beyond the frontier of human habitation, a solitary red flag with a white cross flies in the freezing winds, its pole hammered into the unyielding rock of Hans Island. Next to it, a plaque tells the world the Vikings have returned.

The tiny island, a hostile wedge of rock poised between the north-west corner of Greenland and Canada's Ellesmere Island, where winter temperatures plummet to 40C below, is normally home to a seal colony and the occasional polar bear.

Now it's on the front line of the race to claim the North Pole, a modern scramble for the Arctic that has pitted tiny Denmark against its Nato ally Canada, with Russia and the United States lurking in the wings.

At stake, in what could be the last great territorial land-grab, is the promise of untold mineral riches that has prompted an increasing number of governments to throw tens of millions of pounds at scientific and military missions in a bid to get ahead.

These days the Vikings do not come in long ships. The Danish navy sent HDMS Vaedderen, a 3500-tonne frigate with a reinforced hull, into the disputed channel that forms the maritime border between Canada and Greenland, the world's largest island and a semi-independent Danish territory, and more importantly, only 804km south of the North Pole.

And the elite Sirius Patrol, a contingent of specially trained Arctic soldiers, completed a hazardous patrol to the north-east shore of Greenland. The success of the Vaedderen and Sirius missions in proving their ability to operate so far north has given Denmark the confidence to stake its claim to the North Pole.

Trine Dahl Jensen, a geologist, is heading the team of scientists tasked with proving that Denmark's northern frontier is a lot further north than anyone expected. She is more aware than most that the Danes' argument is complex and expensive to prove.

What they must resolve, Ms Dahl-Jensen says, is where Greenland's continental socket ends and where the ocean floor begins. Under the North Pole, the 2000km Lomonosov Ridge of mountains runs from north of Greenland to north of Siberia. If high-tech measurements prove Greenland's socket is attached to the ridge, they are in business. "We must be able to argue that it is a natural extension of Greenland."

In the lobby of her offices at the Geological Survey of Greenland and Denmark there is a mechanical reminder of what they are working towards. A giant Foucault's pendulum is tracking the rotation of the Earth around its South and North Pole axis. So far, no nation has secured territorial rights to either but the dawning of 2005 means the clock is ticking. That is the deadline for the Danish parliament to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

The 1986 treaty affords coastal countries an economic zone extending 370km from their shores. If the socket is part of Greenland, then the North Pole could be part of Denmark.

The scientific work has to be completed within 10 years from the date that Denmark ratifies the UN convention. Ms Dahl-Jensen and her team have been given $38 million in Government grants for a project said by the Danish ministry of science to have "historic dimensions".

"In any other situation, we would never have received this kind of funding," she says. At her desk in an overheated, cupboard-sized office lined with polar maps on both walls, the Danish scientist with her blonde hair and broad forehead looks a true descendant of her Viking forebears.

Contrary to expectations, the main challenge her group faced on their first expeditions into the Polar Basin, was weather warmer than usual. "We need cold conditions, preferably between 30 to 40 degrees below," the geologist says. "We can't land [helicopters] on the ice if there is too much water on it."

After landing and setting up camp, the team uses sonar equipment and audio waves produced by controlled explosions and air cannons to map the sea bed. Some of the equipment is in place along the northern shores of Greenland.

But there is a greater imperative behind the latest round of grandiose territorial claims than the workings of international law. The Inuit were among the first to notice it and they do not even have words for what they were seeing. Many indigenous languages have no vocabulary for the legions of animals, insects and plants that have advanced north as global warming melts the polar ice and invites forest to creep over the thawed tundra.

An eight-nation report in November revealed that the Arctic was warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet and that the North Pole could be ice-free in summertime by the end of the century. Around the Arctic, salmon are moving up into more northerly waters, hornets are beginning to buzz and barn owls are appearing in regions where indigenous people have never seen a barn. The Arctic report said polar bears were "unlikely to survive as a species" if the ice disappeared and they were left to compete with their better-adapted brown and grizzly cousins.

What is for some an environmental catastrophe might be a great commercial opportunity. Diamond finds in Canada's Nunavut have fired a mining rush and propelled the country into the ranks of a top-three producer. Ottawa is counting on tapping what the Government suspects are major natural gas reserves in the Beaufort Sea, the frigid zone bordering the Yukon and Alaska, where diplomatic swords were crossed with the US when it tried unsuccessfully to auction the area to oil companies last year.

What no one disagrees with is the riches that would come from the thaw creating a north-west passage. The centuries-old bane of Arctic explorers could become a reality thanks to global warming, cutting thousands of miles off the shipping routes between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and delivering a windfall to any country able to tax its users.

In August, Canada spent C$4.9 million ($5.7 million) in a show of force, sending hundreds of troops, helicopters, a frigate and an ice-breaker on a training exercise in search of mock satellite debris. Bad weather grounded planes, two soldiers were lost for a night and a fire on an ageing Sea King helicopter exposed the limits of the present force. This year, the Government has approved the launching of the Radarsat II to provide high-resolution surveillance across the Arctic and monitor ships on the surface.

Canada's Defence Minister, Bill Graham, was well aware global warming has added a new urgency to claims in the Arctic. "[It has created] new possibilities and new threats," he told the New York Times.

The Government has allocated C$70 million ($82 million) for its own underwater mapping. One Canadian diplomat says: "To stake a territorial claim, you must be able to demonstrate you can actively patrol and enforce it, if necessary militarily."

Beneath the pack ice are the nuclear submarines of Russia, patrolling the dark water. Moscow has made a failed attempt to stake its own claim to the Lomonosov Ridge, and thereby to the North Pole.

Faced with a common enemy, Canada and Denmark have begun to negotiate to fund a joint programme, which will divide the hefty expenses. Kai Sorensen, the deputy director of the Greenland and Denmark survey, says Denmark and Canada share a common interest in arguing that the natural divide of the North Pole is formed by the Lomonosov Ridge, which creates a natural median line between Canada, Greenland and across the North Pole to Russian territory.

Moscow has based claims on the so-called sector principle. A division along the median line would give Denmark territorial rights to the North Pole in accordance with the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea, but the sector principle would divide the North Pole along sectors formed by longitudes, thus splitting the Pole into several territories.

Torquil Meedon, a senior official at Denmark's ministry of science and technology, said: "Climate changes indicate that ice in the Polar Sea may disappear within 50 to 100 years. That will open up the north-west passage as a new and valuable shipping route. It will also be open to fishing, and the oil and gas reserves which may prove significant. Who knows how valuable the rights to the North Pole could be 100 years from now?"

Ms Dahl-Jensen says there is no solid evidence to suggest the area of 200,000sq km will contain any wealth of natural resources.

The race to claim new territory is, in large part, about regaining long-lost status. "It is all surreal," says Ole Kvaerno, director of the Institute of Strategy and Political Science at the Royal Danish Defence College. "It really strikes me that various nations have begun to make these impossible territorial claims ... What will be the next territorial claim: space?"

With bragging rights to one of the last, unexplored territories at stake not everyone is being rational. Kvaernoe smiles wryly, and shrugs. "The North Pole; it sounds pretty cool, doesn't it?"

New Zealand Herald 07 Jan 2005

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