Word: arctics
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...reserves under the ice. But as a new study showed, that landscape is changing radically: the ice cap is the smallest it has been in recorded history. That change has ushered in the first great gold rush of the 21st century as the countries along the Arctic Circle stake claims to territory and resources thousands of feet under the melting crust...
Even backed by the new icebreaker fleet Harper has promised, that's not much of a deterrent. In truth, of course, it isn't military encroachment the Canadians fear so much as the environmental peril that may come from unregulated use of their waters. Cruise ships transporting Arctic ecotourists, many of them Russian vessels hired out to Western tour operators, anchored off Resolute 17 times this year alone. Once the Northwest Passage becomes not just a tourist destination but a viable commercial route that would cut an astonishing 5,000 miles (8,000 km) from the distance between Asia...
With all the other Arctic nations making their plays, it would be too much to expect the U.S. - an Arctic state itself, thanks to Alaska - to stand idly by. The Coast Guard icebreaker now on its way back from plying the waters of the Chukchi Cap, north of the Bering Strait, has charted the sea floor with a multibeam echo sounder to delineate where Alaska's continental shelf ends and the depths of the Arctic Ocean begin. But to press its case for extended territorial waters, as the other Arctic nations are doing, the U.S. needs to sign the convention...
...competing claims to the Arctic - of environmentalists and entrepreneurs, nations and natives - be reconciled? Antarctica, with no native population, has been saved from international competition by a treaty signed in 1959, which (among other things) bans all mining there until 2041. There have always been advocates of such an approach in the Arctic, but given well-established local populations and long-standing national claims, they have never gotten very...
Meanwhile, as they always have, adventurers, hucksters and dreamers will continue to make their way north - some of them in bikinis. Iceland's Valsson sees the Arctic as "the new Mediterranean," with warming temperatures fostering new centers of civilization in Siberia and Arctic Canada. Hammerfest bears witness to some of that: The population is booming, and a sense of hope infuses the economy. But as winter approaches in Resolute and the lowering sky turns dark, Kalluk, the Inuit hunter, suspects that dreams of a new world in the north are overdone. "Whatever else happens," he says, "the sun will still...