Pity the polar bear, unless he has been lonely these past few millennia. For the Far North that is his natural habitat is destined to fill up with geologists, cartographers and prospectors almost as fast as the Arctic ice cap that has hitherto deterred them recedes.
The Great Game is about to be re-fought at the top of the world. The starting signal is the spectacular evidence of climate change that reduced the ice cap to its smallest recorded size last summer and, five years ago, allowed a Russian research ship to reach the North Pole unaided by icebreakers. The prizes are pristine fisheries, new, ice-free shipping lanes and almost immeasurable mineral wealth.
For environmentalists, dismay at the prospect of a rush to plunder one of the planet’s last great wildernesses is only deepened by the conviction that man-made global warming has made it possible. Comparisons with the fate of Antarctica offer little solace: that continent, administered by relatively amiable consensus, has so far remained the preserve of science, tightly controlled tourism and its own unique fauna. (The march of the penguins happens nowhere else.)
But Antarctica is both harsher and more remote than the Arctic, which is closely ringed by four highly developed economies — Canada, Norway, Denmark and the US — and by Russia. Its waters cover up to a quarter of the world’s remaining oil reserves and at least two prodigious gas deposits. The cost of reaching these reserves may yet prove prohibitive. The investment required per ton of output is put at five times that needed in the Gulf of Mexico. But the race to extract the Arctic’s mineral wealth has already begun and is likely to continue as sustained high oil prices fund ever-bolder exploration. The best that can be hoped for in the new Great Game is that contestants keep it orderly.
There is little chance of such orderliness yet. Each summer research vessels from the Arctic nations set out on increasingly political missions to map the ocean floor in the hope of supporting territorial claims far beyond the 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone afforded each country by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. The convention allows such claims where undersea features are contiguous with a country’s coastal shelf. On this basis Russia has already claimed almost half the Arctic Ocean including the North Pole itself. Denmark could make a rival claim based on “possession” of the 1,000-mile undersea Lomonosov Ridge. And the US could claim an area the size of California to the north of Alaska — but has not yet ratified the convention.
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President Bush has called ratification a priority, but has been stymied so far by Senate Republicans. The Canadian Prime Minister will have caught their attention with his announcement this week of £2.6 billion in new security spending for the Canadian Arctic. The sensible response, for all the Arctic nations, is to redouble their efforts to reach a comprehensive treaty based on legitimate claims, not icy sabre-rattling. It is the least the polar bears deserve.