The Great Game Moves North

The Arctic is the fastest-warming region on earth and continues to melt at a breathtaking rate. Last summer, for the first time in history, the polar icecap retreated far enough to open sea routes north of Eurasia as well as North America, and it is expected to be completely ice-free during the summer months in 2013. Boreal forests are appearing where there was once just frozen tundra, and last summer, the first wild fire was recorded north of Alaska's Brooks range, in a region where the local Inuit dialects lack a word for forest fire.

In an article in Foreign Affairs last year, I described how not only is the climate changing fast, but the region's geopolitics are also rapidly transforming. As the Arctic coastal states begin to make claims over both these transit passages and newly accessible deep-water resources, a Great Game is developing in the world's far north.

The next few years will be critical in determining whether the region's long-term future will be one of international harmony and the rule of law, or a Hobbesian free-for-all. Although the Bush administration took a huge step by publishing a new Arctic policy during its final week in office, the Obama administration must do far more to keep Washington from being further marginalized in this geostrategically important region.

The polar icecap in the central Arctic Ocean thinned by half between 2001 and 2007. Other signs -- such as warmer deep-water ocean currents, greater albedo feedback loops, and massive ice shelves breaking free -- point to further melting. Scientists are increasingly concerned that the thawing permafrost will disgorge millions of tons of methane, unleashing what some refer to as a "climate bomb," a runaway warming cycle that could dramatically raise the planet's temperature.

The Arctic may be open to year-round shipping within a few decades, if not sooner. Eventually, the Arctic, like the Baltic Sea or Great Lakes, will freeze in the winter and melt in the summer. Shipping companies are taking notice. The German-based Beluga Shipping company, for example, is planning to move cargo from the Atlantic to the Pacific via the Northeast Passage this summer unassisted by icebreaker escort.

Last July, the U.S. Geological Survey released the first-ever comprehensive assessment of the region's oil and gas potential, and the numbers are staggering. Based on a resource appraisal of technically recoverable hydrocarbons, the Arctic contains about 13 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and about 30 percent of the world's undiscovered natural gas. Together this represents 22 percent of all untapped but technically recoverable hydrocarbons. More than 80 percent of these resources lie offshore.

Due to the ongoing global economic crisis, development of these oil and gas fields has proceeded in fits and starts. The price of energy needs to be high enough to make production in such an extreme environment economically viable. To complicate matters even more, some Arctic coastal states have not settled on the regulatory standards for development. The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court, for example, ruled last November that before the Royal Dutch Shell company can move forward with exploratory drilling in the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska -- for which it had already paid the U.S. government billions of dollars in leases -- the U.S. Interior Department needs to further study the environmental impacts of drilling on the sea's bowhead whale population and nearby indigenous communities.

Similarly, Norway has barred production of oil and gas in some of its northern waters, despite the Norwegian company StatoilHydro partnering with Gazprom, the state-owned Russian energy giant, in the Russian Arctic. While Norway is struggling with this contradiction, Russia seems to have no such qualms and has dived headlong into massive Arctic nonrenewable energy projects. Gazprom hopes to bring the enormous Shtokman field, in the Barents Sea, on stream by 2013. The field holds enough gas to provide all of the United States' electricity needs for six years, and Gazprom is eagerly eyeing the U.S. energy market, envisioning regular shipments of liquefied natural gas to import facilities in Maryland and Georgia.

Given the high stakes and pace of Arctic climate change, countries that border the ocean are working to extend their sovereignty in the region. After its controversial flag-planting on the North Pole seafloor in 2007, Russia moved to further bolster its Arctic presence in 2008. In addition to strategic bomber flights to the edge of U.S., Canadian, Norwegian, and Danish airspace, the Russian navy began patrolling Arctic waters last summer for the first time since the Cold War. On the eve of President Barack Obama's first visit to Canada in late February, the Canadian air force scrambled fighter jets to intercept Russian long-range bombers.

The Russian federal government plans to invest more than a billion dollars in the northern port of Murmansk, doubling the port's capacity by 2015. Moscow also pledged last summer to build at least three new nuclear icebreaker ships to join what is already the world's largest icebreaker fleet. And much to the chagrin of environmentalists, Moscow completed a reactor vessel for the first floating nuclear power plant in October 2008.