Arctic Oil Rush: the Naval Aspect
- From: Jack Linthicum <jacklinthicum@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2008 09:15:29 -0700 (PDT)
Shrinking ice cap in an area the size of Texas and California combined
with perhaps 25% of the remaining fossil fuel reserves creates a
situation with naval complications. Oil is one aspect and transit of
previously unattainable areas another. The combination, when the price
of oil starts to rise in the future, will involve all of the countries
with a claim on the sea floor beneath the Arctic Ocean.
The article has a lot of "local color" and is quite long.
Dispatch
The Arctic Oil Rush
There have been many expeditions to the North Pole, but it was
Russia’s, last summer, that touched off a furor over who owns the
Arctic—and the oil that is becoming more and more accessible as the
ice disappears. From the halls of Moscow’s scientific institutes,
where global warming is not part of the official story, to Siberia’s
permafrost tundra, where reindeer are dying and a powerful greenhouse
gas is bubbling from the ooze, the author probes the secrets of Yakut
shamans, woolly-mammoth skeletons, and a new Great Game: energy
exploration.
by Alex Shoumatoff May 2008
Eveny herders
On August 2, 2007, two 26-foot-long Russian submersibles, Mir-1 and
Mir-2, descended through a hole in the ice at the North Pole. The
Arctic, which has been losing almost 10 percent of its ice per decade
since 1953, was in the middle of its biggest summer meltback on
record, but the ice at the pole was still five feet thick, and the
hole had to be opened by the nuclear icebreaker Rossiya. Once below
the surface, the submersibles sank more than two and a half miles
down, to the ocean floor.
At the helm of Mir-1 was Anatoly Sagalevich, head of the Deep Manned
Submersibles Laboratory at the Russian Academy of Science’s P. P.
Shirshov Institute of Oceanology. Although they officially belonged to
the academy, the two Mirs were Sagalevich’s babies. Sitting in his
office in Moscow, Sagalevich recalls being inside the cockpit and
watching the hole at the pole above him grow smaller and smaller until
it finally disappeared.
The ships spent about eight and a half hours underwater, and 90
minutes at the bottom. Using a robotic arm attached to his submersible
(“Not submarine, please,” he insists; “submarines are military”),
Sagalevich collected geologic samples and planted a titanium Russian
flag in the murky sediment. The pressure at this depth would have
compressed him to the size of a mouse had he ventured outside. He
shows me a Styrofoam cup he put out deep underwater off the coast of
France two years ago, when he investigated the wreck of the Nazi
battleship Bismarck. It had been shrunk to the size of a thimble.
Alex Shoumatoff
With their mission accomplished, the two Mirs headed back to the
surface. This was the trickiest part: finding the hole in the ice,
which, in addition to being two-thirds frozen over, had already
drifted at least a mile from where it was when they went down. The
Arctic ice pack is constantly moving, at a rate of six or so miles per
day. Sagalevich had to calculate not only the speed of the ice but
also the effect of the currents beneath it while maneuvering the
ascending submersibles.
There were other notable figures aboard the two vessels. The great
polar scientist Artur Chilingarov, who also happens to be the vice-
speaker of the Duma (Russia’s largely cosmetic parliament), was on
Mir-1. With him was the oligarch Vladimir Gruzdev, who has an
estimated net worth of $820 million. He’s in the Duma, too, but had to
pay to join the expedition. Along for the mission, according to press
accounts, were other paying explorers: Swedish businessman Frederik
Paulsen; Ibrahim Sharaf, a sheikh from the United Arab Emirates, who
wore his traditional robes under his polar suit; and Australian
adventurer Mike McDowell, who paid a reported $3 million. The two
submersibles were plastered with the logos of eight sponsors—the
Kremlin was 100 percent behind this expedition, in every way except
its funding.
The arctonauts returned to a hero’s welcome in Moscow not seen since
Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut, returned from outer space. The
reception was cooler elsewhere in the world, especially in the four
other countries with Arctic coastlines: the United States, Canada,
Norway, and Denmark, which controls the vast territory of Greenland.
“This isn’t the 15th century,” protested Peter MacKay, Canada’s
foreign minister. “You can’t go around the world and just plant
flags.” As elated as he ever allows himself to be, Vladimir Putin
tried to smooth international hackles: “Don’t worry. Everything will
be all right. I was surprised by a somewhat nervous reaction from our
Canadian colleagues. Americans, at one time, planted a flag on the
moon. So what? Why didn’t you worry so much? The moon did not pass in
the United States’ ownership.” John B. Bellinger III, legal adviser to
the secretary of state, told me, “We knew they were going to the North
Pole, but we didn’t know they were going to plant the flag. It was a
provocative action, and took us aback.”
All this outrage may have been a bit overdone. Frederick Cook planted
an American flag at what he claimed was the North Pole in 1908, and
Robert Peary did the same thing a year later. Chilingarov himself was
photographed at the South Pole last year with a group of American
scientists and the flags of both countries.
Chilingarov wasn’t above fanning the flames of nationalism in public.
In Moscow, he told a group of well-wishers, “I don’t give a damn what
all these foreign politicians … are saying about this. If someone
doesn’t like this, let them go down themselves and try to put
something there. Russia must win. Russia has what it takes to win. The
Arctic has always been Russian.”
“It’s only natural that our dive had great patriotic impact, and of
course we planted the flag, as Americans would do in a similar case,”
Chilingarov told me. “I don’t understand why there is all this noise
in the international community. If anyone wants to plant a flag down
there, they’re welcome to. There’s plenty of room.” And Sagalevich
told me, “Everybody knows now that a pure Russian crew—supported by
Russian helicopters, submersibles, research vessel, icebreaker—can go
to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. We know how to do it, and we can do
it again.”
This “stunt fueled by a return to czarist impulses,” “coup de
théâtre,” “Kremlin-sponsored act of bravado aimed at boosting national
pride,” as it was variously described in the Western press, is just
one of many signs that the Russian bear is once again rearing its
head.
Like much of what happens on the world stage these days, this
expedition—and the diplomatic flap it caused—was really about oil. By
some estimates, 25 percent of the world’s remaining fossil-fuel
reserves are buried under the Arctic Ocean. With the ice cap shrinking
by 28,000 square miles a year, and gigantic pools of open water
appearing as it splits, the possibility of getting at them is
improving daily. Meanwhile, oil supplies are dwindling, and prices are
rising to historic highs, making expensive oil exploration more and
more worthwhile.
It all adds up to a renewed interest in the Arctic—the last large
piece of non-jurisdictional real estate on the planet—which went off
the screen when the Cold War ended. Now there’s a new Great Game on—
the Cold Rush.
The Laws of Extraction
According to an obscure clause in the 1982 United Nations Convention
on the Law of the Sea (unclos)—also called the Law of the Sea Treaty,
or lost, by its critics—if you can prove that your continental shelf
extends beyond the 200 nautical miles that signatory states with
coastlines are automatically entitled to, you have sovereign rights to
its oil, gas, and minerals. The Russians’ Arctic claim hinges on an
underwater formation called the Lomonosov Ridge, which runs 1,240
miles from Siberia through the North Pole nearly to the juncture of
Ellesmere Island (Canada’s northernmost point) and Greenland, and
which Russia says is an extension of its shelf. Actually, it is
claiming only half of the ridge—the half on its side of the pole. This
has the rest of the world nervous. Much of Europe depends on Russia’s
natural gas, and the Kremlin has already turned the faucet off once,
on Ukraine, and threatened to do the same to Belarus. If it starts
tapping the Arctic deposits, Russia will be back as a superpower and
may become the world’s dominant energy supplier. There would then be a
Fifth Russian Empire, presided over by the increasingly autocratic
Putin, who has sidestepped the presidential two-term limit by making
himself prime minister.
The U.S. hasn’t even signed unclos. Its ratification has been blocked
for years by a few conservative Republican senators currently led by
Oklahoma’s James Inhofe, who is famous for dismissing the human
contribution to global warming as “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated
on the American people.” These senators don’t want to cede an inch of
American sovereignty to the U.N. and apparently find the treaty’s
designation of the high seas as “the common heritage of mankind” to be
intolerably Marxist. So the U.S. isn’t on the 21-country Commission on
the Limits of the Continental Shelf, which will decide on Russia’s
claim. It has some fancy footwork to do if it’s even going to be a
player in the scramble for the Arctic.
Russia isn’t the only country whose Arctic aspirations are unnerving
the Americans. Last summer, Canada’s Northwest Passage was nearly free
of ice and completely navigable for a few weeks—for the first time
since records have been kept. This fabled route to the Orient, which
eluded Henry Hudson, Sir Francis Drake, and Martin Frobisher, and was
finally navigated by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen in 1905, would
reshape global trade, being thousands of miles shorter than most
currently used shipping routes, though it won’t be clear long enough
to be commercially viable for at least another 15 to 20 years. Canada
has claimed the passage as its internal waterway since the early
1970s, but the U.S. maintains that it is an international strait,
through which any vessel, including submerged submarines gathering
intelligence, has the right of “transit passage.”
Any way you look at it, Russia has the greatest legitimacy in the
Arctic—geographically, historically, demographically, hydrologically
(it has six major rivers that feed the Arctic Ocean, while the other
countries have one or two), and, it now hopes to prove,
geomorphologically and geologically. Twenty percent of the country
lies above the Arctic Circle, and almost two million Russians live
there today. If the world were an orange with 18 segments meeting at
the top (the North Pole), roughly 8 of them would be in Russia, Canada
would have 4, Denmark 2, and Norway, Sweden, and the U.S. just one
apiece. Only a sliver of Alaska, on the Beaufort Sea, lies above the
Arctic Circle.
The new accessibility of the Arctic’s deposits is not going to make
the effort to curb global warming any easier. Ironically, fossil-fuel
emissions are making more fossil fuel available. It’s as if someone on
the verge of bankruptcy were suddenly to get a huge inheritance from a
distant relative he didn’t even know. Compounding this vicious circle
is another feedback loop that is making the top of the planet warm
twice as fast as anywhere else: as more bare land and open water are
exposed by melting, more solar heat is absorbed instead of being
reflected back by white ice and snow. With global warming already
stressing the Arctic’s animals and its million or so indigenous
people, its newfound wealth could be the coup de grâce.
Party Lines
The Sheraton Palace Hotel Moscow is full of American businessmen.
Million-dollar deals are being discussed in hushed tones in the bar.
There is serious money to be made in this country. One of the
businessmen, who is building a chemical plant in Siberia to purify
locally mined silicon so it can be used in solar panels, tells me,
“It’s going to cost so much to get the oil in the Arctic out that they
will need partners.” Gazprom, Russia’s energy parastatal, is already
partnering with France’s Total and the Norwegian energy giant Statoil,
in the Shtokman Field, just over the Russian border with Norway.
Russia doesn’t have the sophisticated technology to tap the huge
deposits of natural gas below the seafloor, or the estimated $20 to
$30 billion it will cost, and the partners do.
I catch a cab to the Russian Institute of Geography, which is on a
side street in Old Moscow, in a building that used to be a poorhouse
during the time of Ivan the Terrible and whose ratty décor is still
U.S.S.R. circa l960. Nikolai Osokin, a glaciologist who has been
studying the Arctic’s shifting ice for 45 years and is an authority on
its fossil-fuel deposits, shows me the line that Stalin drew from
Murmansk to the pole to the middle of the Bering Sea in l926, which he
declared to be the limits of the Russian Arctic. It is still in post-
Soviet atlases, and no one, Osokin says, has ever disputed it. Canada
had similarly defined its Arctic territory, shooting lines from its
eastern- and westernmost points to the pole a year earlier.
“Traditionally, all the Arctic countries mention their own sectors,”
Osokin says. “Only in the last 10 years is the discussion about
unfairness of definition of sectors.” This is how the seven countries
with claims in Antarctica divvied up the continent in l959, agreeing
not to use their sectors for military purposes or to exploit their
resources until 2048. (The claims had been asserted in the first half
of the 20th century, beginning with Britain—on the basis of its
disputed ownership of the Falkland Islands and its explorations, going
back to Captain John Strong in 1690—and followed by France, Norway,
Argentina, Chile, Australia, and New Zealand.)
Many feel the best thing for the Arctic would be a similar
arrangement. The ships that pass through the Arctic Ocean could be
taxed by an international body, and the proceeds could be used to help
the indigenous people and wildlife, whose eco-system and livelihoods
are melting from under them.
Osokin unfolds a map of the Arctic sea bottom. “The Russian shelf goes
out much further than 200 nautical miles not because of Russian
greediness but geological reality,” he says. “The currently accepted
edge of the Russian shelf goes a little more than halfway to the pole,
but the Lomonosov and Mendeleyev Ridges and the Podvodnikov and
Makarov Basins [other, parallel-running features] extend the territory
to the pole and from the pole in lines to Murmansk and the eastern
coast of Chukotka—just like Stalin’s boundary.” In fact, with the 200
miles of shelf that its northernmost archipelagoes are entitled to,
Russia already has the right to almost all that it is claiming in this
new submission.
How do you know there is so much oil there?, I ask. “Seismic profiles
establish that at the bottom of the North Ice Sea is a large amount of
oil-bearing structures analogous to the structures of western Siberia
that formed 38 million years ago, when the Arctic Ocean was beginning
to be formed,” Osokin assures me. Then he drops something of a
bombshell: “But the interest in the oil will soon be decreasing,
because of new information that global warming is almost over, and the
Arctic ice pack will soon be refreezing.”
Say what? What about all the information from Western scientists that
the ice pack has been losing almost 10 percent of its ice per decade
over the last 50 years, that this year open sea the combined size of
California and Texas was exposed, and that the Arctic could have an
entirely ice-free summer as early as 2040?
“There is no evidence that the warming is going to continue,” he
maintains. “In fact, some of our meteorological stations on the
eastern-Siberian coast have been registering colder temperatures since
l995. The Holocene interglacial warm period has been going on for
11,000 years, already longer than any previous one. Its end is
overdue.”
This, I will learn after talking with half a dozen other scientists in
Moscow, is the Russian party line: it is starting to get colder, and
the effect of human CO2 emissions on the world’s climate is
negligible.
It’s true that the Arctic ice pack, expanding and contracting
seasonally and in response to a multiplicity of natural rhythms, is,
in Newsweek’s phrase, “a notorious shapeshifter.” The now ice-capped
southern tip of Greenland had thriving boreal forest, with spruce,
pine, alder, and yew, 450,000 years ago. Four to eight thousand years
ago, willows, birches, roses, and heaths—tundra plants—were growing on
the northern tip of Sweden’s Svalbard Islands, which are now covered
with ice. Even in the l930s, the Russian Arctic was warmer than it is
today, and the Great North Way, along its coast from Murmansk to the
Bering Sea, was completely open. And this summer’s record meltback, a
recent paper in Nature argues, was the result not only of man-made
global warming but also of the cyclical north-south shift in the
energy in the Arctic’s atmosphere, which Osokin told me about.
The global climate is a complex interactive system, with all kinds of
nonlinear feedback loops. According to Robert Corell—a climate
scientist at the Heinz Center, in Washington, D.C., who chaired the
Arctic Climate Impact Assessment on how the poles are being affected
by climate change—the last 10,000 years have been the most stable
period in the climatic record, with a temperature range that was ideal
for humanity to flourish. But now, he says, we’re moving out of “the
sweet spot.” The vertiginous “hockey stick” rise in mean global
temperature since 1970 is something that can be explained by only one
thing, a powerful new force in the climate system: us. According to
the 737 scientists and other experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, our contribution actually began to kick in around
l750, at the beginning of industrialization (also when our population
began to take off). There’s a less than 10 percent chance the current
warming trend could be natural.
With the Polar Year in full swing, no fewer than 200 expeditions with
scientists from 60 countries are collecting baseline data in the
Arctic. Every week brings a new study about the breakdown of another
component of the eco-system. So why are the Russian scientists saying
it’s getting colder? Michael MacCracken, a Washington, D.C.–based
climate scientist and policy expert, explains that Russian climate
science is based on paleoclimatic reconstruction and is hierarchical.
You adopt the position of the head of your institute, and the Russian
Academy of Science’s chief climatologist, Yuri Izrael, maintains that
it’s getting colder and the human contribution is negligible. Western
climate science, however, is based on modeling what is happening now
and where it’s going, and is confrontational. The scientists are
always challenging one another’s findings. Corell goes as far as to
accuse Russian climate science of being dictated by conservative
Russian politicians, “who don’t want the warming to stop, because it
will open up the Great North Way again and make Russia the maritime
power it has always wanted to be.”
But outside the walls of academe, the native people of the Russian
Arctic, who are living with what is happening, will tell me a very
different story.
OIL TEXT ENDS, CONTINUED BELOW
I fly to Yakutsk, in far-eastern Siberia, six time zones ahead of
Moscow. Yakutsk is the capital of Yakutia, or, more correctly, the
Sakha Autonomous Republic, which is as big as India but has only a
million people, instead of a billion. In that region, the permafrost,
the layer of permanently frozen soil that covers as much as 25 percent
of the earth’s land, is the deepest in the world, a mile and a half
thick in the Viliui River basin. The Lomonosov Ridge shoots off to the
pole from close to the New Siberian Islands, in the Laptev Sea, above
Yakutia. The coldest confirmed temperature in the Northern Hemisphere—
minus 67.8 degrees Celsius—was recorded in Verkhoyansk, which is also
the oldest European settlement in the Arctic. I want to go there and
look for mammoth tusks that are being heaved up by the melting
permafrost, a welcome development for the again-flourishing ivory
market. Woolly mammoths were hairy pachyderms that died out during the
last big warming event, 10,000 years ago. Their tusks, nearly circular
(while those of modern elephants have a more gradual curve), are also
made of ivory, and are turning up with increasing frequency in Hong
Kong and in mainland China.
I also want to meet some of the Yakut horse breeders, whose
traditional lifestyle is being threatened by the great thaw. They and
the other native people of the Yakut Arctic—the Yukaghir and the Eveny
and Evenki reindeer herders—have powerful shamans, although only a
handful are left. Some are said to be able to drum themselves into a
trance and become winged reindeer, flying up into the sky to see where
the game is.
The shamans have been persecuted since czarist times, as devil
worshippers by the Orthodox priests, and as enemies of the people by
the Soviets, who threw them out of helicopters, saying, “You want to
fly? Here’s your chance.” Animism is the main religion in Yakutia.
Three-quarters of the people still live close to nature, attuned to
the animals and plants, and are acutely aware of the changes that are
occurring because of the mild temperatures.
You don’t have to be a shaman to see what is happening to the tundra;
it’s visible from the plane window. The tundra is pitted with circular
depressions known as “alases.” Some of them are filled with water from
the thawing permafrost; some are empty craters from which the
meltwater has drained as it found new exits in the iceless soil. The
“thermokarst lakes,” as the water-filled ones are called, are bubbling
with methane that had been trapped in the ice. Methane is at least 20
times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. (The
Siberian permafrost zone alone contains an estimated 500 gigatons of
carbon. The entire annual human output is about five and a half
gigatons.)
No one knows how much methane is being released, because we don’t yet
have the capability for “spot” measurement, Corell tells me. But it’s
a ticking time bomb, enough to turn the world into a cauldron, should
it all get into the atmosphere.
Only about 10 percent of Yakutia, however, is methane-emitting tundra.
Most of it is taiga, forest dominated by larch trees, which are taking
carbon out of the atmosphere, so the tundra and the taiga more or less
balance each other out. The taiga is spreading north with the rising
temperature, pushing the tundra to the edge of the Laptev Sea, forcing
migrating cranes and geese to relocate their historic summer nesting
sites. “Drunken forests,” whose trees slant every which way, because
the roots have lost their purchase in the liquefying, buckling soil,
are becoming increasingly common.
Thirty percent of Yakutia’s economy comes from diamond mining. The
republic is practically a private fiefdom of Alrosa, the world’s
second-largest diamond company (after De Beers), which was
nationalized by Putin last year. Yakutia’s president was also once the
president of Alrosa. Most of the mining is done around Mirny, where
there are rich seams of diamond-bearing kimberlite, and where the
biggest man-made hole on earth has been gouged. Yakutsk is a wide-
open, incredibly wealthy frontier town. A travel blog says that one of
the hotels offers “armoured rooms” and that it’s dangerous to eat in
the restaurants because of the presence of diamond mafiosi.
The city of nearly a quarter-million is celebrating its 370th
birthday. Most of the buildings are four-story barracks-like concrete
apartment houses, but here and there one of the centuries-old,
elaborately stenciled log isbas still stands. Some of them have been
tilted at rakish angles by normal, seasonal frost heaving over the
years. The new buildings are constructed on pilings sunk 50 feet down,
so they’re stable. The buckling wreaks havoc with Yakutia’s roads and
railroads and is undoubtedly getting more severe with the warming. If
it cracks the 2,500-mile oil pipeline that’s being built from western
Siberia to the Pacific, there will be an ecological disaster. There’s
already a lot of radioactive and otherwise toxic waste from the mining
of gold, uranium, diamonds, and practically every other mineral from
antimony to zinc.
I visit the Permafrost Research Institute, the world’s only one. First
I am taken down to the dug but not sided basement by a guide named
Pavel. The ceiling is coated with sparkling hexagonal ice crystals.
Pavel points out where the active layer, the part that thaws and
refreezes every year, stops—five and a half feet underground, in the
middle of the basement walls. Below it the soil is frozen solid for a
thousand feet. He says the active layer hasn’t gotten any thicker in
the last 10 or 20 years. There’s a plaster cast of Dima, an almost
intact 39,000-year-old baby mammoth that was found in the late 70s.
Recently an even better-preserved, 37,000-year-old baby mammoth, with
possibly enough intact DNA to enable it to be cloned, with a modern
elephant as its mother, was found on the Yamal Peninsula, west of
Yakutia.
The Eveny and Evenki people (same way of life, different linguistic
heritage) have been relying for centuries on reindeer (known in the
Nearctic as caribou), which provide transport, food, shelter, and
clothing. There are still a few thousand nomadic reindeer herders in
Siberia, moving with their animals in the largest territory of any
remaining traditional people. But the wild and domesticated reindeer
have been experiencing massive die-offs in the spring and fall, I’m
told by Eveny and Evenki activists. Reindeer eat mainly lichen, and
now when the seasons change there is more rain that freezes at night,
often with melted snow, into a sheet of ice that the reindeer can’t
break through with their hooves, so entire herds are starving to
death.
Vyacheslav Shadrin, the head of the council of Yukaghir elders, tells
me that in the Upper Kolyma basin, 700 miles north of Yakutsk, where
he is from, last November and December, when it is normally minus 40
degrees Celsius (also Fahrenheit—Celsius and Fahrenheit converge at 40
below), it rained. That means it was 72 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than
usual. The Yukaghir are one of the oldest aboriginal peoples of
Siberia. There are only 1,509 of them left, as of the last census, and
only 23 who still speak the language fluently. They are a culture on
the way out, unless something is done fast to keep it going.
The Upper Kolyma Yukaghir are hunters and fishermen whose main source
of income is trapping sable. “Usually in one season a hunter can get
20 to 25 pelts, half of them in the middle of October, when the sables
all go to their winter hunting ground,” Shadrin says. “By then the
snow comes thick and the lakes are frozen and the hunters can go out
to the winter routes on snowmobiles. But now it’s no longer safe to go
out until mid-November, because the snowmobiles can fall through the
ice, so the hunters are losing the most important month and a half for
their income.
“Every year the pasture for the wild reindeer, which the Yukaghir
hunt, is getting less and less because the taiga is coming up from the
south,” Shadrin goes on. “Grasses, birches, and some bushes like
willow are covering the lichen. And the reindeer no longer come to
their traditional river crossings, which is the best place to kill
them. The hunters no longer know where they are going to be, so they
lose time and are less successful.
“The quantity of wolves is growing,” he says. “Before, we used to have
only tundra wolves. Now we’re getting taiga wolves, too, which run in
bigger packs. The wolves kill many reindeer and give trouble to the
herders. So for all these reasons, both wild and domestic reindeer are
disappearing. Also, geese and sea ducks have changed their migratory
routes and schedules. Hunters used to wait for them where they rested
at night in the beginning of June; now they don’t know what time to
go. Last few years the waterfowl have been appearing in very small
quantity. They must have changed their route to another river basin.
Trapping polar foxes was a big part of our traditional life, but in
the last 10 or 15 years there have hardly been any. No one knows why.
“Now the runoff from the breakup of the ice and snow is greater, every
spring water comes more, and there is more danger from flooding and
erosion to our villages, which are all on the riverbanks. At the same
time, some of our best lakes for fishing are disappearing.” These must
be thermokarst lakes being drained by new subterranean streams in the
thawing permafrost.
As the permafrost melts, larch trees lose their footing, creating
drunken forests
As the permafrost melts, larch trees lose their footing, creating
drunken forests, a now common sight in far eastern Siberia.
Shadrin continues: “Polar bears are coming into Cherskiy [a town near
the mouth of the Kolyma River]. Usually at the end of summer, when the
ice pack is melting, the pregnant bears come to the land to have their
cubs, and afterward, with the small bears, they return to the ice and
spend the winter hunting seals. The ice used to be a short swim from
the shore, but now it is very far away. The bears cannot even see it,
so they stay onshore and try to find food around the places where
people live.” By some estimates, as many as half of the world’s
remaining polar bears may be in Russia.
What are the old people saying about these changes?, I ask. “They’re
saying nature is lying to the people,” Shadrin says. “It is not
respecting them, because the people are doing many bad things, killing
many animals, cutting many forests, many plants, dirtying rivers and
lakes. They forget that they live in a natural world and are not
respecting old traditions, so nature is returning to people their bad
actions. One of the results of the melting is that too many mammoth
bones appear on the land and people are collecting them, but in our
tradition the mammoth is the spirit of the underworld and we can’t
take their bones. So the elders are saying we have awakened these
underworld spirits. The main thesis of our traditional view is: Don’t
take from nature more than you need; if you take more, you are not
respecting nature. But all our economic basis now is to take more and
more.”
An Unwelcome Warming
I fly up to Verkhoyansk in an old Antonov An-24, a no-nonsense piece
of Soviet machinery. I’m the only non-Asian on the plane. Below is the
Lena River, the world’s 10th-longest, and the largest river you’ve
never heard of. In another two months it will be frozen 15 feet thick
and will become a highway for trucks and jeeps. We fly over the snow-
covered Verkhoyansk Range and touch down at Batagay, a charmless
outpost of three-story barracks built in the 1930s. It’s raining and
overcast. The next five days will be like being in a grainy black-and-
white movie. My driver Sergei and I set out down a road built by gulag
prisoners through the endless expanse of golden larch. This was the
gulag heartland. The camps had no walls, because escape was
impossible; there was nowhere to escape to.
There has been terrible flooding in the last few years. The worst
flood in living memory was in 2004. We come to a washed-out bridge,
where I have to change cars to complete the trip.
A cozy burg of l,800 which has been having a rough time since the end
of Soviet subsidizing of remote rural communities, Verkhoyansk was
founded in 1638 by Cossacks sent out by Czar Mikhail I to conquer the
surrounding region. It’s on the Yana River, which flows into the
Laptev Sea, and is older than St. Petersburg. Many early explorers,
including Vitus Bering in the early 18th century, passed through here.
“The prisoners did a lot for our town,” the mayor, Pyotor Gabyshev,
tells me. “They introduced potatoes and cucumbers. One of them did the
first ethnography of the Yakut, which the Yakut themselves, who have
forgotten many of their ceremonies, now consult. They built a
meteorological station, which in 1892 recorded the temperature of
minus 67.8 Celsius. But now even 55 below has become very rare.
Before, it would drizzle for 10 days straight. Now there are hard
rains, which are more destructive. People are hunting for freshly
exposed mammoth bones for extra income.” He gives me a certificate
stating that I have been to the Pole of Cold.
The next morning I go to a camp of traditional Yakut horse breeders.
The Yakut, or Sakha, were mounted warriors who arrived a few centuries
before the Cossacks and conquered the reindeer herders and the
Yukaghir, and were in turn subjugated by the Cossacks.
Driving back to the washed-out bridge, we stop to make offerings at a
shamanic place, a dead larch tree draped in prayer flags like Tibetan
Buddhist shrines, its base strewn with cucumbers, coins, cigarettes,
candy. The tree is a unifying element in Yakut cosmology. Its branches
reach to the nine upper levels of the heavens, its trunk is in middle
earth, where we and the animals live, and its roots are in the eight-
layered Lower World. Each of us has three souls—a mother soul, earth
soul, and air soul—and several years after you die the first two
reincarnate and are infused with a new air soul, unless you were a bad
person, in which case you are buried facedown and are not reborn.
We turn up a road that leads to an abandoned prison camp called
Ustakh, a cluster of log cabins with a caved-in log church. Some of
the prisoners had been there so long that when they were released they
didn’t know where to go and just hung around, working as woodcutters.
The last of them died two years ago.
The horse-breeding camp is 15 minutes down the Yana by motorboat, then
a 15-minute slog through the muddy taiga. There are three huts with
flat tops and slanted walls, where two breeders, three haymakers, and
an old man who is supposed to have clairvoyant powers are living and
taking care of 130 horses—the hardy native Yana-Indigirka breed, which
is thought to be close to the original horse. Everyone is feasting on
Arctic hares and tuganok, small white fish from the river. Braces of
freshly shot white hares hang from the rafters. This is the time of
year when every able-bodied person in the region is hunting hares. I
will eat almost nothing my whole time in the Arctic but hare and sour
cream so thick you can stand a spoon in it.
There is a local cycle of 10 years of rain, followed by 10 dry years,
the old man, whose name is Zachar, tells me. We are in the fifth year
of the rainy cycle. Spring is coming weeks earlier, and winter weeks
later, Zachar says. Strange birds are appearing, ones that have never
been seen in the region, and a little deer called the kosulya has just
shown up from central Yakutia. “I don’t know where the cold has gone.
Maybe to the other side of the planet, where you live.” Afraid not, I
say. In another month these six men will be on their own, living on
pike, duck, and moose. “This is a dying way of life,” Leonid, who owns
the herd, tells me. “It’s hard to find strong young men who are
willing to spend the winter in such isolation anymore.”
On the way back to the river, we see, sitting on a pond in a bog, one
of the ducks that weren’t here before, a gray selezen, with greenish
tail feathers. All kinds of animals and plants are moving up into
Yakutia, whose biodiversity has increased across the board except for
reptiles and amphibians. If this seems like a silver lining, it is not
good news for the Arctic species. And while the active permafrost
layer may not be getting any deeper, after a few days of steady rain
it has become a muddy soup. Our jeep gets stuck and it takes an hour
of prying with pine logs to get it out.
Betenkes, a farm community on the bank of the Adycha River, which I
reach by nightfall, is the muddiest place I have ever been. It can
flood so badly in the spring, the old woman I’m staying with tells me,
that the water comes up to the windows of the houses, even though
they’re built on five-foot pilings, and the only way to get around is
by motorboat.
In the morning we head down the extravagantly meandering Yana in a
motorboat until we come to where the river is maybe half a mile wide
and the gently curving bank rises from 20 feet high to more than 100
for a mile and a half. The place is called Ulakhan Suullur and is a
famous cemetery for mammoths and other Pleistocene mega-fauna,
including woolly rhinos, musk oxen, and cave lions. The most popular
theory is that it was a swamp thousands of years ago when the last ice
age was coming to an end, and the big mammals got stuck in its mud.
The mammoth was basically done in by climate change. The last ones
survived on Wrangel Island, north of Chukotka, until 3,700 years ago.
According to Eveny mythology, mammoths scooped up dirt with their
tusks to form the first dry land.
A steady, fine rain is sifting down, eating away at the khaki-gray
sandy loam of the bank. On the top of it, larch trees are teetering
and toppling into the river. Every 15 minutes there is a thunderous
avalanche of slumping silt, and every hundred yards, as I walk the
bank, there is a gully, cut by rainwater running down to the river.
The silt in the deltas at the bottom of these gullies is so fine it is
like quicksand. I sink up to my thigh trying to cross one. It’s not
hard to imagine huge animals getting inextricably stuck.
Two fishermen, on the way home with a sack full of 20-pound taimens,
pull up. One of them spots a fresh yellow bone sticking out halfway up
the bank and climbs up to get it. It’s not a mammoth tusk, but the
femur of a giant deer or horse. It’s still heavy, having just been
washed out of the solid wall of fossil ice—with ancient carcasses
frozen in it like flies in amber—that is visible in places where the
bank has just collapsed. The bank and the bone-filled permafrost
behind it are undergoing active, rapid disintegration. Face-to-face
with such a vast slice of time, my individual life seems like a mote,
not even a hiccup. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors who roamed the earth
10,000 years ago hunted these massive mammals, but we were still very
low on the totem pole. We’ve come a very long way in just the last
10,000 years—maybe to the end.
One of the scariest parts of the Arctic meltdown, which only a few
scientists are talking about, is that some 40,000-year-old Ebola or
anthrax-like virus that we have no resistance to could be lurking in
the carcass of one of these long-extinct creatures that are being
coughed up. That’s one way nature deals with species whose population
has gotten out of hand. A 300-year-old Yakut man’s skeleton was
recently disgorged by the melting permafrost near Yakutsk; he could
have died of smallpox. There was a big epidemic in Yakutia around
then, introduced by the Cossacks. So we could see the return of
smallpox. In the first half of the 20th century, a hundred thousand
reindeer a year died of anthrax on the Yamal Peninsula. The spores lie
dormant in the soil and periodically break out. More than 10,000 foci
of anthrax have been registered in Russia in the last hundred years.
In Greenland, RNA from the tomato mosaic tobamovirus was recently
detected in 140,000-year-old ice, and a host of bacteria, fungi,
yeasts, green algae, cyanobacteria, and mosses are coming up from
columns that are being drilled in three-million-year-old ice at the
mouth of the Kolyma. So maybe the Yukaghir’s belief that the mammoths
are going to take their revenge for what we are doing to nature isn’t
so far-fetched.
Back at Batagay airport, I share a bottle of vodka with three licensed
mammoth-tusk dealers. A pair of tusks in good condition can fetch
$35,000, so the melting permafrost has spawned a new, opportunistic
cottage industry. The airstrip is too muddy for landing or takeoff, so
my plane to Yakutsk is delayed, as is the helicopter the dealers have
chartered to fly them to a village on the Sartan River, where one of
their diggers has found a 130-pound tusk. The dealers employ 10
diggers and five craftsmen in Yakutsk who carve the tusks, and they
move 3.5 tons of ivory a year. One ton goes to their craftsmen, and
the rest ends up in Hong Kong, to be carved along with the tusks of
poached African elephants. The Chinese nouveaux riches, already as
numerous as the entire population of Japan, are clamoring for ivory
statuary.
Most of the bones from around Cherskiy, in the Lena Delta, end up at
the History of the Ice Age Museum-Theatre, in Moscow, which is part of
the National Alliance, a private business owned by the oligarch Fyodor
Shidlovsky. The National Alliance has a government license to excavate
and export prehistoric relics. Museums and private collectors in the
U.S. and Korea are paying as much as $250,000 for a reconstructed
mammoth skeleton, $20,000 for a well-preserved tusk.
The Common Heritage of Mankind
OIL TEXT RESUMES
Back in Moscow, I visit Yuri Leonov, the director of the Russian
Academy of Science’s Geological Institute, who is analyzing the
samples that Sagalevich brought back from the floor of the Arctic
Ocean. It doesn’t look like they have proof that the Lomonosov Ridge
is part of the Russian continental shelf. “These probes were
insufficient,” Leonov tells me, “but Russia does have some scientific
data in favor of this claim. The geological evidence that Lomonosov
Ridge is part of the Russian continental shelf is not an easy question
We can say that this is not just a ridge, but part of a whole system
from Russia to Greenland and Canada The Arctic is a shallow
epicontinental sea on a continental base. Most of the bottom has more
characteristics of earth crust than ocean floor. The Lomonosov Ridge
used to connect Russia, Canada, and Denmark 20 to 30 million years
ago, but due to some process we do not understand for the moment very
well, this bridge collapsed at roughly the 30th meridian of north
latitude, and sank to its present depth, 15,000 feet at the pole. So
we cannot call this a bridge anymore. The question is whether the
commission will accept a paleo shelf as a shelf. I hope I don’t get
into trouble for saying this, but I think it would be smart for Canada
to accept our claim, because it would only strengthen theirs. From
point of view of oil and gas, the bottom of the pole is not important,
because almost all of deposits in Russian Arctic are within 200 miles
of coast.”
I pay a call on Pyotr Aleshkovsky, a writer and intellectual, who is
skeptical about the estimate that 25 percent of the world’s remaining
fossil fuel lies beneath the Arctic Ocean (a figure attributed to the
U.S. Geological Survey—though it denies ever having put it out—which
has taken on a life of its own in the media and even among
scientists). “There’s a lot of oil in Evenkia—an autonomous republic
in western Siberia—that they haven’t even started to drill,”
Aleshkovsky tells me. And what about the oil sands in Alberta, Canada,
which are supposed to have 65 percent, and in the upper Orinoco of
Venezuela, which supposedly has 25 percent? He’s right: the figures
don’t add up. In fact, it’s more like 14 percent, if that.
A geologist who works for an American oil company estimating oil
reserves in the North Sea will explain to me a few months later that
“oil reserves are a made-up number, and there’s an incentive to make
it as large as you can. If the oil price goes up, there are more
reserves, because it becomes more economically worthwhile to drill for
them. It’s a real black art.”
I meet with Vasiliy Gutsulyak at a sushi restaurant near the Center of
Maritime Law, in Moscow, of which he is the director. “There is no
maritime law in the Arctic,” he tells me. Until very recently the deep
ocean—more than 600 feet deep—which makes up 90 percent of the world’s
oceans, was considered as the high seas. Piracy was common. England
got rich by preying on the Spanish galleons bringing bullion back from
the New World. The coastal states’ territorial sea extended only 3
nautical miles, as far as a cannonball shot, until the Law of the Sea
Treaty extended it to 12 miles in 1982; the treaty also granted to its
signatories 200 miles of their continental shelf as an E.E.Z.
(exclusive economic zone). Russia applied for an extension of its
shelf in 2001—claiming the same shelf area that it is preparing to
reclaim—but the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf
requested more information.
John Bellinger, the State Department’s chief legal counsel, who is
spearheading Condoleezza Rice’s push to get unclos ratified in the
Senate, tells me that the conservative congressmen opposing it are
laboring under two misconceptions. The first is the notion that the
characterization of the high seas, the part of the ocean that is
beyond anyone’s E.C.S. (extended continental shelf), as “the common
heritage of mankind” came from Elisabeth Mann Borgese, a Canadian
socialist and alleged admirer of Karl Marx. Although she was one of
unclos’s main original supporters, the phrase actually came from a
speech by Richard Nixon, who declared in a farsighted moment on May
23, l970, “I am today proposing that all nations adopt as soon as
possible a treaty under which they would renounce all national claims
over the natural resources of the seabed beyond the point where the
high seas reach a depth of 200 meters, and would agree to regard these
resources as the common heritage of mankind.”
“The other misconception,” Bellinger continues, “is that signing
unclos would be ‘a vast giveaway of American sovereignty’ to the U.N.
The Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf is not a U.N.
agency, and ratifying the treaty would, in fact, give the U.S. its
biggest increase in territory since the Louisiana Purchase. Three
sonic-probing missions by the Coast Guard cutter Healy have determined
that America’s Arctic shelf could potentially be the size of three
Californias, and could extend 600 miles further out than the 200-mile
limit. But our extended shelf needs international blessing, because no
banks will be willing to put money into [oil-drilling] ventures in
such legally murky waters,” he explains.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is treading a fine line, trying to have it both
ways. It claims 200 miles of its shelf by “customary law”—citing
unclos, which it hasn’t ratified—but it won’t acknowledge Canada’s
claim that its Northwest Passage is an internal waterway, even though
it threads through thousands of islands in the Canadian Arctic. The
American position is that it’s an international strait, which is
defined as a waterway that connects high seas or E.E.Z.’s. At stake is
the right of “transit passage.” “Foreign submarines are permitted to
remain submerged in a strait, but they have to come to the surface in
an internal waterway, and there are a hundred straits in the world, so
the Department of Defense regards the guarantee of free passage to
naval and commercial vessels as the crown jewel of the Law of the Sea
Convention,” Bellinger tells me.
“In 2001 we inherited 100 or so treaties that had not been ratified
from the Clinton administration.” (Basically, the U.S. doesn’t ratify
anything that cramps its style. It has still not ratified the Kyoto
Protocol, which Russia has, and Russia doesn’t recognize the human
contribution to global warming.) “The problem with unclos was that the
deep-seabed part, Part XI, was flawed. The landlocked countries,
feeling left out of the original treaty, had eked out an income-
distribution and mandatory-technology-transfer clause. If the big
countries can go and mine in the deep seabed, they should transfer the
technology to the less developed countries and share the profits with
the landlocked ones. Reagan refused to sign the treaty because he
thought this section was too socialistic. There was a renegotiation in
l994. The technology transfer was stripped out, the income re-
distribution was changed, the U.S. got a permanent seat on the Council
of the International Seabed Authority, and the application fee for
mining seabed was knocked down from a million to $250,000. But still,
unclos languished because the political will wasn’t there.”
Bellinger continues: “After lengthy review, this administration
concluded in 2004 that it’s in the interest of the U.S. that the
treaty be ratified, but only this year [2007, starting with a
statement released by the White House in May] has there been a big
push. The navy wants it. So do Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, and
ConocoPhillips, two Alaska senators, the environmentalists, Alaskan
fisherman, and fiber-optic-cable companies like Verizon, who can lay
their lines in E.E.Z.’s. Even the stalwart Republican [senator] John
Warner is for it. What else can you think of that so many disparate
parties all agree on? We think we’ve got the votes—67 at this point—
and will bring it to the Senate floor in December.”
But as of mid-March, this still hasn’t happened. unclos is back in
limbo. Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, is not going to take
up something so contentious unless he is sure the votes are there, and
this being an election year, the conservatives are ramping up the
invective, and unclos, with what they believe to be its hidden
Communist agenda, is one of their favorite whipping boys. Even John
McCain, who in 1998 urged the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to
support the treaty, has flip-flopped and opposes its ratification.
As for Russia’s claim, Bellinger tells me, “we’re not happy about it,
but we don’t have a basis to have a position.” Privately, the U.S. is
perhaps not so averse to Russia getting its shelf extended, so America
can get in on the action. “All kinds of deals are being made behind
the scenes,” a Washington insider told me. “Bush would much rather get
his energy from Putin than have to deal with the madness of the Middle
East.”
Last fall the first project to tap Arctic oil and gas deposits, 90
miles off the coast of Norway and 340 miles above the Arctic Circle,
came on line. It’s called Snøhvit, Norwegian for “Snow White.” All the
production equipment is on the ocean floor, so the drifting ice is not
a problem, and the wellhead links by 89 miles of pipe to a small
island just off Hammerfest. There the gas is cooled to 325 degrees
below zero Fahrenheit, shrinking its volume by 99.8 percent and
turning it into liquid that can be shipped in tankers. Norway is about
to launch an oil-drilling ship it has developed that can withstand the
movement of the ice.
So, as technology keeps improving, the price of oil keeps rising, and
the ice keeps melting, Arctic energy is bound to be an increasingly
bigger part of the global mix.
Going South
Antarctica is held up as the model of international cooperation in the
administration of our fragile and all-important polar regions. Fifty
years ago it was the scene of a similar showdown among Britain,
France, Argentina, Chile, Norway, New Zealand, and Australia, each of
which had asserted claims to the continent. It ended with the seven
countries—and five others, including the U.S.—signing a treaty that
divided the continent into sectors and forbade nuclear tests, military
deployment, the dumping of radioactive waste, and the exploitation of
any resources until 2048. So the news, late last year, that Britain
was drawing up a submission claiming 386,000 square miles of seabed
off northwestern Antarctica—which seismic tests suggest could contain
60 billion barrels of oil—as an extension of its sector’s continental
shelf took the international community even more aback than Russia’s
flag planting two months before. The territory is disputed by Chile
and Argentina, who are sure to submit counterclaims, and the U.S. has
made it clear that it will hold Britain in violation of the Antarctic
Treaty. Bellinger doubted that the Brits were going to go through with
the submission. “If they do put in a claim, they will do it only
notionally, as a placeholder.”
But this is only one of Britain’s five proposed shelf extensions, and
nine other countries have submissions in the works which will affect
the status of 2.7 million square miles of sea bottom—an area roughly
the size of Australia. Canada is hastening to map its answer to the
Lomonosov Ridge: the Alpha Ridge, a 1,300-mile-long submerged chain of
rugged peaks and deep canyons that starts at Ellesmere Island and goes
through the North Pole, possibly all the way to the Russian Arctic
coast. The ocean floor, particularly at the poles, is the new frontier
of real-estate speculation, territorial expansion, and resource
replenishment. What the Russians kicked off is just the tip of the
iceberg.
Alex Shoumatoff is a frequent contributor to Vanity Fair and the
author of the 1988 book African Madness. His writings can be found
online at Dispatches from the Vanishing World.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/arctic_oil200805?printable=true¤tPage=all
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