Fight for the Arctic

Mia Moore

As the Arctic ice melts due to increased temperatures brought on by Global Warming, new trade routes will open and the world will gain access to massive natural resources. The area covered by ice has shrunk by more then one million square miles, fifty percent of its mass fifty years ago. This has created a geopolitical fight for the resources uncovered by the melting between the "Arctic Powers" - Russia, Denmark, Norway, Canada and Greenland. Some have anxiously asserted their legal rights to this area, submitting claims to the United Nations to divide the region.

The natural resources are vast,

The U.S. Geological Survey and the Norwegian company StatoilHydro estimate that the Arctic holds as much as one-quarter of the world's remaining undiscovered oil and gas deposits. Some Arctic wildcatters believe this estimate could increase substantially as more is learned about the region's geology. The Arctic Ocean's long, outstretched continental shelf is another indication of the potential for commercially accessible offshore oil and gas resources.

And the melting increases the number of passageways,

An even greater prize will be the new sea-lanes created by the great melt. In the nineteenth century, an Arctic seaway represented the Holy Grail of Victorian exploration, and the seafaring British Empire spared no expense in pursuing a shortcut to rich Asian markets. Once it became clear that the Northwest Passage was ice clogged and impassable, the Arctic faded from power brokers' consciousness. Strategic interest in the Arctic was revived during World War II and the Cold War, when nuclear submarines and intercontinental missiles turned the Arctic into the world's most militarized maritime space, but it is only now that the Arctic sea routes so coveted by nineteenth-century explorers are becoming a reality.

Although strange to think of Global Warming in terms of politic and economic gain, it is forcing the world to deal with the reality of fueling a world run almost exclusively on fossil fuels. This plan for the future, this extreme form of "Disaster Capitalism", this grab for the ownership of the very thing causing this destruction, may very well set us permanently on the path of our own destruction.