Outside In | As melting ice opens up Arctic routes, can the US set aside China and Russia rivalry for climate’s sake?

The Arctic has, for most of human history, been a largely useless slab of ice. As National Geographic magazine’s Neil Shea noted in May, it was “out of play, too cold, too distant and too dangerous”. And then it started melting.

As ice cover has shrunk by 12.8 per cent per decade since 1979, summer ice cover last year was 42 per cent lower than in 1980. Thawing permafrost in Siberia means underground methane seeps have belched up to the surface and exploded, leaving craters up to 40 metres wide. Polar bears are dying. Caribou are having to shift migration routes. Fish populations are in turmoil. Norway’s Svalbard peninsula is 7 degrees Celsius warmer in winter today than it was in 1970.

But with this calamity has come opportunity – especially for a US administration that insists that climate change is a hoax created by China to make US manufacturing less competitive. Michael Sfraga at the Wilson Centre in Washington is blunt: “Less ice means more access … There’s an ocean opening up before us in real time.”

All was laid bare in a fascinating special edition of Scientific American this month, examining the intensifying rivalry over the Arctic Ocean, bounded by just five countries and dominated by Russia. Maps of the world drawn from directly over the North Pole show a 14 million sq km ocean (the world’s smallest, but more than five times the size of the Mediterranean), divided in half by the 1,800km Lomonosov Ridge that has peaks rising more than 3,500 metres from the ocean bed, and links Siberia to Canada’s Ellesmere Island.