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By Root 1003 0

States once planted a flag on the moon—did anyone seriously consider that a declaration of legal sovereignty? Her real claim to the North Pole was not from a flag, but from the geological samples collected by this and many other Russian expeditions in the Arctic. These data would prove that the Lomonosov Ridge—an underwater mountain chain, rising some three thousand meters above the seafloor, that bisects the Arctic Ocean—was geologically attached to Russia’s continental shelf. This would win her sovereignty of a huge chunk of ocean floor—possibly including the North Pole—in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

UNCLOS and geology are critically important to this story, as we shall see shortly. But in late 2007 the world’s eyes were transfixed by that flag, not sediment samples. The great global economic contraction was still a year away. Energy demand was soaring and resurgent Russia, fueled by hundred-dollars-a-barrel oil and Putin’s steely gaze, was growing increasingly assertive on the world stage.

Two months later, when the news hit about the record-shattering low in the amount of summertime Arctic sea ice,325 the image of uncorked shipping lanes, vast new energy reserves, and Russians planting flags in a brand-new ocean proved too much to resist. Arctic fever went viral. Headlines and pundits declared that a new colonial race for the frontier—a “mad scramble” for control of the Arctic Ocean and its vast presumed resources—had begun.326

The perception that vast quantities of valuable natural resources lie awaiting in the North is not without merit. Most of its land surface has yet to be prospected for minerals; the Arctic Ocean seafloor is among the least mapped on Earth. Some of the world’s biggest mines are dug into Alaska and Siberia; one of the purest iron ores ever found was recently discovered on Canada’s Baffin Island.327 The discovery of diamonds in the Northwest Territories in 1991 sparked the biggest North American staking rush since the Klondike and propelled Canada from having no diamonds at all to becoming the world’s third-largest producer almost overnight. No one really knows what the new Arctic Ocean biology will be, but a longer open-water season can only mean more photosynthesis, more complex food webs, and the prospect of valuable new fisheries there. There are staggering volumes of gas hydrate—a sort of solid methane dry-ice that accumulates in the pore spaces of ocean sediments and permafrost—which no one has yet figured out how to recover but is plausibly a coveted fossil fuel of the future.

The plainest prize of all is natural gas and oil. The Arctic’s broad continental shelves are draped in thick sequences of shale-rich sedimentary rock, an ideal geological setting for finding oil and gas. Prospects for natural gas are particularly high. In 2008 and 2009, the U.S. Geological Survey released new assessments concluding that about 30% of the world’s undiscovered natural gas and 13% of its undiscovered oil lies in the Arctic, mostly offshore in less than five hundred meters of water.328 These numbers are huge considering the region as a whole covers just 4% of the globe. The USGS assessments conclude it is more than 95% probable that the Arctic holds at least 770 trillion cubic feet of gas, with a fifty-fifty chance it contains more than double that. To put these numbers into perspective, the total proved gas reserves of the United States, Canada, and Mexico combined is about 313 trillion cubic feet of gas. The global economy consumes some 110 trillion cubic feet per year.

Between the 2007 and 2008 sea-ice retreats, the Russian flag-planting, and the new USGS hydrocarbon assessments, it didn’t take long to hear rumbles about an arms race—or even outright war—over the Arctic Ocean. “There is simply no comparable historical example of a saltwater space with such ambiguous ownership, such a dramatically mutating seascape, and such extraordinary economic promise. Without U.S. leadership . . . the region could erupt in an armed mad dash for its resources,