The office of Artur Chilingarov, the bearded polar explorer and anointed Hero of the Russian Federation, is at the end of a long hall in the Duma, Russia’s parliament, where he is deputy speaker. Its entrance is guarded by a poster of a nuclear icebreaker, the Yamal, a 492-foot monster with rows of painted-on fangs, and inside is a knee-high wooden penguin and two chicks, a pair of carved walrus tusks, and eight miniature porcelain polar bears—an iconography of the Arctic and Antarctic. On a wall is a portrait of Vladimir Putin. Chilingarov sits in a leather chair in a dark suit with the Hero’s gold star pinned to his breast, and next to him sits a four-foot-high globe, normal in every way but one. It has been spun off its axis, reoriented such that both Poles are visible: the Earth turned on its side.
It is winter in Moscow, three months after Chilingarov planted a Russian flag on the seafloor at the North Pole, an apparent landgrab that created a diplomatic row and a flurry of global headlines. Now he is campaigning for an election in which his party—Putin’s party—will soon trounce its closest rival by a six-to-one margin. He is a busy man, and he skips the niceties when I sit down. “It took us seven days and seven nights to reach the North Pole,” he says. “The ice was heavy. It was not a simple task.” Near the Pole, Chilingarov’s ships found an opening in the ice, and in went two submersibles, Mir I and Mir II. Chilingarov was in the first one. His goal, the true North Pole, was 14,000 feet below.
“Why did we place it? Well, anytime a country wins something, it installs its flag,” he says. Many countries’ flags are planted on the surface ice at the North Pole, he points out. At the South Pole there are flags. On top of Mount Everest there are flags. “The Americans even put one on the moon,” Chilingarov says. He pulls out a photo of the titanium flag and robotic arm, dramatically signs it with a black marker, and hands it to me. “This is one of the world’s greatest geographical achievements,” he proclaims. “I’m proud the Russian flag is there.” Then he stabs at the photo with his finger, pointing out empty space on the seabed. “Look here, and here, and here, and here,” he says. “There is plenty of room for other nations’ flags.”
This is a story about the changing Arctic, but not only in the ways we expect. The changes most important to its future may be those from millions of years in its past, from times between the Triassic and early Tertiary, when the major basins in the Arctic were just being formed. Pieces of the supercontinent Pangaea were drifting apart, and at times greenhouse gases warmed the world to far hotter than it is today. One might say that parts of the Arctic were, for a time, almost tropical—to some degree because temperatures were higher globally, but more so because parts of the Arctic have not always been in the Arctic: Some drifted north, over geologic time, from warmer latitudes. The creation of oil and gas deposits requires the right mix of organic material, heat, rock, pressure, and passage of time—and it may be hard to look at the Arctic today and imagine that it ever had enough organic life, enough heat. But for geologists, it is hard to imagine that it did not.
Now the floor of the Arctic Ocean appears to be rich in petroleum—home, according to some estimates, to nearly a quarter of the world’s undiscovered supply. Sea ice is melting drastically, opening the sea to shipping and the seafloor to mineral exploration. And that seafloor is being eyed by the five countries bordering it—Canada, Denmark (which controls Greenland), Norway, Russia, and the U.S.—all hoping to claim a piece.
For all the talk of conflict in the Arctic, there is broad agreement among northern nations, Russia included, on how to claim a piece of it: You map it. Maps matter because the shape and geology of the seafloor matter, and the shape and geology of the seafloor matter thanks to an article in the 1994 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, a playbook for partition that has been ratified by 156 countries. (Because of obstructionism by a few UN-wary senators, the U.S. is not yet among them, but it is acting as if it is.) Under the treaty, if a state wants to grow its maritime boundaries past the customary 200 nautical miles, it must prove that the ocean bottom is continental in origin—part of its same landmass, only underwater. Political questions can have scientific answers. So politicians have turned to scientists—oceanographers like Mayer for the seafloor’s shape and seismic surveyors for its underlying geology—to build their case. Only Norway has a Law of the Sea submission under active review; the U.S., Canada, Denmark, and Russia are still busy mapping.
Other reports are less rosy, suggesting that the Arctic holds plentiful gas, but far less oil. And in any case, most of the petroleum appears to be near shore—not subject to continental shelf claims because it is within the 200 nautical miles nations already control. The race for the Arctic may be about oil, but it is about the oil that governments hope is there, not the oil they know is there.
The experts best equipped to assess the Arctic’s prospects are the oil companies, and a few weeks after my Snøhvit visit, I witness their tacit vote of confidence: a bidding war for nearshore exploration blocks in the Chukchi Sea. The 488 blocks are auctioned off in the Anchorage, Alaska, public library over the protest of environmentalists who want a decision on the polar bear’s endangered species status before a sell-off of its habitat. They go for a record $2.66 billion—43 times what the government expected.
There is a second misconception about the race for the Arctic: that it is necessarily a race between nations; if America is to win, Russia must lose. But the market for petroleum is globalized, and so is the hunt, and so are the corporations. The companies vying for projects in Alaska—Shell, StatoilHydro, Chevron, Gazprom, BP, ConocoPhillips—are the same companies vying for projects in Russia and Canada and Norway and Greenland, and their oil is sold on an international market. Where we draw the lines does matter—this will determine who sets the environmental rules and who gets the royalties—but it matters far less than the fact that the lines are being drawn at all. Unless the Arctic countries agree, unless there is legal certainty, companies will not purchase mineral leases, because it won’t be clear who can sell them. And the Arctic will remain a wilderness.
That’s why there should be a a legal opportunity to prove your rights for the territory on the sea-shelf. Otherwise Arctic will become a new place for war. First there will be trade wars, than a real conflict will be set. So it’s important to get a scientist’s conclusion and prove your rights in international organizations wit the respect of international laws.
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