Arctic

• 1. Introduction

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  The Arctic takes its name from a bear. The Greek word arktikos means "near the Bear, northern," and arktos means "bear," pointing skyward to the constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor that hang over the northern celestial sphere. This is the polar region that surrounds the North Pole, lying north of the Arctic Circle at roughly 66 degrees 34 minutes north. Yet ask where the Arctic begins and you get more than one answer. Some draw the line at the Arctic Circle, the southern edge of the midnight sun. Ecologists prefer a different boundary, tracing the line where July temperatures stay below 10 degrees Celsius. What lives in a place this cold, and who decided to call it home? Who, if anyone, owns the seabed beneath the pole? And why do scientists watch this region as a warning sign for the rest of the planet?

• 2. Drawing The Line

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  66 degrees 34 minutes north marks the Arctic Circle, the approximate southern limit of both the midnight sun and the polar night. This single coordinate gathers an enormous spread of territory under one name. Travelling east from the IERS Reference Meridian, the Arctic region takes in northern Norway, with Nordland, Troms, Finnmark, Svalbard and Jan Mayen. It reaches across northernmost Sweden through Vasterbotten, Norrbotten and Lappland, and into northern Finland.

  Russia contributes the largest share, from Murmansk and Siberia to the Nenets Okrug and the archipelago of Novaya Zemlya. The United States adds Alaska, while Canada brings Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. The Danish Realm contributes Greenland, and northern Iceland adds the small islands of Grimsey and Kolbeinsey. Around all of this lies the Arctic Ocean and its adjacent seas, from Baffin Bay to the Laptev Sea. The land itself carries seasonally varying snow and ice, with treeless permafrost beneath the tundra. That permafrost shapes everything that grows above it.

• 3. A Climate Of Extremes

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  Minus 68 degrees Celsius is the coldest temperature ever recorded in the Arctic. Average winter temperatures can sink to minus 40, and high winds whip loose snow into the air, creating the illusion of endless snowfall. Precipitation is actually low here. Most of the region receives less than 50 centimetres, falling mostly as snow. Coastal climates are gentler, moderated by the ocean into warmer temperatures and heavier snow than the dry, frozen interior.

  Up to 24 hours of daylight floods the Arctic Circle at the June solstice, and up to 24 hours of darkness falls at the December solstice. This swing between endless light and endless night governs the rhythm of every living thing. The planet's isotherms are migrating poleward at about 35 miles per decade over the past 30 years. As the temperature and tree-line boundaries shift north, the Arctic, by those definitions, is shrinking. The most alarming consequence is the retreat of sea ice, with models predicting near-complete to complete September loss somewhere between 2035 and around 2067.

• 4. Life At The Metabolic Limit

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  The bearberry is a dwarf shrub, and it shows how plants here survive by staying low. Arctic vegetation hugs the ground: dwarf shrubs, graminoids, herbs, lichens and mosses together form the tundra. Move northward and the available warmth drops sharply. In the far north, plants reach their metabolic limits, where small differences in summer warmth mean large differences in the energy left for growth and reproduction. Trees cannot grow at all, though in the warmest parts shrubs reach 2 metres. In the coldest stretches the ground lies bare, ruled by lichens, mosses, and scattered grasses and forbs like the Arctic poppy.

  The Arctic hare, lemming, muskox and reindeer graze the tundra as herbivores. Hunting them are the snowy owl, the Arctic fox, the grizzly bear and the Arctic wolf. The polar bear is a predator too, though it prefers to hunt marine life from the ice. Some 200 species of bird breed here, and the seas hold seals, walruses, narwhals, orcas and belugas. Once, this cold land looked very different. During the Cretaceous, the Arctic had only light seasonal snows, and dinosaurs such as Chasmosaurus, Hypacrosaurus, Troodon and Edmontosaurus may have migrated north each summer to feed.

• 5. First Peoples Of The Ice

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  Around 2500 BCE, the earliest inhabitants of North America's central and eastern Arctic left behind what archaeologists call the Arctic small tool tradition. It included several Paleo-Eskimo cultures, among them the Independence and Pre-Dorset cultures. The Dorset culture, known in Inuktitut as the Tuniit, followed, evolving through technological and economic change between 1050 and 550 BCE. Except on the Quebec and Labrador peninsula, the Dorset vanished around 1500 CE, though their descendants the Sadlermiut survived on Aivilik, Southampton and Coats Islands into the early 20th century.

  The transition from Dorset to Thule culture dates to around the ninth and tenth centuries CE. The Inuit descend from the Birnirk of Siberia through the Thule, who expanded into northern Canada and Greenland and replaced the Dorset, genetically and culturally, sometime after 1300 CE. So complete was the disappearance that some have called it "an example of prehistoric genocide." By 1300 CE the Inuit had settled west Greenland, moving east over the next century. Across the wider Circumpolar North live other peoples, among them the Chukchi, Evenks, Inupiat, Khanty, Nenets, Sami, Yukaghir and Yupik.

• 6. Who Owns The Pole

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  No country owns the geographic North Pole or the ocean around it. The six states bordering the Arctic Ocean, Canada, the Kingdom of Denmark with Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Russia and the United States, are limited to a 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone off their coasts. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, a country has ten years after ratifying to claim an extended continental shelf. So Norway, Russia, Canada and the Kingdom of Denmark each launched projects to claim sectors of the Arctic seabed.

  On the 2nd of August 2007, two Russian bathyscaphes, MIR-1 and MIR-2, descended to the seabed beneath the North Pole for the first time. They planted a Russian flag made of rust-proof titanium alloy, during Arktika 2007, stirring concern over a race for the Arctic's hydrocarbon resources. The following year, on the 28th of May 2008, officials from Canada, the Kingdom of Denmark, Norway, Russia and the United States met in Ilulissat, Greenland. Their Ilulissat Declaration blocked any new comprehensive legal regime for the Arctic Ocean and pledged "the orderly settlement of any possible overlapping claims." Disputes remain. Canada calls the Northwest Passage internal waters, while the United States and most maritime nations treat it as an international strait.

• 7. Cooperation And Rivalry

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  Eight nations form the Arctic Council: Canada, the Kingdom of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Russia and the United States. Alongside them sit organizations representing six indigenous populations, including the Inuit Circumpolar Council and the Saami Council. The council works by consensus, handling environmental treaties while steering clear of boundary and resource disputes. Shipping in these waters falls under the International Code for Ships Operating in Polar Waters, adopted by the International Maritime Organization on the 1st of January 2017 for all ships over 500 tonnes.

  The Arctic is also a site of strategic competition, particularly between Russia and NATO. Russia's Northern Fleet, stationed on the Kola Peninsula, anchors part of its nuclear deterrence strategy, and the country conducts nuclear weapons tests on Novaya Zemlya. Two strategically important straits are the GIUK Gap and the Bear Gap, between Svalbard and Norway. Research, by contrast, has long crossed borders. Since 1937, Soviet and Russian crewed drifting ice stations explored the Asian-side Arctic, and between 1937 and 1991-88 international polar crews lived on drift ice that carried them thousands of kilometres.

• 8. A Warning To The World

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  2 to 3 times faster than the global average: that is the rate at which the Arctic's near-surface temperature is rising, a pattern called Arctic amplification. Because the region responds so strongly to warming, it is often read as a leading indicator for the rest of the planet. The melting of Greenland's ice sheet is linked to polar amplification, and Arctic shrinkage could soon add substantially to worldwide sea levels.

  Thawing permafrost is releasing ancient carbon, which micro-organisms turn into methane and carbon dioxide, potent greenhouse gases that could drive abrupt warming. The Arctic is comparatively clean, yet it is the fallout zone for long-range pollutants carried by sea and air currents. This produces phenomena such as Arctic haze and the bioaccumulation of PCBs in wildlife and people. As ice retreats, new opportunities appear alongside the dangers. In the summer of 2016 the Crystal Serenity became the first large cruise ship to navigate the Northwest Passage, a glimpse of an Arctic that may one day serve as a major trade route. On the 21st of June 2012, a group of states proposed protecting the region like the Antarctic Treaty System, with a sanctuary around the pole and a ban on oil drilling.