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Sunday, 8 July 2012

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Is Arctic rush worth it?

Rising temperature and melting Arctic ice are changing global geopolitics. Oil, natural gas, minerals and fish - there is enough of these trapped under the melting sea ice to satiate the world's growing hunger. Receding ice caps are opening up new sea lanes, making the exploitation easier. The eight nations surrounding the Arctic Ocean are in a frenzy not to let go of even an inch of their territory.

The newfound resource is also attracting distant players like India and China.

But is the melting of the Arctic as promising as it seems? It has been under permafrost for ages. No one knows how human activity will affect its pristine ecology.

Scientists warn that locked in its permafrost is twice as much carbon as in the atmosphere. Freeing up of this carbon and access to more hydrocarbons will accentuate global warming, causing a domino effect.

Is the world being complacent about the warnings? Richard Mahapatra finds out. The 80,000-odd tourists heading for the North Pole this summer are likely to witness a changing topography: icebergs crumbling into the sea, ice shelves floating away and freely navigable sea lanes that remained icebound just five years ago. Rising global temperature is melting Arctic sea ice, making a piece of the planet accessible for the first time in living memory. Recent scientific studies confirm that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe.

The period between 2005 and 2010 was the warmest since record keeping began in 1840.

In September 2011, at the height of its summertime shrinkage, ice caps covered 4.33 million square kilometres of the Arctic Ocean.

This, according to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC), was a 50 percent drop from the average sea ice cover between 1979 and 2000.The Arctic is also getting thinner and younger.

Its thicker, older ice caps that have formed over several years and were able to survive through the summer melt season are increasingly being replaced with ice that accrues over the winter every year and then melts away.

This makes the Arctic more vulnerable to global warming. By the reckoning of NSIDC, only five per cent of the Arctic ice caps were over five years old last summer. In the early 1980s as much as 40 per cent of the Arctic sea ice was over five years old.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007 estimated that the Arctic will have an ice-free summer by the end of this century.

A few recent studies predict that this may happen as early as 2030-2040. But no one can say for sure. What everyone is sure about is summer now comes early and stays longer."This is a very fast, profound and dramatic change in the earth system. It has significant consequences for the world," says Vladimir Ryabinin of World Climate Research Program.The Arctic's vast reservoirs of fossil fuel, fish and minerals, including rare earth materials, are now accessible for a longer period.

But unlike Antarctica, which is protected from exploitation by the Antarctic Treaty framed during the Cold War and is not subject to territorial claims by any country, there is no legal regime protecting the Arctic from industrialisation, especially at a time when the world craves for more and more resources.

The distinct possibility of ice-free summer has prompted countries with Arctic coastline to scramble for great chunks of the melting ocean. The scrambling pales the Gold Rush of the 19th century in its scope and degree.

- Down To Earth

 

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