Ice capades

Like moving chimneys, deck hands breathe out frosty clouds as their vessel splits the polar ice into huge chunks that desperately climb atop each other, as if to swallow the ship.

This is a typical icebreaker at work above the Arctic Circle, the fastest-warming place on Earth, a worrying environment that is changing and disappearing alarmingly fast. Much of it is an unfriendly desert of ice covering roughly four per cent of the earth. It is the U.S., China, Russia and Canada shadowboxing for supremacy, in whole or in part.

Kenneth R. Rosen’s Polar War is an outstanding, in-depth, well-researched explanation of what lies ahead for the Arctic Circle — and it isn’t encouraging. Rosen believes that conflict over possession of this area may lead to world war.

“Nations near and far from the region have seen the warming as an opportunity for expansion and military dominance and what they have cooked up is a conflict teetering toward full-blown war,” he writes.

Rosen has spent much of his time in dangerous places: Syria, Iraq, Ukraine. An American, he is particularly known for the quality of his writing and his first-class reporting. Together, they engender credibility.

He has written for the New York Times, the New Yorker and the Atlantic magazine. Previous books include 2020’s Bulletproof Vest and 2021’s Troubled: The Failed Promise of America’s Behavioral Treatment Programs.

Everybody wants a piece of the Arctic, or the whole pie, Rosen says. The world’s major powers ache to own the Arctic because it contains a virgin treasure house of natural resources and the for security of possession its conquest provides. As the snow and ice keep melting, it may dramatically reveal new sea routes, ones which could change the face of commercial shipping around the world. Such interest is acute among the major powers.

Rosen says the more the ice thaws due to climate change, the more impatient countries are to own the Arctic. And after his three years of study and on-site observations, he thinks that squabbling between the U.S. and other powers could eventually change today’s legal disagreements into lethal ones. The only question, he says, is when.

Recently, the Canadian federal government announced it will be modernizing its surveillance and communication capacities in the Arctic via satellite. It’s part of Ottawa’s $38.6-billion plan to refurbish the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which was announced in 2022 and is slated to take two decades.

Canada is also going to build three operational support hubs in the Arctic that will consist of airstrips, logistical facilities and equipment depots.

One very dangerous ingredient in the race to claim ownership of parts or all the Arctic Circle is U.S. President Donald Trump, who has a habit of claiming places as his simply because he thinks they should be.

Meanwhile, Russia’s footprint in the Arctic far outstrips the United States. Russia has built numerous military facilities in the Arctic and increased its operational capabilities. To catch up, the U.S. must invest in platforms, infrastructure and training in the North.

“War in the North is wildly unthinkable. It is too cold, too harsh, too inaccessible, too unpredictable,” says Rosen. “What I’ve heard time and again, is that a maritime emergency — a stranded cruise ship, a botched fisheries inspection — will lead to conflict elsewhere, a military phenomenon known as horizontal escalation.

“To say the Arctic is warming four to five times faster than the rest of the world — a grossly unexplained punchline — means little to those living elsewhere. Will Greenland’s melting ice cap flood parts of Bangladesh? Will Cape Cod become Prairie? Will sparrows make nests at the North Pole? Will all the disasters forewarned by climatologists be realized? We do not know.

What has already come to pass is that the Earth’s climate first showed change in the Arctic. The rest of the world followed.”

There also is the problem of perennially frozen ground — permafrost — melting. When it thaws, the buildings above it can crack, shift and drop. It also releases greenhouse gas.

Unfortunately, when Russia started waging war against Ukraine, the international co-operation and joint exchange of information on climate change between the West and the Russians was severed. This is particularly unfortunate because the effects of climate change become evident in Russia first.

“Scientists want to help, but it is too late,” Rosen concludes. “The new Cold War will only get worse, in part because scientists failed to stop it and in part because the world failed to listen.”

Someday, we may become the True North, Strong and Flee.

Barry Craig and family lived 12 years in Canada’s North. As a journalist he went through the Northwest Passage east to west on the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker John A. Macdonald in 1969.