If you’re interested in what’s happening up north in the Arctic with climate change, you’ll appreciate (and enjoy) this article published by Biographic about the Arctic. Good photos, a couple of infographics, and a comprehensive story about the changing ecosystems, militarization (by Russia, mostly), access to oil, politics, and so on.
Excerpt:
The melting ice has already turned the region into something of a new frontier, with many nations eyeing its sea routes, its strategic position between Eurasia and North America, and its potentially huge reserves of oil and gas. Indeed, the area north of the Arctic Circle may harbor an estimated 90 billion barrels of oil and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, as well as 44 billion barrels of technically recoverable natural gas liquids. This amounts to 22 percent of the world’s undiscovered stores of these fuels. All that from an area comprising just 6 percent of Earth’s surface, according to a U.S. Geological Survey assessment.
And herein lies the polar paradox: As global warming from burning fossil fuels and other human activities causes sea ice to shrink, it helps open the Arctic to offshore fossil fuel exploration. Should large amounts be discovered and burned, it will be all the more challenging to meet the Paris Agreement goal to keep the rise in global temperatures this century well below 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit—and to limit the already-significant impact on this and other regions.
Unanticipated ecological and species changes could also bring major surprises. This has already happened with snow crab (
Chionoecetes opilio) in the Barents Sea, where it is an invasive species. It was discovered there in 1996, and its population has since skyrocketed, creating a whole new fishery. But as an invader that feeds on animals living on the seabed, the crab could significantly alter the composition of bottom-dwellers and thereby disrupt the entire marine ecosystem.
“We’re talking about a huge shift in the Arctic, but we don’t know what the hell is happening,“ Dankel says. “It’s a fascinating, complex perfect storm. It can either come out really great, or everything could go down the shithole.”
