Thesis Research 2020

LAPHAM’S Q U A R T E R L Y VOLUME I, NUMBER VII

Winter 2020

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“The fact that the Arctic, more than any other populated region of the world, requires the collaboration of so many disciplines and points of view to be understood at all, is a benefit rather than a burden.”

-Bruce Jackson, 2010

An iceberg, the HMS Terror and some walrus near the entrance of Hudson Strait July 1836, George Back

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North Introductory PROGRAM NOTES MAP PREAMBLE

6. AMONG THE CONTRIBUTORS 8. The Situation at Hand 11. Arctic Front, Ken Coates, P. Whitney Lackenbauer, William R. Morrison

Voices in Time PERSPECTIVE 2020: TORONTO

19. HOLLY SMITH

2012: KINGSTON

30. AGNES LADON

2016: NEW YORK

44. LEANNE SHAPTON

1971: KEEWATIN, NWT 1000: BAFFIN ISLAND, NU 2019: NUNAVUT

46. FARLEY MOWAT 48. INUIT 49. ISABELLA GOMEZ SARMIENTO

CLIMATE 2008: IQALUIT, NUNAVUT, CANADA

53. RACHEL QITSUALIK

2019: CANADA

57. ROBERT MOOR

2019: SIBERIA

62. CRAIG WELCH

2014: NORTHWEST PASSAGE 2007: NORTH POLE 2001: HERSCHEL ISLAND

72. HAMPTON SIDES 75. LEWIS PUGH 76. S.R. GAGE

2019: TUKTOYAKTUK

80. JESSE MCLEAN

2018: ARCTIC OCEAN

81. JENIFER KINGSLEY

1958: VERMONT

84. MARIANNE MOORE

2014: TORONTO

87. PATRICK WHITE

Voices in Time POLITICS 2020: U.S.A

89. ROGER ROBINSON JR.

1969: OTTAWA

91. JEAN CHRETIEN

2016: HANS ISLAND

93. JEREMY BENDER

2017: N.Y

99. JOE CLARKE

2001: CANADA

104. S.R. GAGE

2019: U.K.

Polar Reflection Baffin Islands, Paul-Nicklen

95. ERIC ROSTON AND BLACKI MIGLIOZZI

1985: OTTAWA

109. PHILLIP STEINBERG

Among the Contributors

Sir John Franklin, (1786-1847) naval officer and Arctic explorer, whose name is synonymous with Arctic exploration and the Northwest Passage. He mapped large stretches of unknown coastline in the Canadian Arctic. He disappeared while on his last expedition, attempting to chart Northwest Passage. His disaperance increased poularity of the Arctic.

Stephen Joseph Harper, (1959-) is a Canadian economist and politician who served as the 22nd prime minister. As a Conservative Harper sees the Arctic as a new Canadian bread basket. In August 2007, Harper announced his government’s intention to install two new military facilities in the Arctic to boost Canada’s sovereign claim over the Northwest Passage.

Joseph-Elzéar Bernier, (1852– 1934) was a Quebec mariner who led expeditions into the Canadian Arctic.

He knew more about navigating the arctic waters than any contemporary mariner. In 1909 Bernier unveiled a plaque on Melville Island which claimed the Arctic Islands for Canada and lead to an increasing amount of credibility to Canada’s sector claim.

Allan MacEachen, (1921-2017) delivered Canada’s 2nd internal waters claim in 1975. His evidence was that “as Canada’s Northwest Passage is not used for international navigation and since Arctic waters are considered, by Canada, internal waters, the regime of formerly referred to as “innocent passage”, now transit passage does not apply to the Arctic” .

Lawren Stewart Harris (18851970) was a Canadian Painter and founding member and catalyst of the Group of Seven, who pioneered a distinctly Canadian painting style in the early twentieth century. His painting was inspired by his Canadian nationalist ideas and he has come to be recognised for his high arctic and glacial landscapes.

Henry Hudson, (1565-1611) was an English explorer. Canada’s claim to its North on the charter granted to the Hudson’s Bay Company by Charles II in 1670, giving the company title to Rupert’s Land (the watershed of Hudson Bay, half of present-day Canada). In 1821, the rest of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut were added to the HBC charter.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson, (18791962) Arctic explorer, ethnologist, lecturer, writer. His most well-known exploration, was the Canadian Arctic Expedition, led between 1913 and 1918. By the 1920s, Stefansson’s travels and writing informed a deeper undersatnding of the Canadian Arctic among Politicians and an international audience.

Jules Gabriel Verne, (1828–1905) was a French novelist and pioneer of the science fiction genre who wrote based on extensive research. His novel,The Adventures of Captain Hatteras published in 1864 based on the Franklin expedition included extensive mapping of the Canadian arctic which helped to further glamorize arctic exploration.

Doris Mccarthy, (1910-2010) was a Canadian artist known for her landscapes and depictions of the arctic. She painted scenes from every Canadian province and territory. Her love of the Canadian Arctic is evident in her series Iceberg Fantasies. She was the first woman to become president of the Ontario Society of Artists.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, (1952-) is a Russian politician who has served as the President of Russia since 2012. His plans for Arctic expansion have been of great scale.

He aims to more than quadruple the number of cargo ships in the arctic space by the end of the decade with the aid of military and icebreakers.

Rachel Qitsualik-Tinsley, (1953-) was born in a tent at the northernmost tip of Baffin Island. Raised as a boy, she learned Inuit survival lore from her father. She survived the residential school system and witnessed the full transition of Inuit. Rachel currently writes fiction and educational works that celebrate the world of Arctic cosmology and shamanism

Mike Pompeo, (1963-) is an American politician, diplomat, businessman, and attorney who, since April 2018, has served as 70th United States secretary of state. He has used this position to warn against Chinese advances in the arctic space as well as to deny the Canadian position on the arctic waters. He advocates for an open and profitable arctic.

Roald Amundsen, (1872-1928) was a Norwegian explorer of polar regions and a key figure of the Heroic Age of Polar Exploration. He led the first succesful expedition to traverse the Northwest Passage by sea, from 1903 to 1906, and the first expedition to the South Pole in 1911.

Lola Sheppard and Mason White of Latteral Office, a highly collaborative practice, embracing research-driven design processes.

They chart the unique spatial realities of Canada’s Arctic region.

Sedna Sea Goddess, is the goddess of the sea and marine animals in Inuit mythology, also known as the Mother of the Sea or Mistress of the Sea. In narratives, Sedna gave birth to fish, seals, polar bears and whales – the life sustaining animals in this region

Xi Jinping, (1953-) is a Chinese politician serving as the President of the People’s Republic of China, and chairman of the Central Military Commission. China hopes to build a ‘Polar Silk Road’ through developing the Arctic shipping routes. Jinping’s presence on the arctic council in 2012 represents a strong uprise in the countrise Arctic presence.

Robert Edwin Peary Sr., (18561920) was an American explorer and United States Navy Officer who made several scientific expeditions to the Arctic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is best known for claiming to have reached the North pole in 1909. He develloped the “Peary Method” which uses expedition aids, such as local Inuit to send supplies along a route.

Erik the Red., (960-1004) was the first Norse man to colonise Greenland, in 985, after his exile from Iceland for murder. His colony was formed during the Medival Warming period and rose from a group of 500 to 2000 people when the colony fled due to cold and drought in the 1400’s

The Situation at Hand

LEGEND MILITARY PRESENCE GAS AND OIL OPERATIONS MINING OPERATION DETERMINED BOUNDARY CLAIMED BOUNDARY PROPOSED SHIPPING

Preamble

ARCTIC FRONT KEN COATES, P. WHITNEY LACKENBAUER, WILLIAM MORRISON, GREG POELZER “The Arctic Sea is not at the end of the earth but must...become in time a polar Mediteranean.”

-Vilhjalmur Stefansson, 1920

“The True North, Strong and Free of our national anthem is a cliche worn smooth by generations of repetition.”

-K.S. Coates and W.R. Morrison, 1989

Arctic sovereignty seems to be the zombie-the dead issue that refuses to stay deadof Canadian public affairs. You think it’s set­tled, killed and buried, and then every decade or so it rises from the grave and totters into view again. In one decade the issue is the DEW Line, then it’s the American oil tanker Manhattan, steaming brazenly through the Northwest Passage, then the Polar Sea doing the same thing. In August 2007, a Russian submarine planted a flag at the North Pole. Or perhaps it was under the North Pole, as the UK Daily Telegraph1 reported, raising an image of a striped pole floating in the ocean, with the devious Russians diving underneath it. Perhaps the flag did land on the pole, though good luck with that, since the pole is a point with no size at all, so the Russians likely missed it. However it was, they are up there, and the zombie has come to life once more.

And the Russians aren’t the only ones who make us nervous.The United States, one of the countries that does not agree that the Northwest Passage lies within Canada’s internal waters, is run­ning cruise ships in the Arctic, and somewhere in the boardrooms of America plans are being drawn up for more northern voyages by oil tankers. We’ve even had issues with Denmark, usually the most inoffensive of countries, over an island in the High Arctic that very few Canadians had ever heard of a few years ago. Everyone Lawren S. Harris, Icebergs, Davis Strait,1930

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knows that the main area on for all this activity and concern is global warm­ing. Recent satellite images have shown that the ice is melting faster than even the most pessimistic doomsters predicted, and that(quite soon the Northwest Passage will be open for navigation for much of the year. A hundred and fifty years ago, the passage was difficult or impossible to get through, a death trap for many, including the Franklin expedition. It was conquered early in the twentieth cen­tury by Roald Amundsen, but he had to spend two winters in the North to get through.When the passage was locked fast in ice for ten or eleven months of the year, no one much cared who owned it or the waters around it, or who went through it, and under what authority. Even today, no state disputes that Canada owns the waters, but the U.S. contends that a strait runs through them.

When these waters become freely navigable, pessimists suggest,Canada may face new challenges to its control over this part of the country.

The Canadian High Arctic is very much in the news, front and centre, in a heady and ominous Any American threat to this region...would be seen as an assault upon Canada’s very own heritage and identity. mixture of money, science, and politics. The United -Thomas M. Tynan, Political Scientist, 1979 States disagrees that the Northwest Passage is Canadian internal waters, believing instead that it is an interna­tional strait. The Russians, on the other hand, have no problem with our assertion that the Passage is internal waters, but their claims to a huge area of the polar seabed may compete with Canada’s Conti­nental shelves, of which the Grand Banks off Newfoundland is a good example, belong to the country to which they are attached.

But you have to prove that the shelf is continuously attached, that is basically what those Russian submarines are doing at the North Pole-trying to establish as big a limit as possible for that country’s continental shelf. No one knows how much oil and gas lies under the ocean, but with Russia’s return to the international stage funded by petroleum dollars, exclusive jurisdiction to exploit the Arctic seabed is of more than simply scientific importance.

Speaking of science, the Arctic is also at the centre of the global warming controversy. It has been reported that the summer Arctic sea ice, measured at its Photochrome of a glacier, Grindelwald, Switzerland, 1890

summer minimum, was smaller in Sep­tember 2007 than at any time since satellites began measuring it in 1979. On the sixteenth of that month it was measured at 4.13 million square kilometers (1.59 million square miles); the previous low, two years earlier, was 5.32. The difference, 1.19 square kilometers, or 436,000 square miles, is the size of Texas and California combined. It’s a fifth smaller than it was in 1979. The effects of this change are political, economic, social, and environmental, a potent brew that one stirs and tastes at one’s peril. Only the dramatic effect of a possible opening of the Northwest Passage-not the one that Amundsen took a century ago, twisting around the Boothia Peninsula and across the shallow waters off the Arctic mainland, but the broad passage leading west from Lancaster Strait. Cruise ships, warships, oil tankers, all steaming through what Canada considers its internal waters, perhaps six months of the year, perhaps ten. “What is Canada doing about this?”What can we do?

It’s hard to believe how recent this situation is. Twenty year ago, global warming was only a theory proposed by a few scientists, and most of the public had never heard of it. Now it is Holy Writ, at least among the political left, and schoolchildren run campaigns to Save the Planet.

What a difference two decades make! Claims The authorities...were carrying more important burdens than the remote and useless Arctic now circulate that one-quarter of the undiscovered -Diamond Jenness, anthropologist, 1964 reserves of oil and gas lie in the north. Into the increasingly ice-free waters race government scientists, capitalists, and the military, as the industrial world seeks the additional supplies of oil and gas necessary to maintain western styles of living. Indigenous leaders, whose claims and accomplish­ments grabbed headlines a few years back, have been reduced to bit player -and there is an unstated recognition in government and development circles that one of the key attractions of the High Arctic is that there are virtually no indigenous people living there, and thus no one to consult before development takes place. For developers now used to adapting to the realities of indigenous autonomy and expectations for local control, the prospect of working in a largely indigenous-free zone is a dream come true.

50 dollar bill, The Canadian Guide, The reverse depicts the CCGS Amundsen a state-of-the-art icebreaker ship

The issues that dominate this debate in northern Canada are not new it’s just that energy needs and global warming have now made them urgent. Given the parent-child military relationship between Canada and the United States and Canada’s historic unwill­ ingness to take a strong public stand against its prime ally, the ques­tion of the Northwest Passage seemed merely theoretical. The Russians have traditionally pushed against the boundaries, main­taining floating scientific stations on the Arctic ice, to the alarm of several generations of North American military leaders. During the Cold War, from the mid-1 940s to the early 1990s, the bound­ary testing caused both irritation and concern, but the massive American military presence in Alaska stared down any substantial Russian intrusions. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the apparent chaos within the new Russian Federation appeared to remove Russia from the Arctic equation. If they could not control terrorists in the southwest, they hardly seemed capable of or inter­ested in expanding their sovereignty claims in the northeast. With the emergence of a stronger Russia, this seems likely to change. Although Russia repeatedly stated that the submarine at the North Pole was part of its scientific research and that they were not laying claim to anything, the planting of a flag was clearly provocative. North Americans are not off base feeling insecure about the real intentions of their neighbour across the melting ice cap.

The uncertainty begins with ice. For decades, the Apparently we have administered these vast territories government of Canada has argued that the frozen of the north in an almost continuing state of absence waters of the High Arctic con­stitute a formal part of of mind. I think all honorable members now feel the national territory in the North.The Inuit certainly see territories are vastly important to Canada.

-Louis St. Laurent, Prime Minister of Canada , 1953 it this way, for winter living typically involved many weeks spent on the ice; for northern indigenous peoples, the stan­dard European division between water and land made no sense at all.

But Arctic ice is more than a thin, seasonal covering over northern seas and waterways.

For hundreds of years, it has been a thick, almost impenetrable barrier to any regular or reliable use of Arctic waters. Climatic circumstances-warm summer weather, favourable “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”

-Pierre Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada 1969

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winds, and quirks of nature-could occasionally pennit ships to make headway through the Arctic islands. Some explorers were lucky and got through, while others were unlucky, and died, but on the whole the region was impenetrable.

Now the ice is receding. Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, was the first to popularize images of the retreating polar ice cap, drawing on scattered bits of Arctic science that pointed to dis­turbing trends in the regional climate. More scientific investiga­tions followed, predicting a time in the near future when the polar seas would be open for navigation and when massive environmental changes would hit the Arctic.

Increasingly dramatic images from the North showed more and more open water in the Arctic. The ice cap seemed to be melting like an ice cube on a Toronto sidewalk in August. Scientists became increasingly alarmed, as did northern indigenous leaders and environmental activists. The North seemed to be proving that all the worst fears of Gore, David Suzuki, and other doomsayers were “Even in our day, science suspects beyond the Polar seas, coming true. Only the small number of people at the very circle of the Arctic Pole, the existence of a directly affected and the complexity of the scientific sea which never freezes and a continent which is ever debate about the meaning and extent of global green.”

-Helena Blavatsky, Russian Author, 1897 warming prevented wide-scale panic.

One person’s crisis is another’s opportunity, however. The receding ice cap seemed a boon to shipping companies and resource developers. The same open water that signalled ecological melt­down created possible new shipping lanes through formerly ice­locked passageways. Asian companies, in particular, salivated at the prospect of the time-saving opportunities that accompanied a secure Arctic route to Europe and the eastern United States-a Great Circle route for ships to match the long-use air lanes that have accelerated intercontinental travel in earlier decades.Resource exploration in the region had also been stalled for years because of the danger and challenges of working in High Arctic waters. The ice sheets that look so serene and placid on maps and aerial photo­graph are actually twisting many metres thick, with the power to snap and oil rigs and smash drilling platforms. The cost of exploring and developing resources in the north seemed so astronomical that few companies and governments were prepared to venture into the region. That scenario looked to be melting away as well. With the possibility “In politics, madame, you need two things: friends, but of large stretches of open water, and with ready above all an enemy.”

-Brian Mulroney, Prime Minister of Canada, access to the Arctic seabed, huge fields lay open for oil and gas exploration.

The High Arctic may well be the last true empty space on the planet. Even-the upper reaches of the Amazon basin and the most remote corners of the Sahara Desert exist within well-defined national boundaries. Antarctica, which belongs to no one nation, has worked under a collaboratively managed and supervised juris­diction for decades. “While some countries mostly in Africa, have trouble defending and enforcing their national borders, and while there are still disputed borders-Kashmir is a good example-the world’s boundaries seem generally stable. The exception is the Arc­tic, where tiny islands, the shape of the continental shelf, and longi­tudinal projections have suddenly become the stuff of international politics. There may be a lot at stake, if there truly are large deposits of oil and gas in the North. On the other hand it may turn out to be as in the past, much ado about a lot of ice and cold water. The Rus­sians though, are deadly serious-and the West continues to mis­understand and underestimate both that nation and its leadership. The Americans are intractably stubborn on both military issues and questions of international straits, and-if we believe journalists and academicsthe pesky Danes and others (including the Russians and Chinese) cast covetous looks 15

at Canadian areas of interest.

That there is still a void speaks volumes about Canada’s approach to and neglect of the High Arctic. For reasons that will become clear in, Canadians have never strayed far, either physically or spiritually, from the Canada-U.S. boundary.We are northern nation in fantasy and imagery only. Our galleries are full of Inuit sculptures and Group of Seven paintings and our libraries are stocked with books by authors from Rudy Wiebe to Margaret Atwood and Mordecai Richler extolling the mysteries and haunting beauty of the Arctic and northern regions generally. But for every canoe-paddling celebrity, like Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who routinely ventured north there are hundreds of thousands of Cana­dians who rarely venture out of southern cities-a trip to Muskoka or the Laurentians being a northern adventure, and a vacation in Algonquin Park providing the complete frontier experience, Canada has never embraced the north beyond symbolism and mythology. Now, “purveyors of polar peril” suggest that the country is paying for its neglect and lack of interest in the High Arctic and the North in general.

Some observers, to be sure, would argue that Canada has not been neglectful in terms of “sovereignty,” given that we have successfully controlled navigation in the Northwest Passage and everyone-even the U.S.-respects our laws. Either way, though, it is clear that Canada certainly faces public embarrassment over its lack of Arctic capabilities and presence.

The history of Canada’s relationship with the North yields an episodic and tentative approach to sovereignty in the region.

Although Canada managed to expand and entrench its sovereignty in a cautious and reactive manner Canada will be a strong country when Canadians of all provinces feel at home in all parts of the country, and through the twentieth century, we write with a fair when they feel that all Canada belongs to them. degree of frustration for our northern predicament -Pierre Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, 1970 is as Yogi Berra once said, “deja vu all over again.”

Canadians have been down the current path of panic and sweeping promises many times in the past, and there are familiar echoes in the latest Canadian response to northern challenges. But this is not simply a replay of nineteenth- or twentieth- century contests. There is much more at play-oil, gas, northern passageways, and a painful illustration of how ill prepared we are for Arctic disputes in the twenty-first. The issues are global, in Sovereignty Begins at Home the form of climate change debate; local, through -Mary Simon, President of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, 2007 indigenous claims and self-government initiatives; and circumpolar, in terms of military issues and competition for northern resources. If Canada faces a twenty-first-century challenge to its northern future, it is entering the battle with twentieth-century perspectives and nineteenth century credibility. Global warming and the race for resources have opened an Arctic front. Canada’s northern flank is ill defended. Moreover, our country, and its place on the world scene. Rousing Canadians from the southern perspective that defines and directs this country will not be easy, but there is potentially a great deal at stake, not the least being our self-respect as a nation and our belief in the sustainability of Canada as a northern country.

Ken Coates, P. Whitney Lackenbauer, William Morrison and Greg Poelzer have all written extensively on the Arctic. Together their aim was to modernize the telling of this space in their book written in 2007

Stowaway Loons, Pudlo Pudlat 1984 16

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Voices in Time

PERSPECTIVE 2020: Toronto VICTORIAN SUBLIME TO CANADIAN MODERNISM

Julius von Payer, Starvation Cove, 1897

Frederic Church, Aurora Borealis, 1865

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Artist’s depiction of Robert McClure’s ship Investigator trapped in sea ice north of Banks Island, 1867

1832: Leopold Island A Tender Strain Far as the eye can reach, and all around Is one vast Icy Solitude profound On snowclad ground, in silent stillness sleep The weary crew; no soothing vapours steep The rocks with freshness not an herb is there, Nor shrub, nor brush, but desolate aud bare, It seems as if these regions were by the will Of Heaven transfixed and all at once stood still, And the proud waves, beneath the fatal blow Had spread into a field of lifeless snow The poem John Ross buried on Leopold Island in September 1832.

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1850: Arctic Ocean Arctic Poem I own it looks fine, in a cause so sublime, To bear up against hardship and misery sore But who can explain, the discomfort and pain Undergone by a party sent out to explore.

To sleep in a bag, a damp nasty rag, With your breath freezing into what is called barber Resting your bones, on hillocks of stones Or perhaps on the floe, which you rather George McDougall,17 who journeyed north with Osborn in 1850 and again in 1852 (both expeditions searching for Franklin), provids an overt critique of the scientific pretension toward corporeal displacement.

Francois Etienne Musin, HMS “Erebus” in Ice, 19th Century

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Frederic Church, The Icebergs, 1861

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Fishing for Walrus in the Arctic Ocean, Francois Auguste Biard,1841

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2017: James Pollock NORTHWEST PASSAGE: after The Franklin Expedition, 1845-48 When you set out to find your Northwest Passage and cross to an empty region of the map with a headlong desire to know what lies beyond, sailing the thundering ice-fields on the ocean, feeling her power move you from below; when all summer the sun’s hypnotic eye won’t blink, and the season slowly passes, an endless dream in which you’re forever diving into pools, fame’s image forever rising up to meet you; when the fall comes, at last, triumphantly, and you enter Victoria’s narrow frozen Strait, and your Terror and Erebus freeze in the crushing floes; in that long winter night among the steeples of jagged ice, and the infinite, empty plain of wind and snow, when the sea refuses to be reborn in spring, three winters pass without a thaw, and the men, far from their wives and children, far from God, are murdering one another over cards; when blue gums, colic, paralysis of the wrists come creeping indiscriminately among you; and you leave the ships, and set out on the ice, dragging the lifeboats behind, loaded with mirrors and soap, slippers and clocks, into the starlit body of the night, with your terrible desire to know what lies beyond; then, half-mad, snow blind, even then, before you kill the ones who’ve drawn the fatal lots, and take your ghastly communion in the snow, may you stumble at last upon some band of Inuit hauling their catch of seal across the ice, and see how foolish you have been: forcing your way by will across a land that can’t be forced, but must be understood, toward a passage just now breaking up within.

Franklin

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Ice-Dwellers Watching the Invaders, 1880

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Lawren S. Harris, South Shore Bylot Island, 1930

Jackson suggests in a letter to Vincent Massey, Canada’s Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the United States, these efforts were more than merely an artistic venture to popularize the North, but were also part of a larger process of advancing the Arctic as a Canadian possession.

2012: Kingston, On As historian William R. Morrison asART AND ARCTIC SOVEREIGNTY serts, “Canada has historically had two kinds of sovereignty” in the Arctic—what he describes On 1 August 1930, A.Y. Jackson and as “concrete sovereignty,” the assertion of sovLawren S. Harris embarked on a fifty-nine-day ereignty through direct administrative control, sketching expedition to the Arctic Archipelago and “symbolic sovereignty,” the emblematic and as members of Canada’s Eastern Arctic Patrol. abstract means of conveying control. The ways The collaborative venture between the Depart- in which the works were discussed and underment of the Interior and the noted Group of stood—contributed not only to the “imagining” Seven artists, which followed Jackson’s 1927 of the Arctic as a Canadian possession, but also government-sponsored Arctic sketching voyage to the dissemination of Canadian sovereignty aboard the S.S. Beothic with insulin co-discov- efforts in the North. erer and amateur artist Dr. Frederick Banting, was part of a mutual effort to generate popuAgnes Ladon as part of her thesis work on Canadian art at Queens University. lar interest in “the Canadian North” through “a graphic impression” of the region. Yet, as “I think we can put the Canadian Arctic on the map pretty definitely. We might even hold an exhibition in New York. It would be a very artistic way of letting the Americans know it is ours.”

-A.Y. Jackson to Vincent Massey, 31 May 1930

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Lawren S. Harris, 2 am Buchanan Bay, Ellesmere Island ,1930

Lawren S. Harris, Baffin Island Mountains, 1930

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Lawren S. Harris, Icebergs, Davis Strait , 1930

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Lawren S. Harris, Baffin Island Mountains, 1931

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A. Y. Jackson, Yellowknife Country, Northwest Territories, 1929

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A.Y. Jackson, Echo Bay Great Bear Lake, 1953 A.Y. Jackson, Mountains On Haines Highway, Yukon, 1946

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1909: Robert W. Service MEN OF THE HIGH NORTH Men of the High North, the wild sky is blazing; Islands of opal float on silver seas; Swift splendors kindle, barbaric, amazing; Pale ports of amber, golden argosies.

Ringed all around us the proud peaks are glowing; Fierce chiefs in council, their wigwam the sky; Far, far below us the big Yukon flowing, Like threaded quicksilver, gleams to the eye.

Men of the High North, you who have known it; You in whose hearts its splendors have abode; Can you renounce it, can you disown it?

Can you forget it, its glory and its goad?

Where is the hardship, where is the pain of it?

Lost in the limbo of things you've forgot; Only remain the guerdon and gain of it; Zest of the foray, and God, how you fought!

You who have made good, you foreign faring; You money magic to far lands has whirled; Can you forget those days of vast daring, There with your soul on the Top o' the World?

Nights when no peril could keep you awake on Spruce boughs you spread for your couch in the snow; Taste all your feasts like the beans and the bacon Fried at the camp-fire at forty below?

Can you remember your huskies all going, Barking with joy and their brushes in air; You in your parka, glad-eyed and glowing, Monarch, your subjects the wolf and the bear?

Monarch, your kingdom unravisht and gleaming; Mountains your throne, and a river your car; Crash of a bull moose to rouse you from dreaming; Forest your couch, and your candle a star.

You who this faint day the High North is luring Unto her vastness, taintlessly sweet; You who are steel-braced, straight-lipped, enduring, Dreadless in danger and dire in defeat: Honor the High North ever and ever, Whether she crown you, or whether she slay; Suffer her fury, cherish and love her-He who would rule he must learn to obey.

Men of the High North, fierce mountains love you; Proud rivers leap when you ride on their breast.

See, the austere sky, pensive above you, Dons all her jewels to smile on your rest.

Children of Freedom, scornful of frontiers, We who are weaklings honor your worth.

Lords of the wilderness, Princes of Pioneers, Let's have a rouse that will ring round the earth.

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A.Y. Jackson, Great Bear Lake, 1948

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Doris McCarthy, Fantasy Iceberg #40, 1989

2011: Laura Lush ARCTIC DREAM Snow-swaddled body flanked by flags, sun-charred laugh, the barely-stitched-together wind. Then the single tusk of a narwhal surfacing, a ship dynamited free from its winter grave. Its sleek hull bludgeoning ice floe after ice floe. Huddled into night fortresses, numb to the grieving of snow dogs. Sometimes a noise rises from the depth of tundra--neither animal nor human. A sound like chewing of carrion, the spit-back of bones twitching the night air. It is saying he will come back, swell like the din of a thousand drums beating the Arctic into deafened ears.

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Doris McCarthy, Pond Inlet looking towards Bylot, 1983

Doris McCarthy; Air Strip at Broughton Island, 1983

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2016: New York Artifacts of a Doomed Expedition On a Monday morning in May 1845, two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, set out from Greenhithe, England, to chart a northwest passage to India and China. They departed with 134 crew members commanded by Sir John Franklin, 59, a decorated explorer famous for his previous journeys to the north. The ships were former bomb vessels that had been refitted with iron plating, furnaces and steam engines.

They carried the latest magnetic surveying instruments and were provisioned for three years:The ships’ manifests listed 32,289 pounds of preserved meat, 1,008 pounds of raisins and 580 gallons of pickles. Also aboard were 2,000 books, a hand organ and a daguerreotype.

Everything we know about the passage tells us that for regular commercial use to occur, it must be wanted very strongly. Faint-heartedness has no place here.

-Franklyn Griffiths,1987

Three years after setting out, Franklin and his 129 men (five had been discharged and sent back home within three months) were missing. The British public, and Franklin’s wife, Lady Jane, held out hope that they were still alive, and the admiralty dispatched its first search parties along the largely uncharted route that Franklin had followed. In 1850, three graves, two dated January and one April 1846, were discovered by American and British searchers on Beechey Island, an uninhabited speck, less than two square miles, in northernmost Canada.

No further traces were found until 1854, when John Rae, a Scottish explorer searching for the men, met some Inuit at Pelly Bay, southwest of Baffin Island. They were carrying personal items from Franklin’s crew found at abandoned camps. A gold cap band. A telescope. The Inuit also described seeing kettles containing cooked human remains. Rae reported this disturbing news to the admiralty, and it was published in the London papers. Charles Dickens, in an 1854 edition of his weekly Household Words, dismissed the accounts Rae collected as ‘‘the 44

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vague babble of savages.’’ Finally, in 1859, an official naval record was found in a stone cairn at Victory Point, on the northwest coast of King William Island, a rippling expanse of tundra 150 miles above the Arctic Circle. The record held two messages. The first ended with ‘‘All well.’’

The second, written in shakier script, reported that Franklin was dead.With the Erebus and the Terror stuck in ice, the men abandoned ship on April 22, 1848, and began a march, presumably to a trading post 600 miles south.

In the years since, the mystery of what happened to those men has inspired countless writers and artists. Wilkie Collins, Jules Verne, Mark Twain and Margaret Atwood all wrote fiction based on the Franklin expedition.

James Taylor, Iron Maiden and the Breeders wrote songs about the sailors and their ordeal.

Hobbyists and scholars connect on Facebook and blog forums to pore over evidence and crowdsource keys to the question of how, exactly, the men died.

From 1849 to the present, some 90 search parties have set out to find the fate of Franklin and company. A toothbrush was found lying atop the windblown tundra. A lowering mechanism for the ship’s lifeboats was discovered when ice melted in the summer.

Recently, dinner china was found in the debris field of the Erebus, preserved by ice water.

The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, has more than 400 of the relics from the expedition, recovered by 19thcentury search parties. Personal belongings, like bone combs and soap, are emotional to contemplate. A piece of uniform found beneath a skeleton in 1859 was placed in Abraham Lincoln’s coffin by a dignitary. Franklin’s fiddlepattern cutlery is in usable condition.

Bits and buttons keep turning up in a trail of Victorian breadcrumbs strewn across the tundra. Some artifacts, like files and tins, have been repurposed by the Inuit as sledge runners and knives, and some relics are nearly dust, like the scraps of a naval overcoat found frozen to the bleached bones of a skeleton. But each fragment flickers with a life.

Leanne Shapton, of the New York Times

Breadcrumbs from the Franklin

Artifacts from the fabled expedition A soup tin, supplied to the Franklin Expedition, found at Beechey Island. In 1984, Owen Beattie, a Canadian anthropologist, argued that Franklin’s men had suffered from acute lead poisoning caused by the 8,000 tins of food, sloppily soldered with lead.

Part of the heel of shoe.

It was found at Starvation Cove, Adelaide Peninsula by the Schwatka Search Expedition 1878-79. This was the furthest point reached by the main body of Franklin's expedition on the mainland of America.

Date made circa 1845

Fragments of a wool overcoat found in the grave of Lieutenant John Irving, Irving Bay, King William Island by the Schwatka Search Expedition 187879.

A piece of a telescope draw tube. It may have been obtained by the Schwatka expedition from Inuit on the Hayes River. Schwatka was at this Inuit encampment from 15-17 May 1879.

The remains of a pocket chronometer in a silver case with an enamelled dial. It was found in an abandoned boat at Erebus Bay, King William Island, in May 1859 by the McClintock Search Expedition 1857-9. The glass and hands are missing.

A pair of snow goggles found in an abandoned boat at Erebus Bay, King William Island, in May 1859 by the McClintock Search Expedition. They are made from leather with the eyes screened with wire gauze and were possibly made on board.

A pocket edition of 'The Vicar of Wakefield' by Oliver Goldsmith (first published in 1766) found in an abandoned boat at Erebus Bay. Part of the leather remains with the title in gilt on the spine. One of five small books found here, all devotional except this one.

A fragment of navy sail canvas found in the grave of Lieutenant John Irving, Irving Bay, King William Island. It is stenciled in black ‘NAVY SAIL CANVAS’. It was used as a shroud for the body. Franklin gave the men proper burials in navy wool-covered coffins.

A pocket New Testament in French found in an abandoned boat at Erebus Bay. After employing French Canadians on his first overland expedition, Franklin expressed a wish to be able to conduct services in their own language.

Found by the Franklin Search Expedition,1850-51, led by Captain Horatio Austin. This wine bottle was found on Beechey Island on the 23 August 1850. The bottle was presented to the Royal United Services Institute

by John Barrow (18081898).

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glances at the long, skin-covered sled which held that balance of the wealth he had brought.

Now he cut the thong lashings of the skins Excerpt from People of the Deer covering the load. It was his moment, and the cries of amazement as the People looked on the Kakumee saw the knot of armed men, and fabulous things on the sled were sweet in the ears so he cried, ‘Ai! You on the bank! It is only of Kakumee. Five rifles, a case of black powder, Kakumee who comes! And I return from the a box of bar lead, a shotgun, three cases of tea, lands of Kablunait, bearing gifts for the People!’ bags of flour, salt and white sugar, bolts of cloth, It was to have been his great moment of axes, snow knives, and kettles-- these were but a triumph. He who had dared the indescribable part of the load. It was wealth unbelievable. For terrors of that long journey was returning laden a few moments fear returned to the hearts of with much more wealth than even the white the People. It was beyond comprehension how man who had visited the river had carried in a mere man could have come by such things. . . . his canoes. Again and again he called out, but [Kakumee] fought his way into the center of the the cluster of men stood silently on the bank excited mob of his People and tried to restore and no one acknowledged the hail of Kakumee. his things to the sled. But as fast as something Women peered furtively from holes melted in was returned, someone else would seize it and the igloos by the thaw. The huskies stood about, pass it about, and Kakumee, working at an growling deep in their throats, for they had impossible task, began to lose control. . . . He caught the unfamiliar scent of the Indian dogs screamed imprecations into the unheeding ears and they too were alarmed. of the People, and his face was set in the mask of rage which was never to leave it again.

I conclude, therefore, with a paradox. The ultimate and Then it happened. Kakut, who had been the comprehensive meaning of Canadian history is to be quietly watching from a few feet away, now found where there has been no Canadian history, in The North. stepped forward and picked up a rifle. He -W. L. Morton, Canadian Historian looked at it with pleasure and then with the nonchalance of a man who knows the law and Then Kakut came from his igloo, which respects it, he turned from the sled and began stood apart from the rest. Kakut, the shaman, to walk off to his igloo with the rifle held in was a wise man . . . He stood on the shore the crook of his arm. It was no more than his looking steadily at his brother, who had halted right. A rifle would be of great aid to him in a few hundred feet from the shore. At last he supporting a family swollen by the addition turned to the men who watched from the cliff of the wife and child of Kakumee. Kakumee and chided them for their fears. ‘This is the himself had a rifle--five rifles, in fact--and a man, my brother, and not his spirit! When did man has no need or desire for more things than you ever hear of a ghost who drove dog teams he can use with his own hands. It was the creed up the River of Men?” The tension dissolved. of the People that what a man had he shared Women and children poured out of the igloos with his neighbors. Kakut had not taken more and their hurrying feet wrestled over the brown than a dozen steps when Kakumee saw what clumps of brittle, dead moss on the snow. The had happened. He acted with such speed that dogs broke into long wavering howls as the no one could have stopped him, had any dared camp came alive. Kakumee reached the edge to try. He seized one of the axes and, leaping of the shore and a dozen men sprang down after his brother, caught him a slashing blow on to untether his dogs as he stepped forward the shoulder with the keen edge of the ax. . . and solemnly touched noses with Kakut, his .Then he cried out in a great voice so all the People might hear, and these were his words: brother.

People clustered about the man who had ‘All this that I have is mine-- and mine only! returned from the dead, and they cast curious Hear me well, Kakut, for if I must argue with

1971: Keewatin, NWT

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Tyler Heal, Pangnirtung, Nunavut, 2012

you about this, then I shall argue with a man who is dead!’ Now a sense of sacrilege possessed the watching People, for they were beholding the flagrant violation of a law as old as life.This thing was without precedent in the memory of the Ihalmiut. Yet not only was the law of material things being openly flouted but Kakumee had also broken other law, for he had struck a man in anger, and that man was his brother. This was madness! . . . Of all living things, the Ihalmiut most fear a madman, and it is the rule that such a one must die, and his name most never again be spoken by living lips. But in the camp of Kakut there could be no such easy release from the danger of one who was mad. Kakumee was a shaman who could not easily be harmed by human hands. Moreover he had gone from the camp and not even Kakut had the courage to follow and to face the evil spirits Kakumee would unleash against a pursuer. . . . A wave of uneasiness swept through those camps where there dwelt over a thousand men, women and children who now heard of Kakumee’s return, and feared for the evil that he might do.

It was barely two weeks before those fears were realized. A strange sickness broke out in the camp of Kakut. Three women sickened at once, complaining of a great Pain that sat on their chests and denied them air for their lungs.

The magic of Kakut was helpless against this new evil and in a little time those women died.

Then the Great Pain, as it was called, swept on up the river, into the hidden camps by the lakes, and all over the face of the land. Before the end of that spring more than a third of the People were dead. . . . The winter before the coming of the Great Pain had been a hard one, for it had been long protracted. But there had been no deaths from hunger that winter, though the Ihalmiut had been weak and lacking in strength, when the coming of spring, and Kakumee, brought the plague to their land. The killer which Kakumee had brought with him from the place of the white men, perhaps even from that little cabin where he had believed he looked on the frozen face of his devil, struck down the hungry folk of the Barrens. . . . Though men sickened and died in all the camps, Kakumee, who had brought the Great Pain, did not sicken, for he was well fed and lacked for nothing.

In 1886, the Ihalmiut of Northern Canada numbered 7,000 souls; by 1946, when 25-year-old Farley Mowat travelled to the Arctic, their population had dwindled to only 40. Living among them, he observed the millennia-old migration of the caribou and endured the bleak winters, food shortages and continual, devastating intrusions of interlopers bent on exploiting the Arctic. In this seminal book, Mowat details a genocide wrought by misunderstanding and neglect. Debated long after its publication, this powerful story of the Ihalmiut continues to haunt the Canadian conscience.

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a storm rises, and the selfish father becomes afraid that the boat will capsize. He decides to throw his daughter overboard to lighten the Inuit origin Story; Sedna the Sea goddess load.

When she tries to climb back into the Many years ago, a handsome stranger visits a boat, her father cuts off her fingers. These finfamily’s igloo. He is welcomed to spend the gers become seals in the sea. She tries again and night, but when they awake, the stranger is he cuts off her hands, which become walruses. gone. The father sees only animal tracks leavShe makes one last attempt to climb aboard the ing the igloo, and says, “We were deceived. boat but her father cuts off her forearms, which That must have been my lead dog disguised as transform into whales. a man." When the daughter becomes pregnant,

The daughter can no longer stay afloat, the ashamed father paddles her to an island, and sinks to the bottom of the ocean, where she where he abandons her. is transformed into a half-fish, half-woman god The daughter only survives because dess. She holds all of the sea animals entangled the lead dog swims out to the girl, bringing in her hair, only to release them when she is her meat to eat. In time, she gives birth to six appeased by offerings, songs or a visit from an young; three are Inuit children, but the other angakok (shaman), who combs the tangles from three have bigger ears and snout-like noses. She her hair. makes a boat of sealskin, and places the three strange children inside, pushing them adrift in One of the most well known Inuit myths is that of the Sea the sea. Some legends say that European and Goddess. She is known by many names (Sedna, Nuliayuk, TaFirst Nations peoples are descended from those luliyuk), and there are many variations of the story, but there is one central message: The Sea Goddess is the keeper of all three children. the sea animals, and she must be kept happy for the ocean to

In time, the father decides to retrieve keep providing for the people. his daughter off the island. On their way home,

1000: Baffin Island

Ann Kayotak strolls down Igloolik’s main street, Magnus Holm, 2014

food” is still the preferred source of sustenance.

These traditional Inuit foods include arctic How Families Eat In The Arctic: From An char, seal, polar bear and caribou — often con$18 Box Of Cookies To Polar Bear Stew sumed raw, frozen or dried. The foods, which are native to the region, are packed with the viIn the most northerly Canadian territory of tamins and nutrients people need to stay nourished in the harsh winter conditions. The parts Nunavut, grocery shopping is expensive. of the animal that aren’t edible, like the fur and Like, really expensive.

So much so that residents regularly post in skins, are used to create clothes and other proda Facebook group called Feeding My Family to ucts that hunters can then sell to make a living.

“We’ve got to find ways that work in the share photos of high prices at their local stores.

A package of vanilla creme cookies: $18.29. North,” Papatsie says. “What’s already workA bunch of grapes: $28.58. A container of baby ing in the North is Inuit culture — harvesting, sewing, making art. So it’s not reinventing the formula: $26.99.

Leesee Papatsie, founder of the Facebook wheel but working with the wheel that’s algroup, says she spends at least $500 a week on ready there.”

And that includes sharing meals and leftfood for her family of five — and that’s just for basics in the capital of Iqaluit, a city of some overs not just with your neighbors, but with anyone in the community who could use a little 7,000 residents.

Because it costs a lot to fly goods into com- something extra to eat.

Acacia Johnson, an Alaskan photographer, munities in remote regions of the Arctic Archipelago, there’s not much that can be done spent several seasons documenting these custo drastically reduce prices, she explains. But toms in Arctic Bay on the northern tip of Baffin that’s why — in a territory where about 84% Island, where the population is around 750.

Johnson first received a Fulbright grant in of the population identifies as Inuit — “country

2019: Nunavut

2014 to complete a “poetic landscape project” in the small community. She lived with a local family for four months and sometimes joined groups on hunting and fishing trips out on the ice.

“I went there to make a photo project about the importance of the Arctic landscape to people, and I don’t know what that was going to look like. I guess I was imagining landscape pictures,” she says now. “But I realized that the best way to show people’s connection to the land is through the hunting practices, because the land is the food source that sustains people.”

Follow me: I seek the everlasting ices of the north, where you will feel the misery of cold and frost, to which I am impassive.

-Mary Shelley, 1823, Frankenstein

But it’s extremely sensitive to take pictures of someone skinning a seal, Johnson says. She remembers the question a hunter asked her the first time she went out on the ice: “You’re not Greenpeace, are you?”

In 1976, Greenpeace Canada launched a graphic anti-sealing campaign that picked up steam around the globe. The environmentalist organization has since issued several apologies to Inuit communities, saying that they intended to target the commercial sealing industry and not independent hunters. But the impacts of that campaign are still felt by Inuit communities in Canada and Greenland decades later.

In 2009, the European Union banned the trade of seal products. Although the provision included an exception for seals sourced through Inuit hunts, the market for seal products suffered an intense decline. In 2015, seal pelt exports from Greenland had dropped by 90%.

Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, a filmmaker from Iqaluit, explored the detrimental effect of anti-sealing legislation and environmental campaigning on Canadian Inuit hunters in her 2016 documentary Angry Inuk. The film shows how the drop in seal prices has made it more difficult for hunters to afford hunting supplies, earn an income and ultimately feed their families.

In a region that already suffers from poverty and food insecurity — a 2014 report by Action Canada found that almost 70% of all house50

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holds in Nunavut struggle to obtain nutritious and affordable food — less money means less food on the table.

Wade Thorhaug, executive director of the Qajuqturvik Food Centre in Iqaluit, is trying to fix that. But it’s not easy to allocate resources so that everybody has enough to eat.

“There’s not a whole lot of public funds available for things like a daily meal program or a food bank,” Thorhaug says.

The center operates on donations and government funding from a program called Urban Programming for Indigenous Peoples. The funds are awarded to organizations that build skills and prepare residents for employment preparation, so Qajuqturvik offers culinary training and work experience alongside their meal program, which provides 150 to 200 free meals a day for those who walk through their door.

They serve traditional and nontraditional foods — polar bear stew made the lunch menu on Nov. 11, the day Thorhaug spoke to NPR. Thorhaug says they’re looking for a hunter to come on staff in order to be able to provide the community with more country food options.

“We’re just making sure that people can have one reliable meal per day that ideally is as nutritious and as delicious as possible,” Thorhaug says. “And also, when it’s available, to be as culturally appropriate as possible.”

There’s another way the community looks out for its members when it comes to food. In Arctic Bay, people hold community feasts to make sure no one goes hungry. Hunters will lay out the catch, like narwhal, and everyone enjoys the meal in each other’s company. This is especially significant for families who may not have the equipment or skills to hunt themselves.

They still get a chance to give their children the nutritional benefits of their traditional foods.

Food-sharing occurs on a smaller scale too, and is a regular part of life in Nunavut. Johnson recalls how her host family would prepare large breakfasts every day and invite neighbors or community members over to share, sometimes even posting about extras on Facebook so that anybody in need of a hearty meal could pop by.

Papatsie says that despite the high rate of

The North-West Passage. 1874. Sir John Everett Millais

food insecurity in the region, she believes the culturally ingrained act of sharing keeps many people from struggling.

“Eating has always been kind of sacred to the Inuit because years ago there were a lot of starvations,” she says. “So eating together is one of the stronger Inuit customs we have. It’s who we are.”

And the biggest solution moving forward, she believes, is to invest in programs that keep the Inuit tradition alive by teaching younger generations about hunting, harvesting, weaving and other arts and crafts, even in the face of a changing climate.

Over the past three decades, the oldest and thickest type of Arctic ice has declined by 95%.

This threatens the surrounding ecosystems and

the people who depend on it for survival.

On her most recent visit to Arctic Bay in the spring of 2018, Johnson accompanied families on camping trips out on the land meant to pass Inuit customs down. There’s a stark contrast in the generational divide, she says — some of the elders remember a time before Inuit lived in settled communities, while their grandchildren are growing up in thriving towns with smartphones and social media.

But on those trips, they find common ground in the practices that have kept their communities alive for milleniums.

Isabella Gomez Sarmiento is a 2019 Kroc Fellow reporting for NPR

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Voices in Time

CLIMATE 2008:

Iqaluit

NALUNAKTUK: THE ARCTIC AS FORCE INSTEAD OF RESOURCE

My teeth are blue, in the hot August of 2020, and my husband and I haven’t managed to walk far. I can’t seem to quit stopping for the wealth of blueberries. We look up, chuckling at the staccato noise of a raven, shortly before bird and laughter are subsumed beneath a roar of vehicles. Squinting under the sun’s glare we spot a trio of helicopters flying out over Frobisher Bay. “Another CARE patrol,” my husband says, pointing. Too small for rescue.”

I shake my head, unsure, since there are now as many rescue missions as so-called Canadian Arctic Regional Endeavors.The CARE acronym replaced the old sovop (Sovereignty Operation) around 2012 when the federal government decided it needed a friendlier term.

I remember the first one-Operation Narwhal, in 2004-wherein vehicles were hobbled by unexpected frost, and the military had to call upon the assistance of Inuit Rangers after losing contact with two communications specialists in the hills. Those operations had improved significantly by 2010, however, in ample time to address our contemporary problem: foreign shipwrecks.

It is at once embarrassing and alarming,

the way wrecks are piling up in the so-called Northwest Passage, those Arctic waters where Inuit have hunted for ages. They yet hunt out there, of course, since Inuit can hunt just as easily from boat as upon the once-common sea ice. It’s tricky, navigating the sludge of icebergs in a small boat, but definitely worth it: global warming, it seems, has caused plank.tonic populations to rise, increasing the numbers of fish and sea mammals with eas· ier access to waterways. I can’t recall a time when the hunting culture was this strong, although bears are no longer sought after. Warmth has made the recently stabilized bear population more dangerous, since the animals are reverting to the costal/island hunting style of their ancestors, but their numbers are nevertheless small. The end of the bear hunts is no real loss (especially to me), and many overlook it in light of the seas increased bounty.

Unfortunately for many, another variety of prospective boom is increasingly resembling bust. It’s amazing to think back on all that sabrerattling among the United States, Denmark and Canada, over rights to the Northwest Passage, only to have so many ships ripped asunder by unanticipated icebergs In 2018, there was great

Ashley Hughes, 10th birthday, wearing a parka sewn by her mother, Acacia Johnson, 2017

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deal of huzzah over Canada’s finalized licensing system (favouring the U.S., of course) for foreign usage of Canadian Arctic waters, even though the U.S. had already been using the waters for some time. The issue only came to the forefront of public awareness in 2011, when an American oil tanker (the Rose of Texas, or something like that) was split open three hundred kilometers from Gjoa Haven, ruining local fish stocks and poisoning coastlines. Inuit made little headway in complaining that the bacterial strain used to clean up the oil was giving their children skin ulcerations, though the Canadian public at least organized a relief effort once pictures of afilicted seal pups came out. The result was the licensing system of two years ago, along with heavy costs in CARE operations to make sure that no illegal dumping, immigration, speculation, or fishing occurs. Add to that the cost of rescue efforts to foreign ships, ever dashing themselves like dazed juggernauts upon this new and unfathomable Arctic.

“Remind me to never visit the Arctic Ocean during winter again” -S.M. Reine, Author

The Land, you see (as Inuit call the Arctic), has always liked to play tricks. In this case, all the profiteers were so busy expecting Arctic waters to dutifully refrain from solidifying that they forgot one thing: the pole is still far from ice-free and the tellurian warming goes on. As ice farther north warms and breaks off the resultant cc slush”-ice-chunks anywhere from the size of a baseball to that of a highrise-float south. Instead of the expected, icefree “Northwest Passage,” the Danish tankers shipping fresh water from Greenland (there is, after all, a global freshwater crisis in 2020 ), and the U.S. tankers shipping (what else?) oil, have instead found themselves negotiating a treacherous, boreal labyrinth.

So many lives have already been ruined as a result of greed and lack of foresight; but that, too, is an old story in the Arctic. I pick an Arctic dandelion ( a plant that someone, the other day, snippily insisted to me was not native to the Arctic, though it is), and I turn to the town of Iqaluit, the edge of whose sprawl lies 54

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nearby. The housing crisis of years past is over for now, having been solved by development.

The illusion of boom, of less permafrost and more shipping, lured hordes of southerners North more than a decade ago, believing that the Arctic was destined to become prime real estate amid rushes for gold, sapphires, and diamonds. They found, instead, an Arctic that was warmer, but nevertheless treeless and incapable of becoming any nation’s new breadbasket, in which shipping costs and fair practices left a bitter taste in the mouths of the most rapacious companies. They built homes and complexes they were already fleeing by the time 2015 rolled around-homes that are now occupied by mostly Inuit families.

An as they retreated to the South again pockets empty and lips curled, with bittersweet memories of a beautiful but strangely unprofitable Land, they were haunted by a single frusterating mystery. The knowledge that they could never say exactly why the Arctic hadn’t been what they’d expected.

But Inuit elders could have told them.

If anyone had bothered to ask, Inuit might have explained the Land to them. And you can bet the word nalunaktuq would have been uttered.

Come back to the present, for a moment-even to a bit of the past.

The root word of nalunaktuq is nalu, or “without knowledge.” In Inuktitut (the Inuit language, which is crammed with riddles), nalunaktuq loosely means “difficult to know” or “unpredictable.” But why should the Inuit perspective on such a thing matter? Well, besides being the majority in the Arctic, the Land has already forced its harshest lessons upon them. And the best such lesson has been that of nalunaktuq: The fact that general trends serve as poor indicators of how the Arctic will actually behave. Many people understand that Inuit survivability and Land knowledge are one, but few suspect that both hinge upon acceptance of the Land’s uncertain nature. Much of the popular shock over signs of warming in the Arctic stems from the assumption that, of all environments, the Arctic is traditionally the least inclined to change. This variety of pop sophism, however, is easily unmasked through

even cursory examination of that era which birthed Inuit culture itself. For the truth is that Inuit were shaped by previous global Warming.

The planet Earth, between AD 800 and AD 1200 was a hot place. There are tales of rich apple orchards in England, sunburns being common. As occurs at any time, in any place, when things begin to heat up, folks move about. History shows this to be one of the greatest eras of tribal migration and rise of empire. Inuit ( or, archeologically, “Thule”) first emerged out of Alaska, around the very time of the warm periods onset. The warmth had given sea mammals ready access to Canada’s Arctic Archipelago, and Inuit culture had adapted to specialize in hunting them. They did so well that by AD 1000 (the time of Leif Ericson’s discovery of Vinland) they had eaten their way across proto-Canada. By AD 1200 they were well settled into Greenland, just in time for the palanet to go chilly again. Nevertheless, folklore-that subconscious history of a culturerarely forgets: to this day, Inuit ajaraaq (string games) retain the pattern called Kigiaq. This is “The Beaver an animal that once ranged as far as the Arctic, during the Earth’s last warming period.

As heretical as it sounds, within the context of pop dogma, the last time the planet grew hotter, it was actually pretty good for Inuit.

In part, this is because Inuit are adaptability itself, and other cultures who direct eyes toward the Arctic would do well to emulate such plasticity. Lately, we’ve become inundated with sweeping, nigh-hysterical declarations, along the lines of “Global warming will render 95 per cent of Arctic species extinct within 10 years”, or “Climate change will destroy Inuit culture within a decade.” We humans instinctive love a crusade; but a crusade is pastoriented, while adaptation is future oriented.

We cannot trust crisis since someone always profits from fear; nor can we trust prediction, until the day science can provide us an accurate five day forecast. But we humans regardless of culture, can trust to our heritage as an ancient species and an adaptive one daptive one. We can trust in our own ability to change, if the land will not.

In truth, I fear more for southern folk than I do for Inuit. The common southern perception seems to be that global warming will reshape the North into the South, as though the Arctic were defined, up to this point, by cold alone. Many busi­nesses now view the Arctic as some ripe new fruit, counting on global warming as the friend who will help them pick it. But ask anyone who has lived in the Arctic for a time, and they will tell you that its islands and shores are strewn with the bleached remnants

Part of the Gjøa’s crew on deck in the Northwest Passage, 1904

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An Equimaux watching a seal, Sir William Edward Parry, 1824

of such ambition: shipping costs that mounted be­ yond control, inconstant yield, disastrous turns of weather. Who can count the number of disappointed ventures?

Inevitably, the next couple of decades promise the illusion of boom for the Arcticperhaps, in some stranger brains, the mistaken belief that a warmer North is about to sprout trees, spawning its own little Toronto. That simply won’t happen. Warming aside, the Arctic fails to meet many of the require­ments for agriculture and construction along southern stan­ dards (scarcity of gravel being but one example). Some might resort to the argument that population is a non-factor, that fleets of international ships will directly connect North to South. But the attempt to have this very thing is what, I be­lieve may, lay the groundwork 56

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for tragedy. My greatest fear is that shipping interests, driven by blind speculation, will brave the stew of icebergs resulting from inconstant freezing , only to spill ice gutted bellies into Arctic waters. How long, I wonder, will Arctic communities have to suffer such disasters, before those companies finally pull out.

The Inuit, until that day, wi ll have to be patient, adapt, just as their ancestors did the last time the planet warmed. Hopefully words are fantasy, and this is a deranged vision I’ve presented. Hopefully, Inuit will not have to stand over the wreckage of the over ambitious, left in the wake of our strange era -unique only in that it is the first in which humankind has had the hubris to term the Arctic “predictable’ “ But Inuit will adapt, no matter the outcome, even as they whisper prayers over the skeletons

of those who refuse to do the same. For Inuit know, of old, that the Land never fully lends itself to resource.

It is a force, and it is nalunaktuq.

Pijariiqpunga (‘’That’s all I have to say”).

Of Inuit ancestry, Rachel Qitsualik was born in a tent at the northernmost tip of Baffin Island. Raised as a boy, she learned survival lore form her father - eventually surviving residential school. Rachel specializes in archaic dialects and balances personal shamanic experience with a university education.

2019: Canada How to Cross a Field of Snow Step 1 One winter morning a few years ago, in order to fill a void in our vacation plans, four friends and I went for a drive across the Canadian tundra looking for wild bison. On the map, the Mackenzie Bison Sanctuary looked close to our hotel in Yellowknife, but distances are deceiving amid such vast expanses—in reality, the preserve was more than 150 miles away.

We drove for most of the day. The frost-patched road was very long and very straight but oddly undulate; our Jeep rose and fell like a ship passing over gentle waves. Lulled into a hypnotic stupor, we drove south, and south, and south, promising ourselves that we would turn around at the next rise, but then, reaching it, driving a little farther, rising and falling, through an unremittingly monotonous landscape. On the snowy roadside ran two-lane bison trails, which I at first mistook for snowmobile tracks. The trails intermittently snarled up, marking places where the bison had apparently paused to stomp around in circles. Here and there lay piles of their scat. But the bison themselves eluded us.

Our view of the surrounding land was often blocked by stands of evergreens, which lined the roadside like ragged gray sentries.

Glancing through breaks in the trees, we could occasionally glimpse glowing white expanses, hidden realms. Our map indicated these were frozen lakes. Somewhere near the edge of the preserve, we stopped at one such lake and got out of the car. The air, at around −20 degrees, felt like a frozen windowpane pressed against

a warm cheek: stinging, windless, and clear.

Trudging through the dry, glittery snow, sinking to our shins, we passed through the trees and stepped out onto the open lake. I had hoped to see a herd of bison there, dark and distant, but instead all we found was about two hundred yards of pristine, perfectly level snow, as smooth as a freshly tucked sheet. I felt a flicker of Wallace Stevens’ wintry emptiness, that sense of “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

The polar explorers of the early twentieth century knew this feeling well. While leading his expedition party to the South Pole in 1911, Roald Amundsen wrote that “it is damnably unpleasant” to “stare at nothing.” The dogs also apparently hated the sight of it; Amundsen’s rival, Robert Falcon Scott, found that his dog team refused to push forward into the white void without a person in front of them to provide a visual reference point.

An essay published in Boys’ Life magazine in February 1912, the month after Scott finally reached the pole, instructs interested young readers how to photograph snow properly. “It is, of course, seriously objectionable,” opines the author, “to have a pure, lifeless white field of snow, unbroken by footprints or shrubbery or an object of some kind.” I’m suspicious of this reasoning, if not its conclusion. Lifelessness is not the issue. We moderns, inheritors of a Romantic gaze, can find beauty in even the most stark and inert landscapes: a sandstone canyon and a snowcapped mountaintop are barren in their ways, but they can nonetheless inspire great awe. I believe we all recoil at a flat white field for a different reason: because it is blank.

This peculiar horror vacui has been felt by almost every person at some point: by the author staring at a blank page, by the artist staring at a white canvas, by the adolescent staring at a bedroom ceiling while contemplating an unknown future. In some sense it is a mark of maturity. When we are very young, blankness can still inspire and excite: I recall, in kindergarten, the distinct pleasure of taking out a new, immaculate page of drawing paper, gleaming with the promise of freedom, possibility, and 57

experimentation. Pouring over maps as “a little chap,” Marlow (the narrator of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) found delight in places like the North Pole, which were unexplored, uncharted, unclaimed by empire. They presented “a blank space of delightful mystery—a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over.” The horror comes only later in life, as we learn the abundance of misery blankness can hold: the regret of setting out on the wrong path, the squandered time, the crippling indecision— and, in the case of the polar explorers, bodily suffering, permanent injury, and sometimes death.

If I had wanted to cross the frozen lake that day, what would have been the optimal method? I could have cut a straight line to minimize the distance; that would seem to be the most efficient course. But it requires enormous effort to maintain a straight line. Amundsen learned as much in Antarctica; he wrote that his party’s forerunners, pushing forward over blank terrain, continually tacked back and forth, overcorrecting for their errors, until the expedition members behind them began to accuse them of playing a prank. So maybe to minimize my overall effort, I should have meandered a bit, like water.

Or, thinking more radically, perhaps I should move beyond the narrow-minded mechanistic parameters of minimizing at all. For practical reasons, geographic explorers must always calculate their route based on expediency. But what about for artists or other aesthetes, who value beauty and novelty over mere efficiency?

Once those new variables are introduced, one’s options multiply fantastically. I could attempt to walk a line of loopy, calligraphic elegance; I could even write a word in the snow with my footsteps. Perhaps the most aesthetically daring gesture would have been for me to take the maximalist approach: walking from side to side, as if reaping a field of wheat, row by row, covering the greatest possible area of ground. In all likelihood, no one in all of human history had ever walked across that patch of earth in such a counterintuitive way. There is an obvious satisfaction to finding new ground on the same old land. But is it too clever, too tiresome? Would 58

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anyone else follow in your footsteps?

This sense of anxious bewilderment attends the birth of any artistic exploration. The maximalist writer David Foster Wallace grappled with it throughout his life. He once noted: Writing-wise, fiction is scarier, but nonfiction is harder—because nonfiction’s based in reality, and today’s felt reality is overwhelmingly, circuitblowingly huge and complex. Whereas fiction comes out of nothing. Actually, so wait: the truth is that both genres are scary; both feel like they’re executed on tightropes, over abysses—it’s the abysses that are different. Fiction’s abyss is silence, nada. Whereas nonfiction’s abyss is Total Noise, the seething static of every particular thing and experience, and one’s total freedom of infinite choice about what to choose to attend to and represent and connect, and how, and why, etc.

These twin abysses are familiar to those of us who work in any realm of knowledge creation—not just literature but also science, history, philosophy, art, folklore, music, technology, mathematics. Wallace’s metaphor of walking a tightrope across an abyss works because it captures the attendant sense of vertigo and danger, but it is ultimately too narrow—it does not allow the writer to choose a trajectory, and so to feel the terror of choosing.

The more accurate analogy, I realized that winter’s day, was one that humans have been staring at and mulling over for millennia.

The creative abyss is a snowy field. Not an abyss you tiptoe above but the one you must navigate.

It is at once an infinity and a vacuum, total noise and total silence, everything and nothing. Your foot hovers; your head swims. To take even a single step into blankness is to enter a maze with boundless options and no clues.

Step 2 The Russian poet Varlam Shalamov

Doris McCarthy, Ice Floes at Pangnirtung, 1973-2011

recounts in Kolyma Tales, his memoir of the seventeen years he spent living in a Siberian forced-labor camp, that in order to escape working in the mines, convicts in the gulag would often use nitroglycerin capsules to blow off their own hands. The camp authorities would assign these maimed men to walking duty, where they would be “forced to spend the

entire working day in deep, loose, crystal snow, tramping down a path for people and tractors at the timber-clearing sites.” (This work was so exhausting, Shalamov recalls, that some convicts blew off their feet, too.)

“How is a road beaten down through the virgin snow?” Shalamov asks. The answer:

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One person walks ahead, sweating, swearing, and barely moving his feet.

He keeps getting stuck in the loose, deep snow. He goes far ahead, marking his path with uneven black pits. When he tires, he lies down on the snow, lights a homemade cigarette, and the tobacco smoke hangs suspended above the white, gleaming snow like a blue cloud. The man moves on, but the cloud remains hovering above the spot where he rested, for the air is motionless. Roads are always beaten down on days like these—so that the wind won’t sweep away this labor of man. The man himself selects points in the snow’s infinity to orient himself—a cliff, a tall tree. He steers his body through the snow in the same fashion that a helmsman steers a riverboat from one cape to another.

“Life,” goes a Russian proverb, “is not a walk across a field.” But perhaps it would be more true to say: Life is a walk across a field of fresh snow.

Step 3 In the years before the Maoist invasion of Tibet, two Lamaist monks would gather near the base of Dakpa Sheri, the “Pure Crystal Mountain,” in the first days of spring. One lama was called the Snow Cutter, the other was called the Snow Firmer. Their job was to open a route around the mountain for the approaching pilgrimage season, when a great many Buddhists would circle holy mountains to purify their karma and improve the circumstances of their rebirth. Of all Tibet’s holy mountains, Dakpa Sheri was believed by many to possess the greatest spiritual power; a single circuit was said to multiply one’s karmic merit by many hundred million times, and seven days of meditation on its slopes were thought to be more effective than months or even years spent meditating elsewhere. So powerful was

Will Steger Foundation, Baffin Island Expedition, Baffin Island, 2007

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the mountain that even the animals grazing on its slopes would be reborn as gods.

But however enlightening it may have been, Dakpa Sheri remained a fearsome place.

Like all the great mountains of Tibet, it was thought to be the home of powerful deities who would punish trespassers by sending down thundering avalanches. So “opening the mountain” (as this process was called) was a dual task: the lamas needed both to clear a walking path and to calm the wrath of the mountain spirits. As they walked, the lamas chanted and made offerings of cakes to the local gods. To avoid soft snow, they walked at night, holding torches. With them traveled a team of twenty strong young men, brought along to break through the snow crust. The lamas spurred them on with shouts of “Cut through the snow!” and “Each of you dig!” while the team passed by a series of landmarks with names that were by turns beatific and ghastly: Human Skin Ravine, Blazing Light Plateau, Turquoise Lake Palace, Community of One Hundred Thousand Sky-goers, Swine Flesh Pass. Of the tens of thousands of pilgrims who flocked to Dakpa Sheri each year, very few would have traveled outside of the path created by the Snow Cutter and Snow Firmer.

To do so would have been to tempt disaster.

Step 4 There is a hidden-camera gag show based out of Montreal that my boyfriend sometimes watches. This particular format, I’ve learned, is phenomenally popular around the world, in part because it is totally wordless. It is structured around the near-universal grammar of the prank—that “benign violation” of forcing a person to feel a strong emotion (fear, rage, shame), followed by the quick removal of that emotion—et voilà, it was all pretend!

In one gag, a janitor in a red anorak shovels a path through a small city park covered in snow. The park is evidently used as a shortcut by many pedestrians to get from one block to the next. Rather than providing a shortcut, however, the janitor’s path grows increasingly tortuous, veering wildly, and then it ends in a loop—it is, in effect, a path to no-

where. Once the janitor is finished shoveling, we watch as pedestrians follow the path one by one. They are confident at first but become less and less so as the trail grows increasingly illogical. Eventually they realize they have been led to a dead end and turn back in exasperation. The joke, of course, is that people are easily duped; so deep is our expectation that a path must lead somewhere that we will follow it, even as it reveals itself to be deceptive or deeply flawed.

“For the first time in history, my community has had to use air conditioners. Imagine that, air conditioners in the Arctic.”

— Sheila Watt-Cloutier, Canadian Inuit Activist

Some walkers, however, did not always follow the shoveled path; where the path doubles back on itself, they instinctively attempted to skip across the snow and create a shortcut to the next stretch. Watching this, I was reminded of the occasionally unfaithful manner in which certain insects, like ants and termites, follow pheromone trails. Termites, for example, will follow a line drawn by a normal ballpoint pen because they mistake the glycol compounds in the ink for trail pheromones. There are many videos of schoolchildren performing this trick on YouTube: they draw a blue spiral on a sheet of paper and giggle as a termite traces it blindly. Initially the metaphorical implications of this image are quite dark, calling to mind that iron-shackled pronouncement of Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d’Holbach: “Man’s life is a line that nature commands him to describe upon the surface of the earth, without his ever being able to swerve from it, even for an instant.”

But I have noticed in these videos that sometimes, if the line of ink curves back on itself too sharply, a termite, like certain people, will abandon the trail and wander free. This existential jailbreak does not last long, however; on re-encountering the next coil of the spiral, they almost invariably resume following the same doomed, stupid path.

Step 5 In 1949 a linguist named George Kingsley Zipf attempted to formulate a working theory of animal movement. His magnum 61

opus, Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort, began with the following thought experiment: Imagine that two villages are separated by a mountain range. A man desiring to walk from one village to another faces a number of options depending on what he values most.

If he desires to minimize the distance he has to walk, he could tunnel through the base of the mountain, at a cost of enormous labor and money. If he wished to minimize time, he might hike directly over the range, covering more ground through considerable physical exertion. If he wished to minimize his work, he might wind his way through the mountain “The most important thing for people to know about the governance of the Arctic is that we have a chance now to act to maintain the integrity of the system or to lose it. To lose it means that we will dismember the vital systems that make the Arctic work. It’s not just a cost to the people who live there. It’s a cost to all people everywhere.”

— Sylvia Earle, American Marine Biologist

pass, following the path of least resistance, though covering a great distance and losing much time. Distance, time, work: choose one value, and the other two inadvertently suffer.

Zipf identified a fourth variable: the walker will choose whatever option minimizes his effort—the estimated amount of labor a person will perform over the course of his life.

Under normal conditions, a traveler will likely take the path of least resistance over the mountains, as indigenous people all over the world often have, because that will minimize his effort. However, if there is a cache of gold in the other town someone else might discover, time suddenly becomes imperative, so he might cut a straight path up and over the mountain, regardless of obstacles; the work of climbing will be offset by the work he will be saved from doing when he has the gold. And if he makes that trip regularly, he may band together with others to tunnel through the mountain, saving them a measure of labor in the long run.

Robert Moor has written for New York Magazine, The New York Times, GQ, Harper’s, and Lapham’s Quarterly among other publications.

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2019: Siberia Arctic permafrost is thawing fast. That affects us all.

Sergey Zimov, an ecologist by training, tossed a woolly mammoth bone on the pile.

He was squatting in mud along the cool, wide Kolyma River, below a towering cliff of crumbling earth. It was summer in eastern Siberia, far above the Arctic Circle, in that part of Russia that’s closer to Alaska than to Moscow. There wasn’t a speck of frost or snow in sight. Yet at this cliff, called Duvanny Yar, the Kolyma had chewed through and exposed what lies beneath: a layer of frozen ground, or permafrost, that is hundreds of feet deep—and warming fast.

Twigs, other plant matter, and Ice Age animal parts—bison jaws, horse femurs, mammoth bones—spilled onto a beach that sucked at Zimov’s boots. “I love Duvanny Yar,” he said as he yanked fossils from the muck. “It is like a book. Each page is a story about the history of nature.”

Across nine million square miles at the top of the planet, climate change is writing a new chapter. Arctic permafrost isn’t thawing gradually, as scientists once predicted.

Geologically speaking, it’s thawing almost overnight. As soils like the ones at Duvanny Yar soften and slump, they’re releasing vestiges of ancient life—and masses of carbon—that have been locked in frozen dirt for millennia.

Entering the atmosphere as methane or carbon dioxide, the carbon promises to accelerate climate change, even as humans struggle to curb our fossil fuel emissions.

Few understand this threat better than Zimov. From a ramshackle research station in the gold-mining outpost of Cherskiy, about three hours by speedboat from Duvanny Yar, he has spent decades unearthing the mysteries of a warming Arctic. Along the way, he has helped upend conventional wisdom—especially the notion that the far north, back in the Pleistocene ice ages, had been an unbroken desert of ice and thin soils dotted with sage.

Instead, the abundant fossils of mammoths and other large grazers at Duvanny Yar and

Acacia Johnson, Inuit elder teaches children how to make a bread called bannock on a school field trip, 2019

other sites told Zimov that Siberia, Alaska, and western Canada had been fertile grasslands, rich with herbs and willows. As these plants and animals died, the cold slowed their decomposition. Over time, windblown silt buried them deep, locking them in permafrost.

The upshot is that Arctic permafrost is much richer in carbon than scientists once thought.

Now new discoveries suggest that the carbon will escape faster as the planet warms.

From the unexpected speed of Arctic warming and the troubling ways that meltwater moves through polar landscapes, researchers now suspect that for every one degree Celsius rise in Earth’s average temperature, permafrost may release the equivalent of four to six years’ worth of coal, oil, and natural gas emissions—double to triple what scientists thought a few years ago.

Within a few decades, if we don’t curb fossil fuel use, permafrost could be as big a source of greenhouse gases as China, the world’s largest emitter, is today.

We aren’t accounting for that. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has

only recently started incorporating permafrost into its projections. It still underestimates just how wide Pandora’s freezer could swing open—and how much havoc that could unleash.

Permafrost’s potential to warm the planet is dwarfed by our own. But if we hope to limit warming to two degrees Celsius, as 195 nations agreed to during the 2015 Paris talks, new research suggests we may have to cut emissions eight years sooner than IPCC models project, just to account for the thawing that will be going on.

It is perhaps our least appreciated reason to hasten a transition to cleaner energy: To reach whatever goal we set to combat warming, we’ll need to move even faster than we think.

Zimov first came to Cherskiy in the 1970s as a college student to help with mapping on an expedition. He loved the stark landscape and isolation and remoteness from Soviet power centers. The dark winters promised time to think. He returned a few years later and founded the Northeast Science Station, at first under the auspices of the Russian Academy of 63

Sciences.Today he owns and runs it with his son, Nikita. It’s an improvisational operation run on a shoestring and on secondhand equipment.

But the station attracts Arctic scientists from around the world.

One day in the summer of 2018, photographer Katie Orlinsky and I joined Zimov in an aging boat to ferry supplies to a carbon-monitoring facility at Ambarchik Bay, near the mouth of the Kolyma on the Arctic Ocean. The site had originally been occupied by a transit station for prisoners bound for Stalin’s gulags, and Soviet-era relics were everywhere.

We traversed spongy grasses across a walkway fashioned from a string of old steam radiators.

Zimov, bull chested, his long white hair tucked in a beret, probed the ground with a metal shaft as he walked. He’s been doing that a lot lately, to check the depth of the hard permafrost.

Permafrost—ground that remains frozen year-round—is capped by a few feet of dirt and plant detritus. Called the active layer, this soil normally thaws each summer and refreezes in winter, protecting permafrost from rising heat above. But in the spring of 2018, a crew working for Nikita found that dirt near the surface around Cherskiy had not iced up at all during the long dark polar night. That was unheard of: January in Siberia is so brutally cold that human breath can freeze with a tinkling sound that the indigenous Yakuts call “the whisper of stars.”

The Soviets used to land heavy planes on the Kolyma. Soil 30 inches down should have been frozen. Instead it was mush.

“Three years ago, the temperature in the ground above our permafrost was minus 3 degrees Celsius [27 degrees Fahrenheit],” Sergey Zimov said. “Then it was minus 2. Then it was minus one. This year, the temperature was plus 2 degrees.”

On one level that’s not surprising. Earth’s five warmest years since the late 19th century have come since 2014, and the Arctic is warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet, as it loses the sea ice that helps chill it. In 2017 tundra in Greenland faced its worst known wildfire. Days before we landed in Siberia, thermometers in Lakselv, Norway, 240 miles above the Arctic Circle, recorded a Arctic Ocean, Photo by Annie Spratt

blistering 32 degrees Celsius, or 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Arctic reindeer hid in road tunnels for relief.

Permafrost temperatures globally have been rising for half a century. On Alaska’s North Slope, they spiked 11 degrees Fahrenheit in 30 years. Localized thawing of permafrost, especially in villages where development disturbs the surface and allows heat to penetrate, has eroded shorelines, undermined roads and schools, cracked pipelines, and collapsed ice cellars where Arctic hunters store walrus meat and bowhead whale blubber. Warm summers are already warping life for Arctic residents.

When Arctic traveler Vilhjalmur Stefansson traded with the Inuit of Victoria Island in 1911, he found the metal of their knives to be of curious provenance: Inuit to the east had bought guns from the Hudson Bay Company and traded them westward; the firearms were then traded farther west, eventually reaching the Inuit he’d met—who, having no use for guns, had beat the metal barrels into knife blades.

What the Zimovs were documenting in 2018, though, was something different, with implications beyond the Arctic: a wintertime thaw.The culprit, paradoxically, was heavy snow.

Siberia is dry, but for several winters before 2018, thick snow had smothered the region.

The snow acted like a blanket, trapping summer heat in the soil. At a research site 11 miles from Cherskiy, Mathias Goeckede of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry found that snow depth had doubled in five years. By April 2018 temperatures in the active layer had risen 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

The phenomenon wasn’t limited to Siberia.

Vladimir Romanovsky, a permafrost expert at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, had for years watched the active layer freeze completely by mid-January at some 180 research sites in Alaska. But as those places also faced a recent period with heavy snow, the freezing slipped first to February, then to March. In 2018, eight 65

of Romanovsky’s sites near Fairbanks and a dozen on the Seward Peninsula, in western Alaska, never fully froze at all.

Globally, permafrost holds up to 1,600 gigatons of carbon, nearly twice what’s in the atmosphere. No one expects all or even most of that to thaw. Until recently, researchers presumed permafrost would lose at most 10 percent of its carbon. Even that, it was thought, could take as much as 80 years.

But when the active layer stops freezing in winter, things speed up. The added warmth lets microbes chomp organic material in the soil— and emit carbon dioxide or methane—yearround, instead of for just a few short months each summer. And the winter warmth spreads down into the permafrost itself, thawing it faster.

“By the end of this century, climate change will reduce the human population to a few breeding pairs surviving near the Arctic” — James Lovelock, British Scientist

“A lot of our assumptions are breaking down,” said Róisín Commane, an atmospheric chemist at Columbia University who tracks carbon emissions by airplane. She and her colleagues have discovered that the amount of CO2 coming off Alaska’s North Slope in early winter has increased by 73 percent since 1975. “We’ve been trying to understand what’s going on in the Arctic by relying on summer,” Commane said. “But after the sun goes down— that’s when the real story begins.”

A few snowy winters don’t make a trend; this past winter there was less snow in Cherskiy, and the soil cooled again considerably. Fairbanks also got little snow.Yet at some of Romanovsky’s sites in Alaska, the active layer again retained enough heat to keep from completely freezing.

“This is truly amazing,” said Max Holmes, deputy director of Massachusetts’s Woods Hole Research Center, who has studied the carbon cycle in both Alaska and Cherskiy. “I’ve largely imagined permafrost thaw as a slow and steady process, and maybe this is an odd fiveyear period. But what if it’s not? What if things change much more quickly?”

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reinforcing—as it already is, for example, in the case of Arctic sea ice? Sea ice reflects the sun’s rays, keeping the ocean below it cold. But as sea ice melts, the dark ocean absorbs that heat, which then melts more ice.

As a rule, the tipping points at which such feedback loops kick in are tricky to predict.

“We know there are thresholds we don’t want to cross,” said Chris Field, director of Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment. “But we don’t know precisely where they are.”

With permafrost, there’s just too much we can’t see. It covers an area more than twice the size of the United States, inhabited by half as many people as New York City, in some of the world’s least accessible terrain. Little of it is monitored directly. Scientists instead study small plots, track others remotely, and draw inferences about the rest—unlike Arctic sea ice, which can be measured in its entirety by satellite. “You can go online and track exactly what happened to sea ice,” said permafrost expert Ted Schuur of Northern Arizona University. “With permafrost, we’re barely looking. We barely have the tools to measure what’s happening.”

One type of permafrost has researchers particularly concerned: the 20 percent or so that contains immense deposits of solid ice. Some of that ice formed when water percolated down through soils and froze as it hit permafrost; some was created over thousands of years during Arctic winters, when the ground contracted and cracked into polygonal patterns. In spring, meltwater filled those crevices, which later refroze. Over time the buried ice grew into massive wedges enveloped by permafrost soil. Duvanny Yar is shot through with them.

Such a structure can unravel swiftly. When permafrost disintegrates, buried ice melts too.

As water drains, it transports heat that spreads the thawing, and it leaves behind tunnels and air pockets. The ground sinks to fill those cavities, creating surface depressions that fill with rain and meltwater. The water deepens the pools and chews through their icy banks,

until puddles grow to ponds and ponds become lakes. That causes more ground to warm and more ice to melt.

“Abrupt thaw,” as scientists call this process, changes the whole landscape. It triggers landslides; on Banks Island in Canada, scientists documented a 60-fold increase in massive ground slumps from 1984 to 2013. It topples forests. Merritt Turetsky, an ecologist with Canada’s University of Guelph, has tracked abrupt thaw in a black spruce forest near Fairbanks for the past 15 years. Flooding there, she has found, is destabilizing tree roots and trunks. Turetsky suspects all the trees in her “drunken forest” will tip over soon and get swallowed by new wetlands. “There are still little pockets of land, but you have to wade through some pretty wet spots to reach them,” she said.

All permafrost thaw leads to greenhouse gas emissions. But standing water accelerates the threat. The gas that bubbles from the oxygen-deprived mud under ponds and lakes is not only carbon dioxide but also methane, which is 25 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2. Ecologist Katey Walter Anthony of the University of Alaska Fairbanks has been measuring the methane coming from Arctic lakes for two decades. Her latest calculations, published in 2018, suggest that new lakes created by abrupt thaw could nearly triple the greenhouse gas emissions expected from permafrost.

It’s not clear how much of this message has reached policymakers. Last October the IPCC unveiled a new report on the more ambitious of two temperature goals adopted at the 2015 Paris conference. The planet already

Natural World Safari, “Arctic Canada Safari inspiration”

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has warmed by about one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since the 19th century.

Capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius rather than two degrees, the report said, would expose 420 million fewer people to frequent extreme heat waves, and it would halve the number of plants and animals facing habitat loss. It also might save some coral reefs—and as much as 770,000 square miles of permafrost.

But to achieve the 1.5-degree goal, according to the IPCC, the world would have to cut greenhouse gas emissions 45 percent by 2030, eliminate them completely by 2050, and develop technologies to suck huge quantities back out of the atmosphere.

The challenge may be even starker. The 1.5-degree report was the first time the IPCC had taken permafrost emissions into account— but it didn’t include emissions from abrupt thaw.

Climate models aren’t yet sophisticated enough to capture that kind of rapid landscape change.

But at National Geographic’s request, Katey Walter Anthony and Charles Koven, a modeler at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, made rough calculations that do add in emissions from abrupt thaw. To halt temperature rise at 1.5 degrees, they estimate, we’d have to zero out our own fossil fuel emissions at least 20

percent sooner—no later than 2044, six years ahead of the IPCC timetable.That would give us just a quarter century to completely transform the global energy system.

“We’re facing this unknown future with an incomplete set of tools,” Koven said. “The uncertainty isn’t all on our side. There are a lot of ways things could turn out worse.” There’s more than one way to make new lakes, for example.

A few weeks after leaving Siberia, Orlinsky and I took a raft trip through Alaska’s Gates of the Arctic National Park with ecologist Ken Tape, a colleague of Walter Anthony’s at the University of Alaska. A floatplane dropped us and river guide Michael Wald at Gaedeke Lake, in the central Brooks Range. From there we made our way south down the Alatna River.

September sun danced on the water. Within a mile or so we found chewed sticks along the bank. We’d been on the river a week when we arrived at a 38-acre lake that hadn’t been there before. At its center was an enormous beaver lodge.

Tape has been using aerial and satellite photographs for years to track how plants and wildlife are changing in Alaska—and how that might affect permafrost. As permafrost thaws

An oil transit pipeline runs across the tundra at the Prudhoe Bay oil field on Alaska’s North Slope, CBC, 2019

and the growing seasons lengthen, the Arctic is greening: Shrubs in Alaska river plains, for example, have nearly doubled in size. (While vegetation growth will take up more carbon, a 2016 survey of experts concluded that Arctic greening won’t be nearly enough to offset permafrost thaw.) The vegetation is drawing animals north.

With willows now tall enough to poke through snow, snowshoe hares can find winter food and hiding spots all the way to the Arctic Ocean. Typically forest dwellers, they’ve now colonized Alaska’s North Slope, hundreds of miles from any real forest. Lynx, which prey on hares, appear to have followed. Both are probably traveling a trail blazed by moose, which also eat willows and now number roughly 1,600 along the Colville River, where they were absent before.

Those discoveries led Tape to search photographs for other tundra newcomers. “As soon as I thought about beavers, I seized on it,” he said. “Very few species leave a mark so visible that you can see it from space.”

In images from 1999 to 2014, covering just three watersheds, he spotted 56 new beaver pond complexes that hadn’t been there in the 1980s. The animals are colonizing northern Alaska in earnest, moving at about five miles per year. Tape believes there are now up to 800 beaver pond complexes in Arctic Alaska, including the one with the massive lodge on the Alatna. Tape dubbed it Lodge Mahal.

It was quite a sight: a mound of branches and saplings, about eight feet high by 35 feet across, plastered with mud and moss and sitting in a waist-high lake surrounded by marsh. The water had been diverted from the river by a series of dams. “That entire swamp around Lodge Mahal is new,” Tape said. “If you went back 50 years, there’d be zero beavers here.”

Tape and Wald had wanted to explore the Alatna in part because a guide who works for Wald had earlier found beaver-chewed wood along the Nigu River. The Nigu starts near Gaedeke Lake, the Alatna headwaters, but on the other side of the Continental Divide—and so it flows north into the Colville River and the Arctic Ocean. Along the Alatna, above Lodge

Mahal, we found other ponds and abandoned dams. Tape now thinks that beavers are on their way to the North Slope, and that they’re using the Alatna as a route through the Brooks Range.

“We’re seeing this expansion in real time,” he said.

He can’t prove that climate change is driving it; the beaver population also has been rebounding since the end of the fur trade, a century and a half ago. But in any case, the bucktoothed engineers could significantly remake permafrost landscapes. “Imagine if you were a developer and you said, I’d like permission to put three dams on every other stream in the Arctic tundra,” Tape said. “That’s what this could be like.”

Tape has seen a preview. Southeast of Shishmaref, on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula, photos of a tributary of the Serpentine River show no change at all between 1950 and 1985.

By 2002 beavers had moved in and flooded the landscape. By 2012 some ground had collapsed and become wetlands. Permafrost was on its way out.

In the spring, when animals migrate north and the sun never sets, Inuit children join their families on weekslong camping trips across Canada’s Arctic.They’re taught hunting skills and cultural values passed down for more than 5,000 years. In the past three decades, multiyear ice, the thickest (and oldest) type that supports the Arctic marine ecosystem, has declined by 95 percent. Elders no longer can predict safe travel routes on thinning ice, and animal migration patterns are changing. The future of the ice—and those who live on it—is uncertain.

Acacia Johnson is a photographer from Alaska, focused on human relationships to the Earth’s polar regions. She has made over 55 expeditions to the these regions as a photographer and expedition guide.

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Arctic Wolf Leaping, Jim Brandenburg, National Geographic, 2001

A few hundred beavers won’t reengineer the Arctic. But the animals may be heading north in Canada and Siberia too, and they reproduce quickly. Argentina’s experience is instructive: Twenty beavers were deliberately introduced in the south in 1946 in order to foster a fur trade.

Today that population hovers around 100,000.

In the Zimovs’ vision of the past and future of Arctic permafrost, wild animals also play a central role—but the beasts are bigger than beavers, and their effect on permafrost more 70

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benevolent. The herds of bison, mammoths, horses, and reindeer that lumbered across the Pleistocene steppes, Sergey Zimov has long argued, did more than just eat the grass. They maintained it. They fertilized it with their waste and packed it down, trampling mosses and shrubs and ripping out tree saplings.

Since the last ice age, those dry, rich grasslands have been replaced in eastern Siberia by damp tundra, dominated by mosses in the north and forests farther south. One key driver

of that change, according to Zimov, was human hunters who decimated the herds of large grazers, by about 10,000 years ago.Without grazers to fertilize the soil, grasses withered; without grasses to soak up water, the soil got wetter.

Mosses and trees took over. But if humans hadn’t pushed the ecosystem beyond a tipping point thousands of years ago, there would still be mammoths grazing in Siberia.

Almost 25 years ago, on lowlands near Cherskiy, Zimov created a 56-square-mile demonstration project called Pleistocene Park.

His idea was to bring large grazers back and see whether they would bring back the grasslands. He and, eventually, Nikita fenced in wild horses and later trucked in yaks and sheep from Lake Baikal. This past spring Nikita hauled in 12 bison from Denmark, traveling 9,000 miles across Russia by truck and barge. In 2018 the Zimovs joined forces with Harvard University geneticist George Church, who thinks he essentially can clone a mammoth. The hope is that one day those now extinct beasts will be stomping around Pleistocene Park, thriving in the Anthropocene.

The park is the ultimate test of Sergey Zimov’s hypothesis—and, he hopes, a hedge against future climate change. Grasslands, especially when snow covered, reflect more sunlight than does dark forest. Grazing animals tamp down deep snow, allowing heat to escape the soil. Both things cool the land. If wildlife could restore grasslands, it would slow permafrost thaw and thus climate change. To make a real difference, though, you’d need to unleash thousands of zoos’ worth of animals across millions of acres of the Arctic.

The Zimovs say the evidence from their 36,000-acre park is promising. Even with only about a hundred animals, the park’s grasslands stay substantially cooler than the ground in the surrounding area.

The gap between the Zimovs’ ambitions and the reality of the park is unquestionably large. During a tour one afternoon, Orlinsky and I hiked soggy grasses to a stretch of marsh to watch the horses. A lone bison hid in the distance. Nikita loaded us onto an eight-wheel mini-tank and took us crashing through the

willows. After a steep climb we plowed over some skinny larches. This is why he needs giant herbivores, Nikita said: “At the moment I don’t have any animals which can kill those trees.” He spends a lot of time raising funds, most recently in California, hobnobbing with the likes of former Governor Jerry Brown, just to keep this proof of concept going.

The concept has its critics. Some scientists dispute the Zimovs’ estimates of how many large animals were roaming around Siberia in the Pleistocene, or insist that their theory of ecological change, both past and present, is too simplistic. Above all, most criticism seems leveled at the Zimovs’ audacity. Max Holmes of Woods Hole, who knows them well, sees a spark of genius in their work. The Zimovs are “I think that I was slightly naive. I thought that if I showed people the beauty of the Arctic and the beauty of the polar bears that they would care so much that they would stand up and try to make a change” — Lewis Gordon Pugh, British Ocean Advocate

“at the fringe,” Holmes said, “but that’s often where big ideas and big changes originate.”

Outside Pleistocene Park, the modern world has responded to the warming Arctic with complacency. We’ve spent decades ignoring the evidence of climate change and hoping that things won’t get too bad. We count on technological advances that seem always just out of reach. And we do this in spite of the fact that climate scientists—permafrost experts in particular—say all signs point to the need for urgent and even audacious action.

The Zimovs are different: They’ve spent their lives battling an unforgiving landscape that rewards bullheadedness. Is trying to save permafrost by restoring the Arctic steppe, they ask, really so much crazier than counting on humans to quickly retool the world’s energy system?

Maybe we need a little craziness.

“Fighting climate change needs multiple actions from multiple different fronts,” Nikita said. Only if we combine them all can we make the future “not entirely miserable.”

Craig Welch is an environment writer at National Geographic. He was previously the environmental reporter for The Seattle Times, where he worked for over 14 years.

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scientists liked to call a ‘pagophile’ — a creature that is happiest in the ice.”

IN THE KINGDOM OF ICE Plans for an assault on the pole via the Bering Sea began in earnest. Bennett would Ice. You remember ice. The stuff that foot virtually all the bills and use his influence forestalled so many polar explorers back before in Washington to have the expedition sail global warming and dreams of beach-front as an official naval venture with De Long in homes along the shores of Baffin Bay. But, as command.

A 146-foot-long three-masted and Hampton Sides reminds us in this first-rate steam-­ p owered vessel was bought and polar history and adventure narrative, the notion of mildish weather in the Arctic did rechristened the U.S.S. Jeannette (after not begin with climate change. Just 150 years Bennett’s sister). Carrying “the aspirations of ago many believed that the Gulf Stream and a young republic burning to become a world its counterpart in the Pacific, the Kuroshio, power,” Sides writes, the ship sailed in July reached all the way to the North Pole. Once 1879. Bennett had ordered De Long to look for a ship broke through a rim of ice circling the Adolf Nordenskiold, who was in the process of top of the globe, the thinking went, it would becoming the first to complete the Northeast encounter an open polar sea and easy sailing to Passage, sailing across the top of Eurasia. He “didn’t need to be ‘found,’ ” Sides writes, “any the pole.

Following the failed tries in the mid- more than Livingstone had needed to be hunted 19th century to discover a Northwest Passage down in Africa. But Bennett had wanted his ‘De and make progress north between Canada Long meets Nordenskiold’ moment, and that and Greenland, many experts, including was the end of it.” De Long guessed correctly August Petermann — the eminent German that Nordenskiold was safe, made a perfunctory geographer known as the Sage of Gotha and, as search and headed north, having lost valuable Sides writes, “probably the world’s most vocal time before winter set in. and indefatigable advocate of the Open Polar 1856: Charles Dikens Sea theory” — argued for an attack on the pole PROLOGUE TO from the other side of North America through “THE FROZEN DEEP” the Bering Strait.

The idea caught the attention of James One savage footprint on the lonely shore, Where one man listn’d to the surge’s roar; Gordon Bennett Jr., the exceedingly wealthy Not all the winds that stir the mighty sea and flamboyant owner of The NewYork Herald, Can ever ruffle in the memory.

If such its interest and thrill, O then the man who, believing that “a newspaper Pause on the footprints of heroic men, should not merely report stories; it should Making a garden of the desert wide create them,” had sent Stanley to Africa to find Where Parry conquer’d and Franklin died.

Livingstone in 1871. Smelling more sensational headlines, Bennett met with Petermann and The Jeannette neared Wrangel Island, with a young Navy lieutenant named George north of the Bering Sea, and there it was.

Washington De Long.

Ice. Not ice a ship could push through, but De Long (1844-81) had made his unremitting, relentless pack ice. By early bones in the Arctic in 1873 when, as second in September, the Jeannette had been “nipped,” command of a ship sent to Greenland to rescue completely trapped in the ice at only the 72nd survivors of Charles Francis Hall’s ill-fated parallel. The imprisonment would not be Polaris expedition, he navigated a 28-foot- temporary. long steam launch through 400 miles of iceThe ship had been well supplied, infested waters. The men he was searching for carrying early Bell telephones and arc lights had been picked up by a whaler, but De Long purchased from Thomas Edison, in addition to soon became, Sides tells us, “what the Arctic tons of various foodstuffs, “barrels of brandy,

2014: Northwest Passage

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porter, ale, sherry, whiskey and rum, plus cases of Budweiser beer.”

The ice squeezed. “Wintering in the pack may be a thrilling thing to read about alongside a warm fire,” De Long wrote, “but the actual thing is sufficient to make any man prematurely old.” Bell’s telephones and Edison’s arc lights failed; but the food held up, and one hopes they drank the Bud. De Long “could be a harsh disciplinarian with a granite disposition.” But Sides, the author of books about World War II and the American West, adeptly humanizes him, noting that De Long once wrote: “Ship life is a hard thing on the temper. Mark Twain . . . says that going to sea develops ‘all of man’s bad qualities and brings out new ones that he did not suppose himself mean enough for.’ I wonder if that accounts for all the rough edges of my character.”

The Jeannette remained confined in the ice for two years. Then one day the ice opened, and the ship slipped into the water — and

floated. But not for long. The pressure resumed “with tremendous force,” De Long wrote. The Jeannette foundered, and the truly appalling chapter of the tale began. The 33 men set out over the ice, 1,000 miles from the Lena delta on the Arctic coast of Siberia, “one of the most remote and unforgiving landscapes on the planet.” They battled “ever-­shifting mazes of fissures, hummocks, pressure ridges and pools of shimmering melt-water.”

And “they pulled more than eight tons of provisions and gear, on improvised sleds whose crosspieces had been fashioned from whiskey barrel staves and whose heavy oak runners were shod with smooth whalebone. In addition to the three battered boats, they hauled, among other things, medicine chests, ammunition, stew pots, cooking stoves, tent poles, oars, rifles, ship logs and diaries, canvas for sails, scientific instruments, the wooden dinghy and 200 gallons of stove alcohol. As for food, they had inventoried, at the outset, 3,960 pounds

Pic Island, Lawren Harris, 1924

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2015 Skilled swordsmen. A group of males gather in an ice holeImage Paul Nicklen National Geographic

of pemmican, 1,500 pounds of hardtack, 32 pounds of beef tongue, 150 pounds of Liebig’s beef extract, 12› pounds of pigs’ feet, and substantial quantities of veal, ham, whiskey, brandy, chocolate and tobacco.” (The stories of polar explorers are but little without the wonderfully evocative lists of the things they carried.)

Sides observes that De Long met all the hardships with a remarkable penchant for understatement. “Gazing at a puzzle of jammed ice and meltwater that would require weeks to cross, he stoically predicted: ‘We are in for a time.’ Hopelessly disoriented by fog for the better part of a week, De Long would only allow that ‘we are in the dark as to our position.’

Halted by a lashing blizzard, he scribbled that the day’s weather was ‘anything but s­ atisfactory.’

After 91 days on the pack, the men took to (relatively) open water in the three small boats they had been dragging. They were soon separated. One boat disappeared and was never heard of again. The whaleboat commanded by George Melville, the Jeannette’s engineer and most resourceful crew member, was lucky. He and his men made it to land, found natives and were saved. De Long’s cutter landed only eight miles from a branch of the Lena that would have led to a settlement within a day. Instead, he and his men left their boat, wandered and suffered terribly. Sides vividly recounts the horrors: gross frostbite, crude amputations, madness, 74

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much boot eating and, ultimately, starvation.

Before succumbing, the ship’s surgeon had gnawed his own hand. Earlier De Long had sent his two strongest men for help. They somehow met up with Melville, who eventually found the bodies of De Long and his comrades. Only 13 of the 33 survived.

“In the Kingdom of Ice” is a harrowing story well told, but it is more than just that.

Sides illuminates Gilded Age society, offering droll anecdotes of Bennett’s escapades in New York, Newport and Europe. The author also convincingly portrays what it was like to survive in northern Siberia and provides an engaging account of the voyage of the Corwin, a kind of mail and police steamer that searched for the Jeannette and carried John Muir as a supernumerary. In addition, Sides intersperses moving excerpts from Emma De Long’s increasingly agonized letters, letters her husband would never read.

After the Jeannette’s voyage, “no other Arctic explorer,” Sides writes, “undertook an expedition with a serious intention of meeting an open polar sea.” But, he notes, “recent climate projections show that by 2050, significant portions of the polar pack will entirely melt in summertime.” The Sage of Gotha may have been onto something after all.

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette by Hampton Sides

to draw the world’s attention to the effect of climate change on the Arctic.

The swim took 18 minutes and 50 NORTH POLE: 1km: 18 mins 50 secs seconds. And the combined efforts of a dedicated team that kept hold of the vision.Their Mum was right – this was not a normal motivation turned an impossible kilometre into thing to do. And standing on the edge of the ice, 10 possible hundred-metre stretches.

I realised I had never been more frightened.

Each section represented a nation, and Not just because minus 1.7°C was the the people who brought me here. Their flags coldest water any human had ever swum in. Or spurred me on. because the previous day’s test swim had gone horribly wrong. Not because the water was Lewis Pugh, United Nations Patron of the Oceans, has pioink black, and it was 4.2 long, cold kilometres neered more endurance swims in the world’s most vulnerable ecosystems than any other person in history. He swam across to the bottom. Not even because of the polar the icy waters of the North Pole to highlight the melting of bears.

Arctic sea ice and across a glacial lake on Mount Everest to Because one shouldn’t be able to swim draw attention to the impact of climate change on the Himalayan glaciers. Lewis has swum in the world’s most hostile at the North Pole in the first place. environments, including the North Cape, the Antarctic, the Two years previously, 23 per cent of the Cape of Good Hope and the North Pole.

Arctic ice cover had melted. I was swimming

2007: North Pole

Lewis Pugh North Pole, 2007

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2001: Herschel Island THE BALEEN QUEST

By late August the best days of summer are gone from the coast of the Beaufort Sea.The winds blow persistently from the north and the pack ice edges again toward land. For a whaling vessel in 1890 this would be the time to head for Point Barrow, Alaska and then southwest to the open waters of the Chukchi Sea. But for the steam brigatine Mary D. Hume the course was almost due east, past the Alaska-Yukon border.

At a glance, the Hume was an unlikely successor to 40 years of American dominance on the whaling grounds of the western Arctic.

She was a small ship of 165 tons and less than 100 feet in length. The Hume was built in Oregon for service as a coastal freighter and tow boat but now she skirted a little-known coast at the onset of a ten month winter. Her owners gambled that a 240 horsepower engine would push her forward against fickle winds and encroaching ice.

“Really, what [sea] ice does is it acts like a garden. …

Losing that ice is like losing the soil in a garden.”

-Paul Niklen

Through the fog on August 20, the crew of the Hume marked a landfall a mile from the Canadian mainland. They saw rolling hills of green tundra, hemmed by cliffs of crumbling clay and cut by narrow, deep-set stream-beds.

This was Herschel Island, a speck on the map bereft of trees or the profiles of human habita­ tion. This was to be the crew’s home for the winter of 1890-91 and the refuge of the Mary D. Hume for many winters to follow.

The whaling life carried with it many risks, but the special dangers that threatened the Hume and her sister ship, the Gram­pus, were not lost on the first officer, Hartson Bodfish.

As he noted in his autobiography, Chasing the Bowhead, “ ... we started on a voyage that was comparable, I might say, with that of Columbus, for no one knew where we were going, what we might find, or if we should ever return.”

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The Hume and the Grampus were ships of the Pacific Steam Whaling Company (PSWC), sailing out of San Francisco.Their main objective in the Arctic was the bow-head whale, a rich source of oil and baleen or whalebone. By the end of the century, petro­leum products had largely preempted whale oil in the market­place, but the demand for baleen was strong.Women’s fashion of the day emphasized a narrow waist, which was established by a tightly laced corset, stiffened with ribs made of whalebone. The baleen used for these ribs could be cut, heated and molded to almost any shape desired. It was a precursor of plastics that was also used in un1brellas, fishing rods, buggy whips and many other products.

Commercial whalers had extensively worked the bow-head grounds, north of the Aleutian Islands, since 1849. The gradual depletion of the species forced ships to sail ever closer to the per­manent pack ice of the Arctic Ocean. It was this scarcity of whales, and the high price of baleen, that pushed the Hume and the Gram­pus toward Herschel Island. The PSWC ships would be the first to over-winter in the western Canadian Arctic since the Royal Navy’s quest for Sir John Franklin, 40.·years earlier.

Hartson Bodfish had made a brief visit to Herschel Island in 1889, as first mate on the Grampus. To catch in the north Pacific had been poor that summer, and when a shore-based whaler from Alaska, “Little Joe” Tuckfield, returned from the Beaufort Sea with stories about a winter spent with local Inuvialuit and an abun­dance of whales, the Grampus and six other ships headed east. They sailed as far as the mouth of the Mackenzie River and an­chored at nearby Shingle Point. The whalers knew very little about the Beaufort, but they soon learned that the waters could be treacherous. One ship, the Jesse H. Freeman, discovered a shoal fifteen miles offshore. “ ... the officers were uneasy,” Bodfish noted, “and we only remained there about forty-eight hours be­ fore sailing westward...”

Two of the seven vessels stayed long enough to catch four whales and to sight many more. While at anchor off Herschel Island they

Karoo Ashevak, 1974

were met by the USS Thetis, a naval ship that was working with the U.S. Revenue Marine Service. Captain Charles Stockton of the Thetis

surveyed the island and found a small cove on the south side with a depth of up to three fa thoms. He named it Pauline Cove, after his 77

wife. In naming the island itself, Stockton deferred to Franklin, who had honoured the British astronomer Sir John Herschel 63 years earlier.

The whaling season of 1889 marked the potential of the Beau­fort Sea, but many captains remained unconvinced of the pro­ductivity of those waters and the possibilities of wintering at that latitude. Bodfish expected the industry would carry on as be­fore, and he signed on to the steam bark Orca. “But I didn’t know that the idea of wintering in the North had gained such head­way,” he remembered, “nor that it was even then being talked over in the office of the owners.”

The upshot was that the PSW asked Bodfish to ship as first mate on the Mary D. Hume. The company chose to take on the risks posed by whaling in the Beaufort, and to re-think whaling procedures in order to make an over-wintering voyage profitable. The Hume and Grampus were chosen because their small size meant a relatively shallow draft and light weight. These features would permit the ships to sail close to the coast to avoid pack ice. Both vessels were too small to carry the equipment for boiling down blubber into oil.

But the profits from such a voyage were to be made from baleen. When a whale was caught, the head was hoisted on board and the bone removed, the rest of the giant beast was simply cut adrift.

The company orders were to sail directly for Herschel with holds packed full of supplies.

A warehouse was to be built there to lighten the ships for late summer whaling and to insure the crew’s survival should either vessel catch fire over the winter. The following spring the ships would be able to hunt the bow-head for the entire ice-free season, without having to run the gauntlet of the Alaskan north Coast.

At Point Barrow, the Hume and the Grampus took additional supplies, and the other whaling captains on board to say goodbye. As Bodfish remembered, They spoke very discouragingly, saying, with one exception, “the next time we see you fellows, if we ever do, you’ll be coming out with your boats,” meaning that the ships would 78

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be lost.

“A ship full of bone” held bright promise for Bodfish and his shipmates. Everyone on a whaling vessel was paid a share or ‘lay’ of the profits, determined at the end of a voyage.

The shares were not equal. A proven captain might get one eighth of the portion of the gross profits set aside for wages, the mates and other skilled crew members, somewhat less.

The ordinary sea man received a portion equal to 1/l00th or even 1/160th of the whole. A green hand could receive as little as 1/200th.

On a voyage where few whales were caught, an ordinary seaman could actually end up owing the shipowners money because of clothing and tobacco advanced to him.

The lay system meant that a portion of the risk in a whaling venture was shifted from the owner to the crew.The work of the men was just about as hard whether whales were landed or not, but no remuneration was guaranteed.

How ever, if the Beaufort proved to be the rich and virgin whaling ground it was suspected to be, there could be a respectable return for all hands.

For Bodfish the voyage to Herschel would also offer valuable experience in his quest to be master of his own ship. He already had ten years of hard labour behind in the whaling fleet. He had little monetary gain to show for his efforts, but he had pro­gressed from the foreman to second in command.

The men who commanded whaling vessels were expected to be tough and self reliant. Bodfish was building the appropriate reputation. During the trip north on the Hume, for example, he had a toe crushed when some rigging fell on his foot. Bodfish decided that an amputation was in order and he called for cap­ tain James Tilton to do the job. But Tilton was too busy at the time, so Bodfish took off the toe himself,” ... With the steward and cabin boy looking on and groaning, ... “ Across the broad expanse of Canada’s North there are few physical reminders of the rich history of the land and its people. S. R Gage’s book Forgotten Places in the North examines three rare cases where heritage structures have withstood the ravages of time and unforgiving climate.

Paul Niklen , Seal breaking water.

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Arctic Ocean, Photo by Annie Spratt

2019: Tuktoyaktuk WHAT LIES BENEATH It was February 2017, just two months after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a ban on new offshore licences for oil and gas exploration in the Canadian Arctic.

The moratorium, which would be reviewed every five years, aimed to protect a pristine and vulnerable ecosystem with waters, the government said, that had “irreplaceable value” for northern Indigenous communities’ subsistence and cultures.

For Nasogaluak, then the mayor of Tuktoyaktuk, an Inuvialuit community nestled on the shoreline of the Northwest Territories, the ban was nothing to celebrate.

“To lose an opportunity on oil and gas for our people is very upsetting,” Nasogaluak told the prime minister. “One elder told me, ‘We can’t just up and move to where the jobs are.’ ” The roughly 900 residents of Tuktoyaktuk have already witnessed the transformation of their landscape, the consequence of climate change that scientists say was fueled by human activity, much of it thousands of kilometers away.

Temperatures in northern Canada have risen at roughly three times the global average, a federal government report concluded in April.

The people of Tuk and other northern communities already cope with thawing permafrost and rising sea levels. Shrinking sea ice disrupts the schedules and safety of 80

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subsistence harvesting for Indigenous hunters.

Large waves and increasingly violent storms eat away the fragile coastline.

The warming temperatures, however, have also presented an opportunity.

Reduced ice coverage has made the billions of barrels of oil buried in and around the Beaufort Sea more accessible, ushering in a renewed interest in developing what has been long seen as a final frontier for oil and gas exploration.

Reviving the Canadian Arctic’s oil industry could mean a return to the heady days of the 1970s and early ‘80s for Tuk, when offshore exploratory drilling abounded in the Beaufort until it was squelched by regulatory uncertainty and a collapsing oil price. The industry, locals say, produced good paying jobs for a people starved of work, and allowed Indigenous hunters to buy better equipment to pursue caribou, beluga and other animals.

Failure to drill for oil, industry proponents say, will reduce Canada’s north to a snow globe, a land that’s visually beautiful but economically stagnant. Yet in developing the offshore oil, northern communities risk further exacerbating the conditions that are warming the Arctic.

So a question bubbles, one that has divided some northern Indigenous communities: Is oil money worth risking a way of life?

Jesse McLean, investigative reporter, Toronto star

Antarctica is the highest, in average elevation, of any continent on Earth due in part to the ice sheet that blankets it with an average FROZEN OCEAN; A PHOTOGRAPHIC PRIMER ON THE DYNAMICS OF MARINE ICE. thickness of two kilometers and a maximum thickness of almost five. The continent has In the era of climate change, ice is a hot been at least partially covered in glacial ice topic. It makes headlines for calving, drifting, for 40 million years, and the oldest ice that and melting in the polar regions at alarming scientists have been able to extract holds gases from the Earth’s atmosphere 2.7 million years rates. But what is marine ice exactly?

The ocean’s ice comes from either the ago. Antarctic ice is often described through atmosphere or the sea itself. Glacial ice (which monolithic metrics like these, but that vast can cover vast areas, including Antarctica) expanse of glacial ice began as flakes of snow.

Snow compressed by its own weight originates from precipitation, while sea ice (also vast, depending on the season) forms when the becomes ice, and when enough ice accumulates in one place, it begins to slowly flow across the ocean freezes.

Ice dominates both polar regions but landscape and becomes a glacier. If glaciers reach in different ways. The Arctic is a frozen ocean the ocean, they float and may extend hundreds surrounded by land. Antarctica, by contrast, of kilometers out to sea as ice shelves. Some is a frozen landmass surrounded by ocean. ice shelves have calved dramatically in recent On a visit to either, your ship might bump years—an iceberg almost half the size of Prince through sea ice, but you would likely take Edward Island broke off a shelf in Antarctica more photographs of glacial ice because it’s in 2017. Ice shelves can help stabilize glaciers, responsible for icebergs. Sea ice, matte white keeping them on land; without them, landand typically no thicker than the height of an based ice may flow into the sea and deteriorate average person, is less glamorous—unless more quickly.

If all the glacial ice in Antarctica were to there’s a polar bear standing on it—but just as remarkable. It’s a critical habitat for a range melt, it would raise the global sea level by 60 of species, from single-celled organisms to meters—high enough to submerge a 20-story whales. And its dynamism is amazing; much of building. In the Arctic, the Greenland ice sheet the world’s sea ice disappears and then re-forms holds enough water for six meters of sea level rise. every year.

2018:Arctic Ocean

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Icebergs—bits and pieces of glaciers or ice shelves—come in all shapes and sizes, from tabular bergs to arches and forms that could have been drawn by Dr. Seuss. A lot of sculpting happens through erosion, as the chunks swivel and flip in the sea.

While glacial ice can have a big impact on the ecosystems around it by decreasing salinity, adding nutrients, and changing currents, there isn’t much living in or on the ice itself. Sea ice is another story.

Unlike freshwater ice, sea ice begins as a thin, malleable sheet called frazil ice, which then progresses through a variety of stages including shuga (spongy lumps a few centimeters across) and nilas (a thin, elastic crust). The process starts when seawater reaches its freezing point, which varies with salinity and is about -1.8 °C in the polar regions. Salt itself does not freeze; as the ice forms, salt molecules are largely excluded from the crystals. As a result, sea ice is not nearly as salty as the sea itself. Gravity helps pull the discarded salt molecules down through the ice, leaving small, vertical tunnels called brine channels.

Before sea ice solidifies, it may become pancake ice, a beautiful mosaic of circles ranging from the size of a Frisbee to a backyard trampoline, with raised edges formed from the constant contact between the pieces.

Pancake Ice, Eefke Essers

Because sea ice is so varied and of such concern for ship traffic, mariners have precise navigational terms to describe its different forms, including young ice, gray ice, gray-white ice, thin first year, and thick first year.

Salt molecules extruded from sea ice form a dense, hyper-chilled brine that can sink rapidly through the water after trickling out of the ice. Because the brine is colder, the subsurface seawater it comes in contact with sometimes freezes upon contact, creating an underwater icicle—or brinicle—that extends toward the seafloor like a slow-growing lightning bolt. Anything the icicle touches can freeze to death, including these unfortunate sea stars and giant Antarctic isopod.

The salty brine that flows out of sea ice is also a habitat in itself. After one year, sea ice has almost no salt left in it, but during the extrusion process, when brine is flowing, small organisms such as cope-pods, nematodes, rotifers, and flatworms can find nutrients and a dearth of predators in the brine channels if they can survive the extreme micro-habitat— under the ice, near freezing, super-saline, and temporary.

First-year sea ice makes up most of the sea ice in the world, both north and south.

Enough forms around Antarctica each fall to almost double the surface area of the continent,

Melting iceberg in Nunavut’s Repulse Bay, Photo by Paul Souders

yet the majority of it melts the following summer.

In the Arctic, multi-year ice is more common; the Arctic Ocean always remains partially frozen. In early autumn, the region reaches its annual sea ice minimum. For the past 20 to 30 years, that minimum has decreased by an average of 45,000 square kilometers worth of ice each year. Sea ice is the defining feature of the Arctic Ocean, yet as more of it disappears, the ocean is transforming from a solid to a liquid.

In spring, when the light returns and ice begins to break up, photosynthetic organisms bloom across the underside of the sea ice, effectively re-energizing the food chain. Zooplankton feed on this plant life and in turn become food for various fish species. Everything from ringed seals and bow-head whales in the north to leopard seals and Adeline penguins in the south benefit from the burst of life.

Polar bears are unable to catch seals, their primary food, in open water, so they depend on sea ice as a hunting platform. Ice is especially critical for the bears between early April and mid-July, when they take in twothirds of the energy they need for the year. Later freeze-up, earlier break-up, and less ice overall may cut weeks off this important window, with wide-ranging consequences. For example, in northeastern Hudson Bay and Hudson Strait, there has been a sevenfold increase in the incidences of polar bears feeding on eider duck

and murre colonies since the 1980s, as hungry bears are forced to look for alternative sources of food. The occasional whale or walrus carcass may provide additional sustenance, yet polar bears will not adapt to a terrestrial existence.

The species needs sea ice to survive.

For many of the four million people who live above the Arctic Circle, sea ice has been a highway and a hunting ground for thousands of years. Today, that important terrain is changing or disappearing. The timings of freeze-up and break-up have changed and so have the thickness and quality of the ice. This threatens food security and directly impacts the safety of those who must venture across the surface.

Glacial ice may tower over sea ice, but during winter, when the ocean changes state, sea ice encircles icebergs, freezing them in place.

This interface between the two types of ice opens new possibilities for those who know ice best. In the Antarctic, crabeater seals use gaps between the two ice forms to haul themselves out. In the Arctic, people cross the sea ice by dogsled or snowmobile to harvest chunks of icebergs for their tea water. Ice defines life in unexpected ways.

Jennifer Kingsley is a journalist based in Ottawa, Ontario.

She is the founder of Meet the North, a project that shares personal stories from some of the four million people who live in the global Arctic, and she also works in the South Pacific. Jennifer is a National Geographic Explorer, and her first book, Paddlenorth, won the National Outdoor Book Award.

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1958: Vermont GOLDEN FLEECE OF THE ARCTIC To wear the arctic fox you have to kill it. Wear qiviut—the underwool of the arctic ox— pulled off it like a sweater; your coat is warm; your conscience, better.

I would like a suit of qiviut, so light I did not know I had it on; and in the course of time, another since I had not had to murder the “goat” that grew the fleece that made the first. The musk ox has no musk and it is not an ox— illiterate epithet.

Bury your nose in one when wet.

A Tale of Two Foxes, Don Gutoski

It smells of water, nothing else, and browses goatlike on hind legs. Its great distinction is not egocentric scent but that it is intelligent.

Chinchillas, otters, water-rats, and beavers, keep us warm but think! a “musk ox” grows six pounds of qiviut; the casmere ram, three ounces—that is all—of pashm.

Lying in an exposed spot, basking in the blizzard, these ponderosos could dominate the rare-hairs market in Kashan and yet you could not have a choicer pet.

They join you as you work; love jumping in and out of holes, play in water with the children, learn fast, know their names, will open gates and invent games.

While not incapable of courtship, they may find its servitude and flutter, too much like Procrustes’ bed; so some decide to stay unwed.

Camels are snobbish and sheep, unintelligent; water buffaloes, neurasthenic— even murderous.

Reindeer seem over-serious, whereas these scarce qivies, with golden fleece and winning ways, outstripping every fur-bearer— there in Vermont quiet— could demand Bold Ruler’s diet: Mountain Valley water, dandelions, carrots, oats— encouraged as well by bed 85

made fresh three times a day— to roll and revel in the hay.

Insatiable for willow leaves alone, our goatlike qivi-curvi-capricornus sheds down ideal for a nest.

Song-birds find qiviut best.

Suppose you had a bag of it; you could spin a pound into a twenty-four-or-fivemile thread—one, forty-ply— that will not shrink in any dye.

If you fear that you are reading an advertisement, you are. If we can’t be cordial to these creatures’ fleece, I think that we deserve to freeze.

Marianne Moore wrote “The Arctic Ox (or Goat)” based on an article written by John J. Teal, Jr. titled “Golden Fleece of the Arctic” published in the March 1958 issue of Atlantic Monthly. Teal was the major proponent of muskox domestication in the US from the 1950s to 1980s. He had an interesting longstanding relationship with the muskoxen in Norway.

A Dog Cariole only used in winter by Canadian Indians, Peter Rindisbacher, 1825

2014: Toronto Northern exposure: A photographer’s one-man Arctic mission Every Paul Nicklen photo poses a question. Sometimes it's a question about the subject: Where are those bear prints going?

Other times it touches on the metaphysical: Why do those meltwater channels look like human capillaries? And often, the question concerns the mental state of the photographer himself: How did he get so close to that bear's jaws without being eaten?

Much of Mr. Nicklen's life has been spent conducting a one-man polar inquisition.

When he was four, his family moved to Iqaluit before settling in the village of Kimmirut, at the southern edge of Baffin Island. "The icy polar sea, snow, and ice were my sandbox, and the Inuit were my playmates and my teachers," he says of those days. He would trek far from home, examining the flora and fauna from every conceivable angle, even adopting seals and gulls as pets.

In 1990, he moved south to attend the University of Victoria, but the call of the North never stopped. After spending five unsatisfying years as a wildlife biologist, he decided the only job that would truly slake his thirst for the Arctic was that of National Geographic photographer, an audacious dream for a kid from Kimmirut.

Over the last 15 years, Mr. Nicklen’s work has been featured in the magazine 15

times. He has earned more than 30 international awards, including a first-place World Press Photo honour last year, the highest recognition a photojournalist can receive.

On assignment, he generally travels with 14 to 20 cases, each weighing more than 25 kilograms. In pursuit of the perfect, intimate shot, he has stalled his ultra-light plane and run out of air beneath several feet of ice. All those moments of misery contribute to his greater cause of helping to preserve endangered areas.

“If we loose sea ice in the Arctic, we stand to impact an entire ecosystem. This is the tragedy and loss we face” -Paul Niklen

“For me, if it is not intimate, it is hard to create the emotional connection I feel is needed for people to care about the challenges facing polar ecosystems,” he told The Globe. “In order to do so safely, both for me and for the animals, I have spent years understanding their ecology, their behaviour and the subtle communication cues they are always giving me.”

Over his lifetime in the North, he has seen the Arctic sea ice shrink. He says he won’t stop until “people care about the regions as much as I do.” It’s a tall order. But then, the boy from Kimmirut has made a life of exceeding lofty goals.

Patrick White: Staff reporter for the Globe and Mail

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POLITICS 2020:

U.S.A

CHINA’S “LONG CON” IN THE ARCTIC

Estimated to possess some 30 percent of the world’s untapped natural gas, 13 percent of its undiscovered oil, 40 percent of its natural minerals and sea-based resources, and one of the world’s most promising fishing grounds, the Arctic region has become a strategic prize in China’s global quest for resources and Asia-Pacific hegemony. Indeed, Beijing is willing to “buy” territories or governments with an Arctic presence to advance its standing and influence in this rising theatre of operations.

Part of China’s strategy is based on a term of art used in the confidence racket – the “long con.” This term is used when a “con man” (or entity) makes a sizeable investment of capital, time, and energy over an extended period to engage his victim’s (the “mark’s”) trust in order to achieve a far more valuable “score” at the end of the scheme.

In China’s case, being granted observer status at the May 2013 Arctic Council meeting in Kiruna, Sweden – after having been deferred twice – represented an important milestone in slipping into the tent of the leading governing body of one of the largest strategic resource and transportation “finds” of our time. Beijing’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are more than Arctic counsel Gavel, Iqualuit

willing to play along with the Council’s focus on the environment and sustainable economic development – for now.

Security-minded analysts should be concerned that China’s true intention is to position itself to influence heavily, if not outright control, the awarding of select Arctic energy and fishing-related concessions as well as the rules and political arrangements governing the use of strategic waterways now gradually opening due to melting ice. In order to preclude this possibility, member states engaged in discussions regarding Arctic development ought to conduct discreet counter diplomacy, ensure competitive bidding and good governance, insist on commercial fairness, demand “know your customer” diligence, and conduct appropriate military planning.

Beijing’s Arctic strategy is underpinned by the initial use of soft power to attain its regional objectives. Science and resource diplomacy and active engagement in multilateral institutions are already playing a large role in this “long con” in the so-called High North. The Chinese navy (PLA Navy or PLAN) is at the helm of several of the country’s seemingly benign Arctic initiatives. It is hastily 89

constructing the capability to operate in the harsh polar environment. This includes a fleet of dual-use icebreakers (with both civilian and military applications), aircraft equipped to fly in inhospitable weather, and reinforced bulk carriers and tankers that can navigate dangerous Arctic waters (Rainwater 2013).

Although environmental research, especially climate change, will be the primary public face of China’s deepening commitment to the Arctic, this soft power strategy is being shadowed step by step by a military buildup specifically designed to engage in Arctic operations, particularly with respect to Russia’s North Sea Route, Canada’s Northwest Passage, and the Bering Strait.

The region has been “governed in a fit of absence of mind” -Louis St. Laurent, Prime Minister of Canada 1950

One military expert from the US National War College suspects, for example, that the 1999 expedition to the Arctic by China’s huge Xuelong ice-breaker to conduct oceanographic and benthic studies helped advance PLAN’s antisubmarine warfare capability (Cole 2010, 24). It is almost certain that China will eventually deploy submarine patrols and surface warships in Arctic waterways for surveillance and peaceful “exercises” (such as search and rescue). Using its icebreakers as a soft power calling card, Beijing will be actively looking for one or more friendly ports on the Arctic perimeter. China’s unsuccessful gambit Source for picture

to purchase some 300 square kilometres of Iceland’s northern coast – ostensibly for a golf resort – may have represented such a foray. An Arctic naval presence would protect Beijing’s “regional interests” and multiply its options should it need to confront Canada or the US in the region.

When – as it undoubtedly will – China turns the dial to its hard strategy, it may be fortunate for Canada and the US that China’s only current point of entry to the Arctic is through the Bering Strait. This choke point – with only some 85 kilometres separating Russia and Alaska, and a similar configuration as the Malacca Strait or Strait of Hormuz – will surely be contested at some point and, at minimum, prove to be an abiding threat to vital Chinese strategic interests because of its proximity to the US. This is just one reason that several Chinese scholars have challenged (probably with government encouragement) the rules and norms governing the sovereign claims of the circumpolar states (Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the US). Initially, it has selected so-called “lawfare” to rewrite the statutes presently in force that favour these nations and affect future governance issues.

Roger W. Robinson, Jr. is Executive Director of PSSI Washington and Chairman and Co-Founder of the Prague Security Studies Institute. He was formerly Chairman of the Congressional US-China Economic and Security Review Commission and Senior Director of International Economic Affairs at the National Security Council.

1969: Ottawa SPEACH TO PARLIAMENT

There are other methods of moving oil which are under consideration. There might be a pipeline across barren land to the port of Churchill on Hudson Bay. Canada’s Herschel Island might become a sea port for Prudhoe Bay crude. But what has caught our attention most of all during the past year has been the Manhattan project.

I am not going to go into the details because I think hon. members are quite familiar with them. An amount of $39 million has been spent by a consortium of oil companies, headed

by Humble Oil, to see whether a specially strengthened United States supertanker could smash its way through the barrier of ice that lies in the Northwest Passage. A subcommittee of our own Standing Committee on Northern Development went north in August to meet the Manhattan and to welcome the initiative taken.

As the record shows, we pointedly welcomed them to Canadian waters, with the accent on “Canadian” waters.

At the moment the Manhattan voyage appears to have been a partial success only.

The hope and expectation was that this heavily strengthened ship could smash the ice barrier in McClure Strait. The plans of Humble Oil were gigantic in scope. If this experiment

were successful, then by the second quarter of next year, 1970,. the company expected to let contracts for 250,000 ton supertankers. Their long range goal was to have two of these tankers a week pass through the Northwest Passage, 52 weeks a year.

To what extent their enthusiasm has been moderated by the experience in the north, I cannot say. However, we must note that the Manhattan did not succeed in forcing her way through the polar pack ice in the McClure Strait.

In fact, she behaved pretty much in the manner that our own coast guard people predicted; she became beset, and the John A. Macdonald, a Canadian icebreaker, had to free the vessel. She then sailed south througb the Prince of Wales channel and, to the sur- prise of nobody, got through in that way to the opposite side of the archipelago. But it las been an exploit and will add very considerably to scientific knowledge of ice conditions. Again, we should congratulate the spirit of enterprise of those concerned, and Canada regards herself as responsible for all mankind for the peculiar ecological balance that now exists so precariously in the water, ice and land areas of the Arctic Archipelago.

-Pierre Elliot Trudeau, 1969

we look forward to the time when this valuable information about ice will become available to us.

Incidentally, Mr. Speaker, since Canada’s attention, as so often, has focussed on the

Flag Raising on Hershel Island

deeds of people of other nations, I do not suppose that many Canadians noticed that it was a Canadian ship the Chesley A. Crosbie, which ‘this year scored another notable first in the north by sailing to within 500 miles of the geographic north pole. This is the farthest that any commercial vessel has pene.rated north of the North American continent.

The shipment of dry cargo is one matter.

Quite another is the shipment of oil. It is this continuing Manhattan project-it is continuing as far as we know-which also poses, in addition to the great opportunity provided if the project is successful, a major danger to the Canadian Arctic. Many ships have been lost in the Arctic,

oil in the Arctic would be a disaster greater than any man-made disaster of this kind the world has ever seen. But what I wish particularly to draw to the attention of both the members of the government and members in all parts of ‘the house is that we really do not know how bad the situation would be since there bas been a complete lack of research into the subject.

The waters of the passage range in temperature from 27 to 31 degrees Fahrenheit.

A little closer to the continental shelf the temperature is between 33 and 35 degrees.

However, we do not know what will be the action of crude oil spilled into water of this temperature.

It is suggested that oil spilling out into water of this temperature would probably form a “You can’t go around the world these days dropping a flag somewhere. This isn’t the 14th or 15th century” gelatinous mass. When it reached the shoreline, -Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Peter MacKay, where it might be exposed to temperatures of In response to Russia placing a flag at the North Pole, 2007 50 below, it might turn into a hard plastic. The only information that I have been able to find as invariably in the same manner. They become to its behaviour is that this pollution might last beset by the ice. They are nipped by the ice and, for decades, and possibly for centuries. Most when released by the movement of the ice away crudes contain poisons, some of which are as lethal as DDT. from the sides of the ship, they sink.

I did say, Mr. Speaker, that I had two subjects To lose a tanker containing a quarter of a to which I in.ended to draw the govern- ment’s million tons of pollutant in the form of crude 92

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attention and urge immediate action, and this is one of them. I suggest that the Department of Energy, Mines and Resources should immediately institute a full program of research in Arctic waters using Prudhoe Bay crude oil to provide us with a body of fact. Since we are the nation most immediately concerned in this matter, ours is the government which should initiate such studies. This is not a question that we should turn over to other nations or leave to the investigation of private companies. The government should ascertain as early as possible precisely what is the result when crude oil, and especially Arctic crude oil, is spilt in sub-freezing temperatures.

My second point is associated with the first one, and I will make it now.What is the potential of our Arctic fisheries resource? We have known for years that there are a great many species of mammals and fish in the Arctic waters. Many Eskimos have formed co-operatives and are canning some of these sea foods for sale in the south. But how great is this particular resource?

Is it over exploited or, as is more probable, under exploited? Might there not be room for considerable expansion of this industry?

We simply do not know how extensive are these resources in Canada’s third ocean. I suggest to the minister that now is the time to make this discovery, and to do so not simply for the immediate benefit that an extension of Eskimo fishing operations would bring. It may be that in this regard Canada will become engaged in debate in the United Nations or elsewhere. Our people will want to speak of the value of our marine resources in the Arctic, and our case will scarcely be strengthened if we have to admit publicly that we really do not know what they are. In my opinion, Mr. Speaker, these two departments of government can and should be undertaking this valuable service with all possible speed.

These are just a couple of aspects of Canada’s great duty to protect this area of our country, and this, of course, inseparably involves sovereignty. The waters within the archipelago are Canadian waters, and we must make this clear to the world community. I suggest there are two things we must make clear. First, we

must make clear that we welcome commercial shipping in these waters, as we have always welcomed such hipping in Canadian waters. It would be intolerable if it were suggested that this country close the passage to the shipping ofthe world, assuming that such passage were made possible by modern day technology Jean Chretien, as Minister of Northern and Indian affairs in a speech to parliament, adressing the issues of the moment concerning the Canadian arctic.

2016: Hans Island 2 COUNTRIES HAVE BEEN FIGHTING OVER AN UNINHABITED ISLAND Far in the Arctic North lies the barren and desolate Hans Island.

The uninhabited half-square-mile island, possessing no apparent natural resources, is a bizarre sliver of territory for two countries to fight over.

However, since the early 1930s, this nondescript rock has been at the center of an ongoing disagreement between Canada and Denmark.

According to World Atlas, Hans Island is located in the middle of the 22-mile wide Nares Strait, which separates Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, from Canada. Due to international law, all countries have the right to claim territory within 12 miles of their shore.

As such, Hans Island is technically located in both Danish and Canadian waters.

World Atlas notes that the island was decided to be Danish territory by the Permanent Court of International Justice of the League of Nations in 1933.

However, as the League of Nations fell apart in the 1930s and was then replaced by the United Nations, the ruling on the status of Hans Island carries little to no weight.

The issue of Hans Island then loss traction in popular consciousness and the concerns of the Canadian and Danish governments throughout World War II and the heights of the Cold War, only to reemerge in 1984.

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On that year, Denmark’s minister of Greenland affairs visited the island and planted a Danish flag. At the base of the flag, he left a note saying, “Welcome to the Danish island,” along with a bottle of brandy, CBC reports.

And since then, the two countries have waged a not-quite-serious “whiskey war” over Hans Island.

Although the two countries have continued to disagree over the territorial status of the island, the governments have managed to continue the “whiskey war” and keep a good Kayak Iceberg, Bern Will Brown

y JEREMY BENDER

sense of humor over the incident.

Peter Takso Jensen, the Danish Ambassador to the US, has said that “when Danish military go there, they leave a bottle of schnapps. And when [Canadian] military forces come there, they leave a bottle of Canadian Club and a sign saying, ‘Welcome to Canada.’”

Currently, a plan is in the works that could turn Hans Island into a shared territory that would be jointly managed by the Canadian and Danish municipalities bordering it.

Jeremy Bender of Buisness Insider

ancestry and bonds extend beyond modern borders. Over the most recent generation, many of these communities have banded THE POLITICAL ARCTIC together into large regional organizations that promote their interests among the international A corrosion-proof, titanium Russian flag community. sways in the currents of the North Pole seabed, When change or strife touches planted there in August 2007 by a privately some part of the world, the political or funded expedition. It doesn't mean that Russia environmental causes are usually local. Arctic owns the pole any more than the Apollo 11 communities facing rapid change are different, flag means the U.S. owns the moon. But it’s a because scientists know the causes are not powerful symbol. local. Warming is global, and residents of the The Arctic story is a tale of sweeping high north are feeling only the first wave. geologic change catalyzing a sweeping Politics in the Arctic often aren’t local either. By geopolitical contest. Melting sea ice is gradually expanding northward, Putin is setting Russia making the Arctic Ocean accessible to economic up to take advantage of new shipping routes and development. Before the region truly opens for oil deposits, and potentially mix clubby Arctic business, however, sovereign governments need to figure out which of them owns what.

“A half-century after racing the Russians to the moon, Titanium flags aside, it’s a bit unclear the U.S. is barely suiting up in the international race to at the moment, and no one more than Russian secure interests in the Arctic.”

-Rick Larsen President Vladimir Putin is taking aggressive steps to implement a vision.

Putin is playing two hands at once. He’s matters with more high-pitched global affairs.

The population data betray Putin’s grand the unpredictable international leader who annexed Crimea, is reinvesting in northern challenge—to boost national economic growth security as if the Cold War were coming back, amid a population decline both north and south and sits atop a government that, as Secretary of the Arctic Circle.

A decades-long push by the Soviet of State Rex Tillerson said Sunday, meddled in the 2016 U.S. election. Yet Russia’s Arctic Union to industrialize the Arctic is indirectly diplomacy has been a pillar of regional stability responsible for the fact that any international governance is there to begin with. Finland, for the past two decades.

The warming Arctic offers an economic downwind from Soviet facilities that emitted opportunity for nations to access resources. pollution, gathered the eight Arctic nations But first, nations must sort out questions together in 1991, with umbrella groups of boundaries and access—and Russia did representing indigenous peoples, to figure not expand to 11 time zones by missing out an international environmental-protection strategy. opportunities such as this.

The effort morphed into the Arctic The Human Arctic Putin may feel entitled to an outsized Council, a consensus-driven environmental Arctic presence because, in both coastline forum that then evolved still further into a and population, Russia has an outsized Arctic catch-all working group for regional affairs.

The efforts of the council may sound mundane presence.

More than 4 million people live north to the civilized world beneath the 66th parallel, of Earth’s Arctic Circle, nearly half of them in but they are vital to future life in the Arctic. The Russia and the rest scattered among the seven council has created oil-spill readiness plans and other northernmost countries—the U.S., scientific endeavors, and it has divided areas of Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, search-and-rescue responsibilities among its and Finland. About 500,000 people live among member nations.

No individual accomplishment of the one of dozens of indigenous nations whose

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council is particularly world-altering, but together its achievements have quietly built a modicum of trust and a pattern of collaboration among players that pose a significant counterweight to national aspirations in the region, Russia’s or others’. (The two-year chairmanship of the Arctic Council last week passed from the U.S. to Finland.)

The Arctic Council has risen in import and attention as the top of the world became a place where developed economies want to play.

Everybody wants in. The U.K., a permanent observer to the council, has called itself “the Arctic’s nearest neighbor.” China, which was made a permanent observer in 2013, considers itself a “near-Arctic” nation, even though its northernmost point is about 900 miles south of the circle. Trade and shipping have much to do with their interest. The state observers are all East Asian or West European nations that stand to benefit from shorter marine routes linking them.

Union and the U.S. were able to come to an agreement over maritime boundaries in the Bering Strait.

Possible points of tension remain, not the least of which is that U.S.-Russian boundary. The scale of Russian military and economic activity—driven in part by a national mythology and pride rooted in its northern identity—means that, regardless of U.S. policy, there is competition for Arctic power and resources. Benefits accrue to early movers, and the U.S. is not one of them.

Russia and China are investing in the Arctic. “That will affect U.S. waters, coastlines, and peoples, and we’re not preparing,” said Heather Conley, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“The U.S. has forgotten why this region is so important.”

All nations, in the Arctic and elsewhere, can claim an “exclusive economic zone,” or EEZ, that extends 200 nautical miles from shore. Nations have the right to explore the There are two kinds of Arctic problems, the imaginary waters and seabed within their EEZs—but not and the real. Of the two, the imaginary are the most real. the surface, which is considered international -Vilhjalmur Stefansson water.

A treaty ratified by 168 countries, the Not everyone can join the club. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, governs eight council members denied all observer how they should figure out which nations have applicants in 2015, including the European rights to what. Russia in 2001 made the firstUnion. In last week’s meeting in Fairbanks, they ever legal claim to seafloor rights beyond its allowed in a new national observer, Switzerland, EEZ under the convention. After its vision was and several organizations, including the rejected, the Kremlin resubmitted it in 2015.

National Geographic Society and the World Denmark has also filed a North Pole claim, and Meteorological Organization.

Canada is expected to do the same, perhaps Who Owns the North Pole? within a year.

The Arctic might as well be part of a Russia’s posture here has been courteous different planet. In addition to the fact that it’s and diplomatic. In a position to claim rights all warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, the way up to Canada’s exclusive economic the region itself challenges general sensibilities zone, Russia chose not to, perhaps to avoid of near and far. In the high north, Denmark and potential provocation.

Russia are close enough to disagree over which Russia, Full of Surprises has the right to call the North Pole its own.

Russian officials’ rhetoric about its This geographic tightness has a way of Arctic presence, coupled with military reenforcing the peace. entrenchment, has been less diplomatic. It’s Consequently, territorial disputes have the flipside of what Heather Conley of CSIS so far been dealt with bilaterally and in good has called the “maddening duality” of Russia’s faith. As recently as 2010, Russia and Norway strategy. finally agreed on where their waters part. Even Dmitry Rogozin, deputy prime in the final days of the Cold War, the Soviet 96

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minister and director of Putin’s Government Commission for Arctic Development Issues, has called the 1867 sale of Alaska a “betrayal of Russian power status” and has said that the Kremlin has a “right to reclaim our lost colonies.”

The harsh words are partly political theater for a domestic audience. But from the Kremlin’s perspective, there is real concern. In the five-and-a-half centuries since Russia first annexed Arctic coastline, no leader has faced the disappearance of a critical natural defense: sea ice. Putin’s decision in 2014 to create a brand-new northern strategic command, build (or rebuild) dozens of military facilities, and bulk up the nation’s submarine fleet reflect a perceived change in Russia’s security needs.

The nation doesn’t have many friends in the region. Five other coastal nations are members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

An Arctic country since the 1867 purchase of Alaska, the U.S. gives less attention than one might expect to northern affairs and its largest swath of coast, which stretches 6,600 miles on both the Pacific and Arctic oceans.

Americans may not be giving their “fourth coast” due attention, according to a growing chorus

of researchers and policymakers—including the Pentagon and State Department under the previous U.S. administration. Russia’s behavior “warrants close attention to the region on the part of the United States,” according to a recent report by the Rand Corporation.

The U.S. styles itself—and many others see it—as the most powerful nation in the world. And the most powerful nation in the world has so far chosen to abdicate a formal diplomatic role in the quest for Arctic economic rights.

The country’s involvement, or lack thereof, in Arctic affairs has been limited by a dispute that’s different from the standard political skirmishing—one between the executive branch and the Senate. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama both supported Senate ratification of the Law of the Sea treaty, which provides the framework for countries’ maritime claims. Not joining the treaty, the White House has argued, might prevent the U.S. from gaining access to economic resources it could otherwise claim rights to. Conservative senators have balked at ratification, citing concerns about national sovereignty. It is unclear what strategy the

Russian reconnaissance unit members of the Northern Fleet’s Arctic mechanized infantry brigade

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Map, William Barentz, 1599

Trump administration holds.

In practice, the U.S. lives up to the letter of the law, even though it is not a part of the pact.

As it stands, the Arctic is a picture of stability, enviable by many other parts of the world. The stability is enforced in part, and at least for the moment, by a topic the Arctic Council is unable by design to even raise: military strategy. The U.S. advocated in the mid-90s that the Council be prohibited from tackling hard-security issues. As a consequence, there are important conversations for the great powers to have about the Arctic and security, but no obvious forum to have them in.

U.S. nuclear missiles on submarines in the Barents Sea could reach Moscow in 15 minutes. The six Delta IV submarines maintained by Russia’s northern fleet can each carry 16 submarine-launched ballistic missiles and together deliver 800 nuclear warheads.

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The complexity of the Arctic will grow as it attracts more economic attention— particularly, perhaps, as more dots are filled in on this map.

The rule of law is the foundation on which economies operate. It’s in no one’s economic interest to de-stabilize the high north. “Military and economic concerns are deeply intertwined in the Arctic,” wrote Stephanie Pezard and three RAND Corporation colleagues in March, “and ... these concerns can, at times, lead to apparently disjointed Russian policies in the region.”

While the Cold War is long gone, Cold War rules still apply in the Arctic: Everything is fine. Just make no sudden movements—and hope there’s no accident or misunderstanding along the way.

Erik Roston and Blacki Migliozzi of Bloomberg news as part of a 3 part series on the growing geopolitical future of the arctic

and the confidence they generate.

Sir, my colleague, the Minister of Communications ( Mr. Masse), and other SPEECH TO PARLIAMENT: Ministers of this government on other occasions STATEMENT ON SOVEREIGNTY , will be making announcements through On 10 September 1985, Secretary of the life of this Parliament on other steps this State for External Affairs the Rt Hon. Joe Clark Government intends to take to assert and made the following statement in the House of guarantee the sovereignty and independance Commons concerning Canadian sovereignty in of Canada. In domestic policy, foreign policy, the Arctic: and defence policy the Government has given Mr. Speaker, sovereignty can be a very Candian sovereignty a new impetus within a emotional issue in this country, and that is quite new maturity. However, Sir, much remains understandable, since sovereignty involves the to be done. The voyage of the Polar Sea identity and the very character of a people. We demonstrated that Canada, in the past had not Canadians want to be ourselves. We want to developed the means to ensure our sovereignty manage our own affairs and control our own over time. During that voyage, Canada’s legal destiny, but we also want to go beyond this position was fully protected, but, when we to play a constructive role in a world that is looked for ways to exercise our sovereignty we become increasingly inter-dependent. We have found that the Canadian cupboard was nearly something to offer and at the same time we bare. We obtained from the United States a have something to gain. formal and explicit asurance that the voyage of Since it came to power, this Government the Polar Sea was without prejudice to Canada’s has shown a keen interest in the sovereignty legal position. That, Sir, is an assurance which issue. We have consolidated national unity, the Government of the day in 1969 did not because a house divided cannot stand. We receive for the voyage of the Manhattan and have reinforced the national economy, because of the two United States Coast Guard ice sovereignty means nothing without solvency. breakers. Sir, whatever was done that summer, Unity and strength: these are the hallmark of and however it may contrast with what was don sovereignty and of the policies and achievements before nonprejudicial arrangements will not be of this Government. enough in the future.

We have declared a Canadian ownership policy in respect of foreign investment in the “I think it would be good policy to defer any public announcement as long as possible. If the Danes are publishing industry. We have made our own really now in occupation in Ellesmere Land, or intend Canadian decisions on controver­ sial issues to take action in that regard next spring a Canadian of foreign policy, whether in Nicaragua or announcement... would probably result in special efforts on their part. If they beleive that Canada is still asleep South Africa. We have passed the Foreign they probably will not hurry.”

Extraterritorial Measures Act to block -J.B. Harkin, 1920 unacceptable claims of jurisdic­tion by foreign Governments or foreign courts seeking to The voyage of the Polar Sea has left no extend their writ to Canada. We have arrested trac on Canada’s arctic water and no mark on foreign trawlers poaching in our fishing zones. Canada’s Arctic sovereignty. It is behind us and We have taken important steps to bolster our concern must be for what lies ahead. Many and improve Canada’s defences, notably in countries, including the United States and the increasing Canadian forces in Europe and in Federal Republic of Germany, are actively putting into place a new North Warning System preparing now for commercial navigation in to protect Canadian sovereignty over our Arctic waters. Developments are accelerating northern airspace. in ice science, ice technology, and ice tanker As well, Sir, we have reconstructed design. Several major Japanese firms are relations with traditional friends and allies who moving to capture the market for ice breaking have welcomed our renewed unity and strength tankers once polar oil and gas come on stream.

1985: Ottawa

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Soviet submarines are, being deployed under the Artic ice pack and the United States Navy has in turn, identified a need to gain Arctic operational experience to counter new Soviet deployments.

The implications for Canada are clear.

As the western country with by far the greatest frontage on the Arctic, we must come up to speed in a range of marine operations that bear on our capacity to exercise effective control over the Northwest Passage and our other Arctic waters. To this end, Sir, I wish to declare to the house the policy of Government in respect of Canadian sovereignty in Arctic waters and to make a number of announcements as to how

archipelago has been signed today and will come into effect on January 1, 1986.

These baselines define the outer limit of Canada’s historical internal waters. Canada’s territorial waters extend 12 miles seaward off the baselines. While the territorial Sea and Fishing Zones Act requires 60 days notice only for the establishment of fishery limits, we consider prior notice should also be given for this important step of establishing straight baselines.

Canada’s jurisdiction over its continental margin and 200-mile fishing zone is unchallenged in the Arctic as elsewhere.

Canada also exercises jurisdiction over a 100mile pollution prevention control zone in arctic water, in order to protect the unique “Sir John A. Macdonald... saw Canada from East to West.

I see a new Canada - a Canada of the North.” ecological balance in the area. That too has been -John Diefenbaker,1958 recognized by the international community, in a special provision in the United National Convention on the Law of the Sea. we propose to give expression to that policy.

However, no previous Government Canada is an Arctic nation. The international community has long recognized had ever extended the application of Canadian that the Arctic mainland and islands are a part civil and criminal laws to offshore zones in the of Canada like any other, but the Arctic is not Arctic and elsewhere. The present Government only a part of Canada, it is a part of Canadian will take this action. To this end, one of greatness. The policy of the Government is to our priorities will be the speedy passage of preserve that Canadian greatness undiminished. legislation covering the offshore application of Canada’s sovereignty in the Arctic is indivisible. Canada laws.

The exercise of functional jurisdiction in It embraces land, sea and ice. It extends without interruption to the seaward-facing coast of the arctic waters is essential to Canadian interests.

Arctic islands. Tht islands are joined, and not However, it is no substitute for Canada’s divided, by the waters between them. They full sovereignty over the waters of the arctic are bridged for most of the ear by ice. From archipelago. Only with full sovereignty can we time immemorial Canada’s Inuit people have protect the entire range of Canadian interests. used and occupied the ice as they have used Full sovereignty is vital to Canada’s security. and occupied the land. The policy of the Go It is vital to the Inuit people. And it is vital to vernment is to maintain the natural unity of the Canada’s national identity.

The policy of this Government is to Canadian Arctic archipelago and to preserve Canada’s sovereignty over land, sea and ice exercise full sovereignty in and on the waters of the arctic archipelago and this applies to undiminished and undivided.

That Canadian sovereignty has long the airspace above as well. We will accept no been upheld by Governments of this country. substitute.

The policy of the Government is also However, no previous Government has defined to encourage the development of naviga­tion in its precise limits or delineated Canada’s internal waters and territorial sea in the Arctic. This Canadian Arctic waters. Our goal is to make the Government proposes to do so. An Order in Northwest Passage a reality for Canadian and Council establishing straight baselines around foreign shipping as a Canadian waterway.

Navigation, however, will be subject to the outer perimeter of the Canadian Arctic 100

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the controls and other measures required for Canada’s security, for the preservation of the environment, and for the welfare of the Inuit and other inhabitants of the Canadian Arctic.

In due course the Government will announce the further steps it is taking to implement these policies, and especially to provide more extensive marine support services, to strengthen regulatory structures, and to reinforce the necessary means of control. I am announcing today that the Government has decided to construct a Polar Class-8 ice breaker.

My colleagues, the Minister of National Defence (Mr. Nielsen) and the Minister of Transport (Mr. Mazankowski) will shortly

bring the cabinet recommendations with regard to the design and construction plans. The costs are very high, in the order of $0.5 billion, but the Government is not about to conclude that Canada cannot afford the Arctic.

Meanwhile we are taking immediate steps to increase surveillance overflights over Arctic waters by Canadian Forces aircraft. In addition we are now making plans for naval activity in Eastern Arctic waters in 1986.

Canada is a strong and responsible member of the international community. Our strength and our responsibility make us all the more aware of the need for co-operation with other countries, and especially with our friends and

North American Aerospace Defense Command, Radar Station, 1957–1993

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allies. Co-operation is necessary, not only in defence of our own interests, but in defence of the common interests of the international community. Co-operation adds to our strength and in no way diminishes our sovereignty. The policy of the government is to offer its coopperation to its friends and allies and to seek their co-operation to its friends and allies and to seek their co-operation in return.

We are prepared to explore with the United States all means of co-operation that might promote the respective interests of both countries as Arctic friends, neighbours and allies in the Arctic waters of Canada and Alaska.

The United States has been made aware that

Canada wishes to open talks on this matter in the near future. Any co-operation with the United States or with other Arctic nations shall only, be on the basis of full respect for Canada’s sovereignty. That too has been made clear.

In 1970, the Government of the day barred the International Court of Justice from hearing disputes that might arise concerning the jurisdiction exercised by Canada for the prevention of pollution in Arctic waters. The Government of that day said to that court, “Your jurisdiction shall not affect Canada. We will not put our case before that court”. This Government will remove that bar. Indeed, we have today notified the Secretary General of

A tagged polar bear scavenges a dump in Churchill Manitoba, David Hiser, March 1982

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the United Nations that Canada is withdrawing the 1970 reservation to its acceptance of the compulsory jurisdiction of the World Court.

The Arctic is a heritage for the people of the Canada. They are determined to keep their heritage entire and to keep their heritage intact.

The policy of this Government is to give full expression to that determination.

We challenge no established rights, for none have been established except by Canada.

We set no precedents for other areas, for no other area compares with the Canadian Arctic archipelago. We are confident in our position.

We believe in the rule of law in international relations. We shall act in accordance with our

confidence and belief, as we are doing today in withdrawing the 1970 reservation to Canada’s acceptance of the compulsory jurisdiction of the World Court. We are prepared to uphold our position in that Court, if necessary, and to have it fully and freely judged there.

In summary, Mr. Speaker, these are the measures we are announcing today: first, immediate adoption of an Order in Council, establishing straight baselines around the Arctic archipelago, to be effective January 1, 1986; second, immediate adoption of a Canadian Laws Offshore Application Act; third, immediate talks with the United States on co-operation in Arctic waters on the basis of full respect for

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Canadian sovereignty; fourth, an immediate increase of surveillance overflights of our Arctic waters by aircraft of the Canadian Forces, and immediate planning for Canadian naval activity in the eastern Arctic in 1986; fifth, the immediate withdrawal of the 1970 reservation to Canada’s acceptance of the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice; and sixth, construction of a polar, class 8 ice breaker and urgent consideration of other means of exercising more effective control over our Arctic waters.

These are the measures which we can take immediately. We know, however, that a long-term commitment is required. We are

confirmed, Claxton knew that soon he would be hearing from his neighbours to the south about the needs of continental defence.

The response was not long in coming.

On September 26,The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff told the American-Canadian Military Study Group (MSG) that an electronic early warning line was needed at Canada’s mid-latitudes.

Pressure was also building in the U.S. media. William A. Ulman wrote in the October 16 edition of Colliers Magazine, “If Soviet bombers could claw their way through to our East Coast and drop only nine hydrogen bombs in a line from Boston to Washington, they would blast out of existence a strip 50 miles wide and 450 miles long.’’ Articles in the Washington Post, Fortune and other ·publications also Rt. Hon. Joe Clark in his speech to parliament. Charles Joseph Clark PC CC AOE is a Canadian elder statesman, emphasized the need of radar warning lines in businessman, writer, and politician who served as the 16th the Canadian north. prime minister of Canada, from June 4, 1979, to March 3, Claxton felt that realistic efforts had to 1980 be made against Soviet attack. He knew that in the end the Americans would want radar lines 2001: CANADA in the Arctic, as well as at the 55th parallel.

Canada could not afford to build that much THE NUCLEAR POKER GAME: protection on its own. But, simply opening CANADA ANTES UP the North to U.S. contractors and troops had serious implications for Canadian sovereignty. If 1953 brought new pressures to bear northern air defence was left to the Americans, on Canada’s long-serving Minister of Defence, what level of participation or information Brooke Claxton. The Soviet Union augmented could Canada expect in future military issues of their nuclear threat in August with their first continental scope? detonation of a hydrogen bomb.The implications America and Canada had been close of a surprise attack on North America, with allies in World War II, but that had been even a few successful Soviet bombers reaching primarily in theaters of war well removed from their targets, were staggering.

North America. Claxton was now engaged in “In time it might become possible to a balancing act in which he must acknowledge deliver so devastating an attack on this continent the military might of his neighbour and protect as seriously to cripple its military and industrial what he could of Canadian sovereignty. He strength, actual and potential,” Claxton told the anticipated this need for balance in a letter to Commons in November 1953.

Mackenzie King soon after taking the defence The Canadian government viewed the portfolio. “Self-interest and our good relations Soviet Union as a real enemy. Postwar events in with the United States should lead Canada to Eastern Europe and the Gouzenko revelations play an adequate part...[that] part... should be in Ottawa had provided the evidence. Canadian especially related to the defence of Canada and military planners, however, had been inclined to doing the things that we can and should do in to think this enmity would show itself first in preference to the United States, particularly in an advance on Europe. The Americans thought the North. an air attack on their homeland was of equal or The prospects for cooperative defence greater concern. Now, with the H-bomb test were suspect, as Canadian diplomat John 104

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Holmes has noted. “ ... history did not make the United States and Canada friends; it made them natural antagonists and they remained antagonists from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. It took the Germans and then the Russians to make them allies.

If Canada put too many limits on America’s perceived needs, it could find its status change from ally to unwilling host of U.S. forces. In the words of historian Shelagh D. Grant, Even before the war ended, the military chiefs of staff of both coutries had declared that adequate defence of northern Canada was crucial to the security of North America and could only be accomplished jointly.

The implied alternative was that if required to do so, the United States would undertake their responsibility independently by right of the Monroe Doctrine.

Britton Riviere, Beyond Man’s Footsteps,1894

Claxton had one card to play that might help him achieve a healthy compromise with U.S. ambition. A sound-based Doppler radar detection system, activated by passing aircraft, had been developed at McGill University.

The ‘McGill Fence’, as it was known, would be cheaper to install than full-system radar.

Claxton wrote to Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, on October 21, with a suggested plan of action (The Lincoln Summer Study Group mentioned, had met in 1952 at M.I.T. and had recommended an extensive continental defence structure using electronics and aircraft). Claxton encouraged quick Canadian commitment to the McGill Fence, which would, ...give us the initiative and enable us to tell our people and the Americans that we were quite prepared to do anything we thought necessary for continental defence.

I feel quite certain that the Americans will not remain content with a line along the

Doris McCarthy; Evening at Pangnirtung

55th parallel but will ultimately want to go for something more.

Our taking the initiative with regard to the McGill Fence will put us in a better position to say, ‘well, we think we have done what we thought was necessary for continental defence. If you want to go and do more, we are not going to stand in the way,’ and keep our self-respect without having to put out too great an expenditure of materials, manpower and money.

Claxton’ s proposal struck a delicate compromise, well suited to the heIght of the Cold War era. In a larger context, his solution was part of a gradual move of Canada’s defence policy out of the British imperial sphere and into the American hegemony.

The format for post-war continental defence was set in 1940 with the Ogdensburg Agreement. President Roosevelt and Prime Minister King met to discuss the prospects of war after the German victory in France, as well as the Anglo-American swap of bases for destroyers. The two leaders also formed the Permanent Joint Board on Defence (PJBD), to provide a ready forum for future consultations on defence issues.

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and foreign service representatives in equal numbers for both countries. Recommendations of the Board moved through executive channels, with Parliament and Congress seldom involved.

The Board was the result of a friendly accord, rather than a formal, bilateral treaty. Either country could ignore it if they chose to, and the U.S. sometimes did in the projects it was soon to undertake in the Canadian northwest.

America’s military interest in the lands to its north grew out of the experience of World WII. In order to protect Alaska Prime Minister _ King gave permission for the Northwest Stagging Route, The Alaska Highway and the CANOL pipeline to be built in Canadian Territory. These projects were developed almost exclusively by troops and private contractors from the U.S. The Americans also constructed air bases and weather stations at several points in the Arctic, including Coral Harbour, Frobisher Bay and Arctic Bay. Canadian policy-makers drew two lessons from this wartime experience. OneAmericans would seek to take maximum control when operating on foreign soil. TwoAmerica sustained a vision of the Canadian North as a likely theatre of war. These lessons Amundsens Goja in the Northwest passage.

were an unwritten part of Claxton’ s brief when he became Minister of Defence in December 1946.

The Americans began their projects to link Alaska to the war effort early in 1942. By that time, Canada had already been at war for two years. Canadian manpower simply wasn’t available to build roads and pipelines in the northwest. By default, America became the dominant power in a large, remote section of the country. For its part, the government in Ottawa showed little interest. In Edmonton alone in 1943 there were 13,000 U.S. military and civilian personnel doing work related to the CANOL project. Federal government representation consisted of a lone consulting mining engineer who served part-time as a representative of the Department of Mines and Resources.

The first official to look into the situation was British High Commissioner Malcolm MacDonald. After a tour of the North, he recommended greater Canadian government presence in what was a virtual American enclave.

Canadian nationalists, including Claxton and Deputy Minister of Mines and Resources Hugh Keenleyside were determined that in post-war

defence strategy, America would never again be left to shift for itself in the North.

When MacDonald reported on American methods of operation in northern Canada, he drew attention to the longrange thinking that underlay their approach.

They pay no particular heed to this or that Canadian national or local interest.

This aspect of the matter assumes even greater of importance than one realizes fully the considerations, which the American Army, and other American interests working with them, have in mind in all their efforts in the NorthWest. Responsible American officers will tell you frankly in confidence that in addition to building works to be of value in this war, they are designing those works also to be of particular value for (a) commercial aviation and transport after the war and (b) waging war against the Russians in the next crisis.

Although the U.S. did not retain 107

those bases it built in Canada in World War II, point (b) of the mind-set that MacDonald described remained a part of American defence policy. By the time the ‘McGill Fence’ was on the table, Claxton and his predecessors had been dealing with that attitude for eight years. The Canadians had learned that U.S. pressure for a northern defence presence would not go away.

In May 1946 American strategists recommended a joint security plan with permanent air bases and radar installations across the North. Canada rejected the plan.

American military interests scaled “Logic, sometimes has very little to do with political action.”

-Alexander Mackenzie, British Explorer and Prime Minister of Canada ,1875

down their expectations, and by February 1947 the two governments announced an accord for cooperation in the defence of North America. Initial projects included the building of more northern weather stations and research on radar and low frequency communication. King stressed in Parliament that no “Maginot lines” would be built across the North. For the Americans,

it was a small, but important step toward a more robust northern defence system.

By the late 1940s the Soviet Union had unveiled a long-range bomber, the TU4. In September 1949 they had completed their first test of an atomic bomb. American experts had expected it would take much longer for Stalin to acquire the Bomb. They had not counted on his effective espionage network. The prospect of he ‘Red Menace’ over North American skies had suddenly become much more real.

The Canadians and Americans responded to the new strength of the Soviet Union with the Pine tree line, a string of radar installations running along the 49th parallel. The United States Air Force (USAF) picked up two-thirds of the cost and provided half the staffing. Canadian-built electronics were used wherever possible.

Claxton furthered the cause of air defence in 1951 by announcing the formation of nine new squadrons of CF-100 interceptors. For Canada’s relatively small air force, this orientation to home defence was obvious. For the much larger USAF, a balance between

A pair of Inuit snow goggles fashioned from bone. Image courtesy of Design Museum Holon

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defence and offence was more difficult to strike. USAF Chief of Staff, General Hoyt S. Vandenberg had been pressing since 1949 for more funds for air defence.

He faced opposition from the other armed services, who feared that they would lose in a reapportionment of total defence dollars to radar base construction. Vandenberg was also opposed by the attack-oriented wing of his own service, the Strategic Air Command (SAC). When the Joint Chiefs of Staff refused him more money for air defence, the General began his own internally-funded research project.

Vandenberg had one primary problem. In World War II a kill rate of ten percent against attacking aircraft was considered the norm. Against bombers with a nuclear payload a kill rate of 50 percent was needed. No one knew how to achieve such a rate.

The Air Force contracted with M.I.T. To investigate ways of getting the kill rate up. An early warning system in the far north would enable SAC bombers to take to the air before being destroyed on the ground, and would give civil defence systems more advance notice. However, the project scientists felt the technology available would produce too many false alarms and would not function well in the Arctic.

Vandenberg chose not to give up.

In fact, there were many in Washington who felt that more emphasis had to be put on air defence. But the Truman and then the Eisenhower administration were hesitant to spend lavishly on an untried system. The result was a problem that was studied to death.

Blacki is a co-founder of Brooklyn Bio a for-hire synthetic biology research group in New York City and Eric Roston is an award-winning journalist who has spent more than 15 years covering climate change in all its incarnations

2019: UK LAND- WATER-ICE: MAKING SPACE FOR ARCHITECTURE IN THE ARCTIC I want to begin by taking you back to July 16, 1970. On that day, a gentleman named Mario Escamilla realized that a 15-gallon barrel of homemade Raisin wine was missing from his home. He was pretty sure that he knew who had taken the wine his neighbour Porky Leavitt. Mario and porky had had issues with alcohol before in fact just a few weeks earlier there was an incident where porky came after Mario with a meat cleaver as part of an altercation.

Mario went over to porky’s place and sure enough, there was porky drinking the wine mixed with 190 proof grain alcohol and grape juice. Together with porky was Bennie Lightsy who was the boss of both Mario and Porky. They got into a fight they yelled at each other Mario went back to his home. a few minutes later there was a knock on the door. Mario went to answer it and remembering the whole meat cleaver incident first grabbed a loaded rifle. It turned out not to be porky but Benny Lightsy. Mario and Benny continued their argument and got into a scuffle. Eventually, the rifle accidentally discharged and next thing you knew Benny Lightsy was dead on the floor.

“The Arctic is going to be an area of intense interest.

Russia has the longest coastline in the world with the Arctic.”

-Hillary Clinton, American Politician,2013

This all might sound like the opening to a western or maybe closer to home a southern morality tale about the evils of drink. But actually, it’s a northern story from a place called T-3 or Fletcher’s ice island. T-3 was a 30 square mile 200-footthick slab of glacial ice that was occupied by the US military as a research station from 109

1952 to 1978 as it floated around the Arctic Ocean. Typically, there were 20 to 30 civilian employees on T-3. Most were doing research on a range of topics concerning the properties of ice.

“You know, once something freezes, it’s solid. That’s the key to the arctic - they didn’t fear the cold, they made use of it.”

-Wade Davis, Anthropologist, 1973

Benny Lightsy was the chief meteorologist and the station chief.

Escamilla was an electronics technician, and porky Leavitt was a local Inuk who performed general maintenance tasks.

Adrift track of T-3 from 1962 to 1974, part of the time that was a US Navy research station, shows where T-3 was around the time of the shooting. it is about 200 miles off the coast of Ellesmere Island, the northernmost island of Canada. At the time of the shooting, T-3 was in international waters. This fact raises an interesting question: who had jurisdiction to try the case?

“I was amazed by my Canadian counterpart’s statement that we are planting flags around. We’re not throwing flags around. We just do what other discoverers did.

The purpose of the expedition is not to stake whatever rights of Russia, but to prove that our shelf extends to the North Pole” -Sergey Lavrov, Foreign Minister of Russia, 2007

In one sense, it seems simple because there was an American flag flying over the research station. However, from the US perspective, this American flag meant pretty much nothing. US naval policy since the early 19th century prioritized preserving the freedom of navigation; meaning, the last thing the US wanted was to create a precedent allowing countries around the world to claim chunks of ice saying, “this is our territory.” That could lead to the divvying up of the ocean, which would interfere with the free movement of both military and commercial vessels.

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Indeed, from the US perspective and that of international law, including the UN convention on the law of the sea, frozen ocean is about the same as liquid ocean.

Only one of 320 articles in the law of the sea notes that parts of the ocean are frozen; otherwise, it assumes the ocean is liquid.

From this perspective,T-3 was a frozen piece of high seas floating on top of the liquid high seas. Legally, it was undifferentiated ocean.

There are two problems with this construction. The first is that T-3 actually consisted of glacial ice that calved all Ellesmere Island. The second problem is that if a crime is committed on the high seas, jurisdiction reverts to the flag state of the ship on which the crime occurs, but of course, T-3 was not a ship.

Canada sent a memo to the US saying, “well, why don’t you just call it a ship? You could claim sovereignty, but you wouldn’t be making any territorial claims, setting a precedent and all those things.”The problem there is that under International Maritime law the flag state of a vessel is responsible for ensuring that its vessel does not cause a hindrance to navigation. And of course, you can’t steer an iceberg. So, the US envisioned all sorts of liability problems down the road if T-3 were considered an American ship.

In the end, Escamilla was removed by helicopter to Thule Air Force Base in Greenland. This led some to suggest that perhaps he should be tried under Danish law because Greenland was a dependency of Denmark and the first state land on which he landed. Eventually, from Thule, he was flown to Dulles airport. In the end, Escamilla was tried in the Second District Court of Virginia where he was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter. However, the District Court judge never explained his basis for claiming jurisdiction. one possibility is that the judge was thinking

that all parties involved were US Nationals and that the crime occurred in the ocean, which is sort of a juridical vacuum, a super territorial space, a space beyond territory.

Alternately, he may have considered T-3 to be a vessel, and extraterritorial space and thereby an extension of US territory.

Or he may have considered T-3 to be an uninhabited, unclaimed island in which case, under the 1856 Guano Islands act, the US could claim temporary authority over T-3 as a comma proto-territorial space.

Indeed, today it is still not clear whether a space like T-3 ocean, a ship, or an island.

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Eskimos (Inuit) constructing an igloo with blocks of snow as children stand by, Frank E. Kleinschmidt, 1924

I begin with the story of T-3 because it tells us a lot about how the complex shifting world of land, water, and ice that is the Arctic, and it complicates established norms for regulating, governing, settling, and transforming space. And those kinds of questions have important implications as we design futures for the region.

I want to go a bit further into what makes the Arctic interesting and what makes T-3 interesting as a complex dynamic space. For this purpose, it is useful to contrast the Arctic with the world as we are used to thinking of it. This is what some of my colleagues and I called the “modern territorial imagery.” The “modern territorial imagery” is a way of thinking of space that pairs binaries. On the one hand, there is a geopolitical, or social binary that divides space into points of fixity, points on the surface with differentiated natures.

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points and their natures, societies develop, and social divisions of labour emerge.

Eventually States and boundaries form.

These are the inside spaces, the territories.

There are also the outside spaces. Space is seen as fundamentally beyond society because they have none of what are deemed to be society’s essential social processes: production in place, social development, state institutions, etc. In fact, these nonterritories are seen as uncontrolled, unbounded, undeveloped and effectively asocial; and really the only reasons to go into them are either to cross through them to get into another space that matters or perhaps to go into them to extract resources be used to develop inside spaces.

The power of this binary is that it is fused with an equal idealized geophysical binary that divides space into land and ocean. The real force of this occurs when these two binaries are paired and naturalized

through objects like a standard political map of the world. On such Maps, the ocean is typically depicted as a background without boundaries or other signs up social activity.

Against this backdrop is a foreground of land, states, bounded places of society, named territories where things can happen.

Frequently colours are added to naturalize this binary division the ocean is depicted as blue, putting the materiality of water, while land is depicted as brown evoking the materiality of a fundamentally different space.

Returning to the case from T-3, the legal debate revolves around how to place T-3 within the geopolitical binary. was it an inside space? Was it an outside space? Was it something in between? I think it was difficult to place T-3 within the geopolitical binary because it was so difficult to place it within the geophysical binary. Was it land?

Was it water? Was it something in between?

In other words, the idealized pairing of two binaries to create categories of “blue” and “brown” space don’t work well in the Arctic.

I should point out that there are problems with the binary’s and their pairing everywhere. The geopolitical binary certainly is contestable. Most political, social, and cultural theorists would have real problems with the idea of there being a simple binary division of inside and outside spaces.

Societies are not fixed in space or time, cultures move across borders, and state power is not solely restricted to the inside of state territories. Likewise, probably most geoscientists would have problems with the notion of a strict and stable distinction between land and sea. Spaces like wetlands, swamps, and barrier islands create a lot of juridical confusion.

Even if one accepts these binary’s, they don’t always pair up well. For instance, in the 17th century when the modern terri-

torial imagery was coming to the fore, cartographers had real problems representing the grand banks, the rich fishing grounds off the coast of Newfoundland. This was certainly - geophysical - water, ocean. It’s wet.

But geopolitically the region was thought of as a distinct place with distinct value. The grand banks couldn’t be represented as land because it wasn’t land, but it didn’t really have all the social and political properties of water. Cartographers chose an intermediate representation: stippling.

The modern territorial imagery doesn’t apply that well anywhere, and it is particularly problematic in the Arctic, for a number of reasons. First of all, Arctic land doesn’t have all of the “land like” functional properties. If what makes Brown space Brown is that it can be improved through agriculture and controlled and developed in all these ways that we have come to think of in the temperate zones, that’s all much more problematic in the Arctic. Arctic water doesn’t have all those “water-like” properties. It’s almost Two simple to say, but when water is frozen instead of liquid the When I read about how 200 people died on a polar expedition, I wonder why they didn't get to know the Inuit people who were around and presumably know something about surviving in the Arctic after living there for thousands of years. Talking to people is a survival mechanism.

-Tim Cahill

difference between water and land just is not as dramatic. The boundary is often not that well communicated in the Arctic; if it is all frozen and covered with snow, you often don’t actually know if you are on land or water at a given time. The physical conditions are dynamic in both time and space, dynamic in time through seasonal cycles and also through climate change. Seasonal cycles of course happen but again they are particularly extreme in various ways in the Arctic, as is climate change. Also dash 113

and this is a strange one conceptually dash but Arctic space is exceptionally dynamic space, because the Arctic itself is constantly moving around not just in geologic time, as exists in the rest of the world, but in the very experienced time of, say, shifting ice flows. So, as an example of this dynamism, both in time and space,T-3 no longer exists.

Shortly after it was abandoned by the US military, it floated around the Northside of Greenland came down the Davis Strait on the East Coast of Greenland and dissipated into the Atlantic Ocean.

Finally, I want to finish up by reminding us that not only is the Arctic different because of its geophysical characteristics, but also because of its location. Indeed, was the arctic’s location that ultimately led to the Escamilla case being thrown out on appeal. When Escamilla was found guilty, he challenged it on several grounds, one of them being jurisdiction. The appeal said “Once the north becomes a real concern of the country, Canadian affairs can no longer be decided by the citizens of Southern Canada alone.We will then come to live in a, who would have ceased to be equivalent of the solely the south or the electoral and centralized majority” -Louis-Edmond Hamelin, Canadian Geographer, 1988

this shouldn’t have been tried in a US court.

The Apple 8 panel split three to three on this jurisdictional issue and they never issued a statement. So, it is still not known whether under US law a nice island is a ship, an island, a chunk of ocean or something else. One of the other grounds had to do with the instructions given to the jury. In the original trial, the jury was instructed by the judge that “the law of United States was applicable to this case in the same manner as it would be applicable to the crime committed in Northern Virginia, so you can just forget about T-3 other than 114

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for background.” Well, the appellate panel commented that this instruction was in error. The appellate decision noted, “It would seem plain that what is negligent or grossly negligent conduct in the Eastern District of Virginia may not be negligent or grossly negligent on T-3 when it is remembered that T-3 has no governing authority, no police forest, is relatively inaccessible from the rest of the world, lacks medical facilities and the dwellings lack locks. In short, absent self-restraint on the part of those stationed on T-3 and an effective group leader, T-3 placed where no recognized means of law enforcement exists and each man must look to himself for immediate enforcement of his rights. Certainly, all these factors are ones which must be considered by the jury given the problem of determining whether the defendant was grossly negligent.”

To conclude, the Arctic changes our notion of the world in many ways. We think of the world as being divided into meta dash continents that are separated by oceans. That vision changes when you look at things from a polar perspective. We see that the Arctic is a space that’s provisional, ambiguous, indeterminate, dynamic, mobile, and at least from the perspective of southern capitals, remote. These are all characteristics that challenge the application of law and the assertion of sovereignty which are the sort of things that I tend to research, but I think they also present specific challenges for architecture and design because architecture, much like the state, has typically assumed backgrounds that are solid, stable, and static. And the Arctic is anything but.

Phillip Steinberg is a professor at Durham University whose research focuses on the historical, ongoing, and, at times, imaginary projection of social power onto spaces whose geophysical and geographic characteristics make them resistant to state territorialisation

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“Really, what [sea] ice does is it acts like a garden. … Losing that ice is like losing the soil in a garden.”

-Paul Niklen

Paul Niklen, Narwals in the Arctic Ocean.

AMONG THE CONTRIBUTORS LEWIS PUGH • A.Y. JACKSON

SERGEY LAVROV ROGER ROBINSON JR. • PHILLIP STEINBERG

LAWREN

HARRIS

JEREMY BENDER • ERIC ROSTON WILLIAM R. MORRISON • S.R. GAGE

JEAN CHRETIEN VILHJALMUR STEFANSON HAMPTON

SIDES

•

KEN

COATES

JOE CLARKE•AGNES LADON

JENIFER KINGSLEY