Northern exposure

As the Arctic melts, vast deposits of oil and gas may be opened up for exploration. Will an Arctic without ice only prolong our dependence on fossil fuels?

Fifty-five million years ago, the Arctic was riotous with life. With average temperatures in the mid-70s, it had palm trees, crocodiles, and mosquitoes, as one scientist has put it, “the size of your head.” For reasons that are still unknown, the planet as a whole was much warmer then, and sea levels were as much as 20 feet higher.

With the world again warming — this time almost certainly because of human activity — the Arctic’s subtropical past may soon play a role in shaping its climatic future: All of those animals and plants and microbes dying in swampy soil, sinking beneath layers and layers of mud and eventually being cooked by the heat and pressure deep beneath the surface, millions of years later became fossil fuels.

The presence of abundant stores of oil and gas near the North Pole is hardly a secret. The United States Geological Survey estimates that a quarter of the world’s remaining oil and gas reserves are in the Arctic. The problem has always been getting to them, and getting their contents out of the ground. Drilling operations in the far north have to deal with subzero temperatures, marauding ice floes, violent seas, and the logistical difficulties that come with transporting oil and gas from remote, often offshore locations. The $10 billion cost overrun at the mammoth oil and gas project being built along the coast of Sakhalin, an island off Siberia, give some taste of what working in the Arctic entails.

But the Arctic is changing, and faster than many climatologists expected. Indeed, parts of the Arctic and Antarctic are warming faster than anyplace else on Earth. Whole swaths of the Arctic Ocean that used to be solid ice year-round are now open water in the summer, freeing up formerly inaccessible potential drilling sites and new routes for tankers. A report published in 2004 by the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental body made up of the United States, Canada, Russia, and the Scandinavian nations, predicted that reduced sea ice in the Arctic is “likely to make trans-Arctic shipping during summer feasible within several decades” and “likely to allow increased offshore extraction of oil and gas, although increasing ice movement could hinder some operations.”

Boston Globe