The Guardian - Polar Opposites: Opportunities and threats in the Arctic

A new race to the North Pole is underway but not on sleds by bearded and wild-eyed adventurers looking for new challenges. The latest pioneers tend to be clean-shaven, hard-nosed salesmen in scheduled aircraft flying in to make money out of a bleak landscape.

C old is the new hot for Big Business and the melting ice caps have triggered a flurry of oil drilling, ore digging and bulk shipping. The chilly waters off Alaska, Siberia and Greenland have all been earmarked for new energy exploration. Mega-mines, such as the Mary river ore deposits in Canada and 300 miles inside the Arctic Circle, are being prepared for exploitation.

Shipowners, including Russias Sovcomflot, are pioneering journeys through the Northern Sea Route with a final goal of eventually sailing right over the roof of the world to cut time for East West trade routes. Guggenheim Partners, a US investment firm managing $125bn worth of client cash, has just announced plans to establish a new Arctic investment fund. A Chinese businessman has just been blocked from trying to buy a slice of Iceland for use as a eco-tourist resort by worried locals convinced it could be a bridgehead for more strategic purposes.

The commercial opportunities from a thawing but unique environment are complicated by legal uncertainties. There are still competing claims by nations bordering the Arctic Ocean over who owns which part of the seabed. An Arctic Council lay dormant but has suddenly become a busy centre of political activity and attracted the attention of major outside countries such as those in the European Union and China.

The US brought along secretary of state Hillary Clinton and other senior representatives to the last meeting in place of the low-level bureaucrats.

The politicians are in on the action, keen to support their national corporate champions but they are also flexing their military muscle too. Nuclear submarines have been prowling the bottom of the ocean in increasing number, with missile tests also on the up and up.

It is a far cry from the place of desolation and even death depicted two centuries ago in Mary Shelleys Frankenstein:

I shall quit your vessel on the ice raft which brought me thither and shall seek the most northern extremity of the globe; I shall collect my funeral pile and consume to ashes this miserable frame. I shall die.

Mary Shelley chose it as a deathly location for her fantasy fiction while explorer John Franklin soon after made that image real by heroically losing his ship and life there. The more positive images have been provided by glorious white landscape pictures and the heroics of explorers such as Norways Fridtjof Nansen who traversed Greenland in 1888.

Today the melting of the far-northern glaciers has stoked fears of a disappearing world hit by global warming: polar bears balanced on tiny ice rafts have become a totemic symbol of danger.

This harsh environment might not just point to extinction of the odd morbid monster or intrepid explorer or a magnificent white beast but for the whole of the human race.

But the long-term threat to the planet has equally unearthed an economic opportunity for nation states surrounding the Arctic Ocean: the search for oil is particularly controversial given that the burning of fossil fuels hasten climate change and the effects of the appalling BP well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico.

The fast-developing industrialization of the far north is already threatening upheaval for Inuit and other indigenous peoples who have peacefully co-existed with nature for hundreds of years.

Those communities themselves are often split between the potential for sudden untold wealth and the threat to their traditional hunting and fishing way of life.

Is there a middle way under which everyone can benefit or is this a dangerous gamble that could bring about catastrophe?