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The Arctic
The circumpolar north, warming four times faster than the world
Sea ice is a mirror, and the mirror is failing. Where white ice once bounced sunlight back into space, dark open water now absorbs it, which is a principal reason the Arctic is warming roughly three to four times faster than the planet as a whole. The region is the circumpolar north — conventionally everything above the Arctic Circle at 66.5 degrees, though ecologists prefer the treeline and oceanographers the reach of the cold water, and the three lines do not agree. It covers some 21 million square kilometers of ocean, tundra, ice cap and island, holds about four million people, and is claimed and administered by eight states with frequently competing interests.
At its center lies not land but the Arctic Ocean, the smallest and shallowest of the oceans, capped by drifting sea ice that shrinks each September to a minimum far below twentieth-century averages. Around it sit Greenland, whose ice sheet is the largest in the Northern Hemisphere and whose Gunnbjorn Fjeld rises to 3,694 meters; the Canadian Arctic Archipelago; Alaska; the Russian north; Svalbard; and the northern rims of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland. Beyond the treeline the land is tundra: permafrost below, mosses, sedges and dwarf willow above, alive with mosquitoes and migratory birds for a few frantic weeks each summer. Polar bears hunt seals from the ice; walrus haul out where the ice used to be.
Inuit, Sami, Chukchi, Yupik and other peoples have lived here for thousands of years, and their hunting and herding economies are being reorganized by thinning ice and shifting animals. Outsiders arrive for what lies beneath: oil and gas, nickel, rare earths, and fisheries migrating north with the warming water. As the ice retreats, shipping routes over Russia and through the Canadian archipelago become seasonally navigable, shortening the voyage between Asia and Europe and raising sovereignty questions the Arctic Council was never designed to settle. Whatever its own residents decide, the Arctic exports its condition: Greenland's meltwater raises sea level on every coast, and the warming here has been linked to a wobblier jet stream far to the south.