Russia's Land Grab in the Arctic

Boy, Russia's make land grabs, and power grabs, all over the place, heh.

At Foreign Policy, "Searching for Leads in the Opening Arctic: Disappearing ice, Russia’s newest land grab, and a new great game at the top of the world":

The Arctic is opening. Can the U.S. play in a new arena? http://t.co/ZpzQR6kdz0 pic.twitter.com/6rq1I37Fey

— Foreign Policy (@ForeignPolicy) September 14, 2015

ABOARD THE COAST GUARD CUTTER HEALY, IN THE ARCTIC–When you plow into a 4-foot-thick chunk of sea ice at 3 knots, even in a 16,000-ton state-of-the-art icebreaker like the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Healy, it’s hard not to notice. The whole ship shudders and seems to lurch sideways. Metal cabinets rattle. Californians swear it sounds and feels just like an earthquake, with deep rumbling booms and tremors. Others say it’s like hitting turbulence on a jetliner, the shivering and rattling accompanied by the overdrive whine of 30,000 horsepower. If you’re down in the galley, right on the waterline, what you hear is the nerve-wracking scraping of shattered ice along the side. Five stories up, on top of the bridge, you feel the bump of the collision over the strain of the engines pushing the ship through a sea of drifting white, blue, and dirty gray ice.

That’s when there is ice. But thanks to rising global temperatures, especially acute in the Arctic, there’s less of it now than there used to be. And that creates its own problems for a ship that seeks out the stuff.

“I just wish there was more ice. It’d be good training for this crew,” said Chief Warrant Officer Tim “Tugboat” Tully, the Healy’s bosun. The 85-person crew could use it. This month, they attempted something the ship had never done before: smashing through solid ice to the North Pole itself, unaccompanied by any other vessels. The July trip would have been an ideal time to get the crew used to plowing through some heavy stuff, but the ice was patchy much of the trip. We steamed north through the Bering Strait, passed the Diomede Islands, and got near the northwest tip of Alaska before we spotted our first chunks of ice in mid-July. “Ten years ago, this was heavy going,” the bosun said.

The Arctic is melting. Summer sea ice that used to cover the Chukchi Sea and the Bering Strait isn’t there, where it used to be. Summer ice coverage in the Arctic hit a record low in 2012; this past March, it registered an all-time winter low. As the ice recedes, something new is popping up in its place: oil rigs and commercial ships. Whatever the debate about climate change looks like in Washington, it’s sadly clear up here. At least for part of the year, thanks to rising temperatures, a once-closed ocean is now open for business.

That doesn’t mean it’s always easy sailing. Less ice is more ice, the Alaskan natives say: As ice melts, it opens things up just enough to get you into trouble.Less ice is more ice, the Alaskan natives say: As ice melts, it opens things up just enough to get you into trouble. That’s as true for native whalers and seal hunters as it is for specialized drilling rigs that are starting to head north for a few months each year. Polar seas are not like other oceans. You need a survival suit just to work on deck, even in the summertime. “Man overboard” drills in freezing water have a uniquely sickening undertone; the ship’s pipe’s intonation “Man has been in water for six minutes” becomes a virtual epitaph. Communications and navigation equipment that works fine at other latitudes doesn’t near the pole. And, even if there’s less ice than there used to be, there’s still plenty of it bobbing and knocking and crashing around; what sank the Titanic is constantly looming out of the fog, posing a mortal danger to ships that aren’t ice-hardened.

“Everybody thinks you can do up here what you can do in the Lower 48, and it’s just not so. It’s a whole different environment,” says Capt. Jason Hamilton, 44, a 22-year Coast Guard veteran who just took over command of the Healy, one of two operational icebreakers the United States has. The other, the heavy icebreaker Polar Star, operates in Antarctica.

As the Arctic melts, it is birthing a new global battleground, with huge economic, environmental, and geopolitical implications for the United States. Oil companies are moving north, even though cheap crude makes pricey Arctic drilling a tough sell for now. Shipping companies are eagerly eying a fresh northern route that can trim thousands of miles off voyages between Asia and Europe. Russia, which has a fleet of six nuclear-powered heavy icebreakers, with 11 more planned or under construction, is revamping scores of Cold War-era military bases inside the Arctic Circle. Moscow, eight years after planting a symbolic flag on the seabed at the North Pole, just handed the United Nations an expansive claim to almost half a million square miles of Arctic seabed potentially rich in oil, natural gas, and minerals. The United States would be hard-pressed to make a similar claim, since it has never ratified the Law of the Sea treaty, which codifies international maritime law. And China, which isn’t even an Arctic nation, is busy dipping its toe into the icy waters — launching its very own icebreaker, currently building a second, and for the first time sending navy ships into Alaskan waters...

Pretty fascinating, no matter what your take is on climate change.

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