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THE ARCTIC Ocean is a moat between the superpowers, yet, partly for
that reason, it is the least understood of the major oceans of the world.
These two facts provide strong reasons for the international communities
of both scientists and politicians to take a new interest in the Arctic
region.

Others may be persuaded by a third fact: the impact of the greenhouse
effect on Arctic regions could leave the entire Arctic Ocean free of ice
each summer within a century.

On Monday this week, Britain’s Natural Environment Research Council
published a review of Arctic science policy and promised to find more money
for research there. This may go some way to reversing a strange anomaly
under which British scientists spend much more time and money investigating
the Antarctic, at the far end of the planet, than they do studying a polar
region that is much closer to home.

The move is the latest in a flurry of activity on Arctic matters. In
December last year, eight nations with borders in the Arctic agreed on the
terms of reference for a new International Arctic Science Committee, and
there are plans for an intergovernmental Arctic Forum. Such moves could
also involve Britain which, while not an ‘Arctic rim’ nation, could be eligible
for membership because of its scientific involvement in the region.

Other nations to pick up the research gauntlet include the US, where
Congress passed an Arctic Research and Policy Act in 1984, which paved the
way for a comprehensive US Arctic Research Plan, published in 1987. Canada,
too, is expanding its activity, including a growing military interest in
the region. But a plan to set up a polar commission is stalled.

In 1987, Mikhail Gorbachov made a speech at Murmansk, the home port
of the Soviet Union’s sizeable Arctic navy. He stunned the world’s Arctic
scientists and policy-makers, by announcing that the Soviet Union would
collaborate with other countries in the Arctic, especially in science, technology
and the protection of the environment.

‘Let the north of the planet – the Arctic – become a zone of peace,’
he said, ‘a nuclear-free zone in northern Europe.’ And he called for ‘peaceful
cooperation in utilising the resources of the Arctic . . . coordinating
scientific studies’, and for a ‘unified complex plan for the protection
of the environment of the north’.

The speech was a complete reversal for the Soviet Union, which had hitherto
regarded everything about the Arctic as top secret, a matter of national
security. The world’s scientists, frustrated by their exclusion from half
the world’s Arctic territory and well over half of its Arctic research,
hurried to take Gorbachov at his word.

The first fruit of this new mood was last December’s agreement to set
up the International Arctic Science Committee ‘to promote international
cooperation and coordination of scientific research’ in the region. This
year, Finland is attempting to organise an international treaty among Arctic-rim
nations, which will have among its goals the coordination and promotion
of northern science.

Anders Karlquist, the director of the Polar Secretariat of the Royal
Swedish Academy, says the Soviet Union’s about-face has changed the whole
outlook for Arctic research. ‘I think the discussion of research cooperation
in the Arctic has already benefited advocates of more funding for Arctic
research,’ says Karlquist. He cites West Germany’s Polar Research Institute
in Bremerhaven, which has recently been able to commit itself to a permanent
research establishment on the island of Svalbard, which is controlled by
Norway.

The old intransigence of the Soviet Union seriously hampered efforts
to study the north in the past. Kurt Abrahamson, of the University of Umea
in Sweden, cites the voyage of the Swedish research ship Ymer in the mid-1980s.
The value of its results was much limited by scientists’ inability to collect
samples of water and sediments from most of the Arctic basin belonging to
the Soviet Union.

While there have been bilateral arrangements between Arctic nations
covering particular research efforts, says Karlquist, the role of the Arctic
in global climate and the transport of air, water and pollutants is such
that only a multinational agreement will make effective research possible.
His view is echoed by Esko Rajakosky, of the Finnish foreign ministry, and
the moving force behind Finland’s proposal for an environmental treaty among
Arctic nations.

It is not just the Soviet Union that has hamstrung Arctic research,
however. Arctic scientists have been overshadowed by their colleagues in
the Antarctic. Many polar scientists left Arctic work for the better-funded
south. The difference between the two areas is not scientific, but political.
The Antarctic Treaty, which came into force in 1961, did not entirely, as
the British proposal for Arctic science states, ‘remove the Antarctic from
politics’. It did, however, limit the activities of nations in the Antarctic
largely to research, making science one of the few ways for countries like
Britain and Norway to assert their presence and promote their territorial
claims on the continent. The British Antarctic Survey, as a result, retains
the lion’s share of British money for polar research.

The Arctic Ocean, because of its strategic role as a shipping lane for
nuclear-powered submarines and, in the case of the Soviet Union, for considerable
civil maritime traffic as well, has not been an area in which scientists
could move freely. In addition to their outright exclusion from Soviet territory,
European scientists complain that the most detailed maps of the Arctic Ocean
floor, for example, are not available to civilian scientists. They are the
carefully guarded property of the US Navy.

The real impetus for the changing political climate in the Arctic comes
from the Soviet Union. Arthur Chillingarov, the deputy head of the State
Committee for Hydrometeorology and the Soviet Union’s leading Arctic scientist,
took an active part in a meeting in Paris this year that brought together
most of Europe’s Arctic researchers. He made proposals called ‘astonishing’
by one participant, ranging from the offer of a joint venture with Western
companies to develop an airship for use in the Arctic, to proposing the
use by foreign researchers of specialised Soviet transport aircraft, and
the expertise developed by Soviet research teams in parachuting equipment
onto ice floes, and maintaining long-term research stations on the ice pack.

With four large research institutes devoted to Arctic research, and
more than 100 research stations in the north, the Soviet Union’s scientists
‘put more resources into the Arctic and know more about the region than
any of us,’ says Karlquist. He warns, however, that the International Arctic
Science Committee ‘doesn’t exist yet’, despite the announcements and preparatory
meetings, and ‘it is too early to say whether it will succeed in the near
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One question that remains to be decided, and which is worrying nations
such as Britain and France, is how nations without Arctic territory will
be included in the new international organisations coordinating Arctic research.
¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵs in Paris in February expressed fears that under the Finnish treaty,
which gives major decision-making roles to Arctic-rim nations, scientists
from further south could be left out of important joint projects. Karlquist
discounts such fears. ‘We hope that we will conduct science in the way we
are used to, with the full participation of the international community,’
he says. ‘Very much important Arctic research is done in non-Arctic countries.’

The scientific imperative for giving greater priority to the Arctic
is growing as fast as the political imperative. This month’s environmental
disaster in Alaska, when an oil spill caused widespread ecological damage
to Arctic waters, has focused international attention on the fragility of
Arctic ecosystems – and brought calls for new restrictions on the activities
of oil companies there.

Plans to exploit vast oil reserves on the ‘North shelf’ of Alaska, bordering
the Arctic Ocean itself, are exciting concern as the administration of George
Bush considers whether it should allow oil exploitation within the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge.

This year, too, researchers have probed the stratosphere above the Arctic,
by plane and balloon, in the search for evidence that the ozone layer is
perforated there, as it is over the Antarctic.

And, finally, climatic modellers are predicting with ever-increasing
confidence that the greenhouse effect will warm the Arctic regions much
more than it will more temperate latitudes. The additional warming is largely
because of the effect of the reflectivity of ice.

The strategic implications of Arctic warming, as passages for ships
open up across the Arctic Ocean, excite military planners. And climatologists
predict that the loss of ice will have fundamental effects on climatic systems
in much of the northern hemisphere – effects that could in some areas dwarf
changes due to the greenhouse effect itself.

Equally worrying, say oceanographers, the far northern Atlantic is one
of the few regions in the world where surface water plunges to the depths
of the ocean. The waters around Iceland and Greenland are the driving force
for a stirring of the oceans that helps to control the climate of the planet.
About 20 million cubic metres of water descends to the bottom of the ocean
here every second, taking with it perhaps as much carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere as humans put into the air by burning fossil fuels.

The Arctic waters descend to the ocean bottom because they become very
saline (and thus dense) as cold Arctic winds evaporate the warmer water
and ice formation removes fresh water, leaving behind an increasingly saline
ocean.

Disturb the ice formation so that the formation of ‘deep water’ changes,
and the entire deep ocean circulation may be disrupted.

The deep ocean circulation appears to be prone to sudden ‘flips’ in
its operation, which are linked to ice ages. One speculation among researchers
is that any interference with the formation of ‘deep water’ in the North
Atlantic could switch off the Gulf Stream, which keeps western Europe warm
in winter.