The Arctic is changing rapidly but no one knows exactly why. Although global warming is the root cause, every attempt by scientists to predict how fast the sea ice is disappearing, or how quickly the Greenland ice cap is melting, has proved wrong, and so far the speed of change has always been worryingly faster than scientists predict. That is partly because the processes are complex and full of unexpected feedbacks and partly because there is just not enough long-term data for most of the Arctic to build powerful models. The book will begin by looking at the attempts to understand what is happening in the Arctic and at the latest scientific expeditions and networks of high-tech instruments that are trying to gather the data needed to predict change, before change has overwhelmed the Arctic.
The second part of the book looks at likely winners and losers as change comes. The indigenous people who live in the circumpolar region face big challenges to traditional ways of subsistence hunting, but they are a very adaptable people and they themselves see new opportunities too as the ice melts. Key questions for Arctic residents will be who governs the region and how, and whether political change is critical to deal with the changing environment. The disruption to Arctic ecosystems will be harder to predict: from plankton to polar bears every species will be affected and some will move, some adapt and some disappear.
The big new winners may be those who will try to get at the Arctic’s wealth—oil, gas, minerals, shipping routes, fisheries—as the ice melts. The book will look at the chances for sustainable development as against an uncontrolled gold rush and at the astonishing technology needed to operate in the Arctic. Any attempt to develop the Arctic will be accompanied by political wheeling and dealing as different nations try to extend their claims under the United Nations Law of the Sea Convention. Those claims will in turn depend on the geology of the ocean floor, another exciting area of exploration that the book will look at.
Finally the book will return to the science of global change and ask whether the Arctic will take its revenge on the rest of the world. Among the more dramatic scenarios for the “Arctic’s revenge” are sea-level rise, changes to the Atlantic conveyor, and massive releases of greenhouse gases from permafrost and sea-bed methane clathrates. But it is more likely that the profound changes in the Arctic will return south as a gradual change to the rest of the world’s climate, proving once again that all the world is interconnected.