The Arctic ice performed an essential function before we caused global warming. White ice reflected much of the solar radiation back into space during the arctic summer days and kept the top of the world cold, as it should be. In scientific terms, the color and reflectivity of the ice helped to keep the albedo of the planet Earth stable. This had been the case for millennia .
Now the Russians have placed a tiny flag on the North Pole seafloor under ice that has broken because it has already been basking under an overheated atmosphere, and bathed in warming water. They used an unmanned submersible to do the deed. No human was down there burbling “one small-minded step…”
At approximately the same time that week, I dropped a brand-new solar fan overboard from the bow of my sailboat. It also rests on the seafloor, but in Salem Massachusetts, a harbor floor littered with wrenches, screwdrivers, outboard motors and other rusting accidents. That tiny green-power generator (about the same size as the Russian flag, and for which I retain a valid sales slip in my name) does not give me ownership of Salem Harbor. I don’t even own the vent any more. It is available for salvage. I guess I lost both the rights to the hatch and the race to own a harbor.
Perhaps the Russians have lost their flag. Like myself, they carelessly announced that they had dropped their flag on the bottom, quite far underwater. They certainly don’t own it any more, nobody is standing down there with their hand on the flagpole, so it should also be available for salvage.
Yet despite the similarities in their circumstances, the consequences are different for these two dropped items. My dropped solar cell will minimally pollute the water, and only alter my checking account.
For their bitty flaggy thing, the Russians are claiming ownership of the all the oil rights for what is expected to be twenty-five percent of the whole world’s oil reserves under ice in a fragile environment that aught to be a global conservation area. That is a debatable claim with a dangerous outcome. Whichever nation wins this crazed debate will lead us all into tragicaly deep waters on coastlands around the world. The debaters are the nations of the world, many of whom believe that they have a right to claim this reserve for themselves. This is a true zero-sum contest.
The winning country will cause a calamity. It is a certainty that if the oil is tapped, there will one day be a great storm in that turbulent part of the globe, and some messy accident will occur to the rigs or pipelines. Black oil will spill upward to the surface. It will spread out in a thin film and change the reflectivity, the albedo of the already compromised polar ice cap. The ice itself will turn gray or black. Global warming will quickly worsen because the new dark colored water and tar-smudged ice will absorb a lot more heat from the sun and melt a lot more ice much faster, changing the ocean's currents and tempertaures. This latest chapter in the quest to exploit fossil fuels will accelerate global warming.
The idea that it is safe to drill for oil in this kind of sensitive, even critical, environment is illogical if not insane. It is Russian roulette or Russian rule-ete. One day that thing is going to go off and drown us all in a way that even the owner of the ‘gun’ will have cause to regret.
This megalomaniac land-grab oozes from deep within the manic phase of bipolar Russian capatilistic versus the Soviet distonic society. Being bi-polar and monopolistic does not mean that Russia, or any nation, should own even one pole. Perhaps it still hurts that they lost Poland.
No nation should be allowed to change the basic reflectivity of the polar regions, ever, for any reason. We should all agree that there must no race among nations for the right to destroy the planet first.
This land and the oil under the polar seas must be declared off-limits for perpetuity. The poles should become a commons upon which no one may graze for fear of great, incalculable tragedy—the tragedy of the tar-black ice.