Tourism Booms as Arctic Melts

Gas, oil, and shipping boost economy but add to environmental concerns.

Researchers anticipate large increases of Arctic industry and tourism in this century.

The Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment, a report compiled by the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum, says that the number of cruise ships visiting Greenland alone rose from 14 in 2003 to 39 in 2008.

"All the vistas, all the sights, all the marine animals, polar bears, polar glaciers - people want to go see that stuff," says Lawson Brigham, chair of the assessment. "They want to go to the North Pole and say they stood there."

The Arctic is a promising site for business as well as pleasure. A 2008 study by the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that it contains 30% of the world's undiscovered natural gas and 13% of its undiscovered oil. Energy companies in Canada, Norway, Russia, and other nations now vie for access.

As tourism and industries increase, so might the emissions from ship smokestacks: ozone, carbon dioxide, sulfur oxides, and black carbon, among others. The emissions poison animal life, deplete the ozone layer, and taint the snow and ice, reducing their ability to mitigate global warming by reflecting sunlight away from the earth.

Arctic animals face additional hazards from human activity, according to Brigham: Fish flee ships' noise, and marine mammals are wounded by collisions with boat hulls or entanglements in fishing gear. Those animal populations have been a staple food source for the region's indigenous peoples for millennia. When animals die off, humans will go hungry.

Industry can benefit indigenous peoples, however, with bigger supplies of food, more amenities, and new jobs.

"The issue is how the indigenous people will share in the wealth of the Arctic," says Brigham. "There are opportunities, but also challenges."

Visiting tourists and developers face the risks of boating accidents, according to Walt Meier, researcher for the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

"If someone gets into trouble, there aren't any bases there to operate rescue missions from," he says. "And any kind of oil spill that may need to be cleaned up - there's no infrastructure there to support that."

The Arctic in general is now threatened by global warming, according to Meier.

"If you have a two-degree temperature change, you've completely changed the environment from ice to water," he says.

The ice is already melting rapidly: The Arctic had 13.5 million square kilometers of ice in December 1979, but only 12.5 million square kilometers of it in December 2009. By 2050, or even sooner, according to Snow and Ice Center researchers, the Arctic might be ice-free for part of every summer.

"The ice is now a lot younger and a lot thinner than it used to be," says Meier.

Brigham concurs and hopes that new treaties and laws in the future will enforce responsible use of the region and its resources. - Rick Docksai