“The cryosphere isn’t cooling the Earth as much as it did 30 years ago, and climate model simulations do not reproduce this recent effect,” Karen Shell, an Oregon State University atmospheric scientist, said.

The cryosphere is the collective portion of Earth’s surface where water is in solid form as sea ice, snow, lake and river ice, glaciers, ice sheets and frozen ground.

Most of these frozen areas are highly reflective, and bounce sunlight back into the atmosphere, keeping Earth cooler than it would be without the cryosphere.

But as temperatures increase, areas of ice and snow melt and reflectivity decreases, Shell said.

“Instead of being reflected back into the atmosphere, the energy of the sun is absorbed by the Earth, which amplifies the warming,” Shell said. “Scientists have known for some time that there is this amplification effect, but almost all of the climate models we examined underestimated the impact — and they contained a pretty broad range of scenarios.”

Mark Flanner, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences is the lead researcher. He has analyzed data from satellites over the last three decades in the northern hemisphere.

“The implication is that Earth’s climate may be more sensitive to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide and other perturbations than models predict,” Flanner said in a press release.

Pat Michaels, a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute, said in an e-mail that while many do not dispute that the phenomenon of “greenhouse warming” exists, what is important is the “amount of warming.” He said that it is clearly below what was predicted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at University of Alabama-Huntsville, said scientists have only been measuring Arctic sea ice since 1979. He said researchers who start with the conclusion that is a “normal” period for temperatures could not be proven right or wrong.

“That is the mistake everyone makes in this business,” Spencer said. “You can’t prove them wrong. It is one thing to measure what has happened. But to figure out cause and effect is extremely different. Yet, that makes all the difference in the world when determining man-made global warming.”

Thermometer readings in the Arctic suggest that it was just as warm in the 1930s as it is now, he said.

“And it was way warmer in the Arctic thousands of years ago,” he notes. “How did that happen?”

Spencer said the sea’s ice could have melted naturally and that the U-M researchers are assuming it is all due to an increase in the output of carbon dioxide.

He notes that there was a great climate shift in 1977 that warmed Alaska up very quickly and that it would have taken longer for the ocean to catch up to the warmer land masses. It is this that could account for the melting ice.

“These changes are consistent with natural climate variability,” Spencer said.

William Happer, a professor of physics at Princeton University, pointed to a graph of data collected by the Department of Oceanography at the University of Hamburg that showed the Arctic and Antarctic sea ice areas had remained relatively the same from January 2003 through January 2010.

“I am not sure what the University of Michigan authors are looking at, but I don’t see much year-to-year ice loss,” Happer wrote in an e-mail. “There are lots of models and they predict different things.  So you can usually find some model that will predict whatever you have observed. With respect to northern hemisphere sea ice and snow cover, you might note that 30 years ago was the end of the last cooling period, that began  around 1940 and had Newsweek running alarming cover studies about the next ice age in the 1970’s.  So you don’t have to have a big computer to guess that there is a bit less snow cover now than 30 years ago.”

Greenpeace spokesperson Molly Dorozensky said there were two primary reasons for staging the tour kickoff in Wilmington.

“We think there’s actually a lot of energy in America among communities—communities where there’s been a noticeable rise in asthma among children, or communities where the effects of coal are pretty visible,” she explained.

While the ship’s presence on the Water Street riverfront will increase that visibility, the on-the-ground work will include a lot of public outreach events—with Greenpeace representatives engaged in listening to and learning and hearing from local grassroots efforts, what people want and how Greenpeace can help, Dorozensky explained.

“We are just in the very early stages of launching our coal campaign,” she said.

“In Wilmington in particular, this seems to be a place where there is already a lot of energy. One of the reasons that we chose it is not only that we think that the L.V. Sutton Plant—across America—is one that we would like to see shut down; but we think there is already pretty significant energy around that in the community among the students at UNC Wilmington and also among some of the other groups we’re working with like Stop Titan.”

In addition to free public tours of the ship, offered 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 22 and Sunday, Jan. 23, high profile events surrounding the ship’s appearance and the tour launch include a fundraiser for Stop Titan at 8 p.m. Friday,
Jan. 21 at the Soapbox on Front Street that will feature some local bands, including Ponchos, Fractal Farm and Bag of Toys.

But the biggest event, Dorozensky predicted, will be a candlelight vigil at Progress Energy’s L.V. Sutton Steam Power Plant near Lake Sutton and the northwest Cape Fear River, 4 to 5 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 22.

“The vigil will be one way for all of the different coalition groups that we’re working with in the area . . . to show their support for shutting down the Sutton Power Plant,” Dorozensky said.

The vigil will be preceded by a training session in nonviolent and direct action, or peaceful protest, led by James Brady, Greenpeace training coordinator, 10 a.m. to
3 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 22 at UNCW’s Fisher Student Union’s Azalea Coast Room.

In addition to students, the session is open to other community activists and will cover the non-violent direct action approach and conflict management.

“If you’re going to be an activist and you’re going to work on coal in the future they’re kind of good things to know,” Dorozensky said.

David Pinsky, Greenpeace student organizer, is a former University of North Carolina Wilmington graduate student and founder of the student movement UNCW ECO.

“UNCW ECO’s been very involved with the Greenpeace campaign for a couple of years and doing some incredible work,” Pinsky said. “They were working to get Congressman Mike McIntyre to sign climate legislation.”

UNCW ECO will also host two satellite events showcasing the Greenpeace Rolling Sunlight solar vehicle. The first, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 18, Greenpeace will feature to-be-announced speakers and solar-powered food; and from 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 20, a solar-powered screening of “Coal Country,” a documentary about coal mining and mountaintop removal.

But the main thrust of the campaign kickoff, Pinsky reiterated, was the coal fight and the local L.V. Sutton Power Plant target.

“That’s one of the very important things … is to raise awareness, and that it’s a dirty and dangerous form of energy,” Pinsky said. Pinsky arrived in Wilmington Wednesday, Jan. 12 to meet with key members of the community, lead outreach events and work with members of the student group and Stop Titan volunteers.

Unless the Obama administration puts the brakes on the permitting process, Shell could begin exploration off the coast of Alaska as early as this summer, despite the fact that response capability and information about the environmental impacts of a spill there are sorely lacking, according to the National Oil Spill Commission.

The commission on Tuesday outline a number of steps that Congress needs to take to help avert a future crises like the one in the Gulf. But on Arctic drilling, the administration has the capacity to step in and stop Shell without needing approval from Congress. In late 2009, the Department of Interior green-lighted Royal Dutch Shell to begin exploration in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas off the northern coast of Alaska. It looked like that exploratory drilling there could begin last summer, but the temporary moratorium that the Obama administration imposed following the Gulf spill delayed that (though that moratorium has since been dropped).

The plan to expand offshore drilling that the Obama administration laid out last March opened more areas of the Arctic for drilling. While the administration later walked back its plans to expand drilling following the Deepwater spill, the Arctic is still on the table; Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in Deember he plans to take a “cautious” approach to issuing new leases there, after completing a new environmental review and evaluating spill response capabilities. The administration also signaled that it plans to move forward with the permitting process that would eventually allow Shell to begin drilling on its lease in the Beaufort, though an exact timeline for decisions is not clear. A new environmental assessment on that application is currently underway.

Environmental groups have been fighting to halt Arctic exploration for some time, arguing that the areas under consideration for drilling would be particularly vulnerable should a spill occur; the Interior Department, they say, has so far done an inadequate job of evaluating the potential environmental threats drilling there poses.

While acknowledging that there the Arctic is an “important area for future oil and gas development,” the commission advised that much more research and investigation should be conducted before it moves forward. Geological and environmental information about the region is lacking, as are the industry and government institutions that would be needed to ensure it is done safely, the commission noted. Exploration there should be undertaken with “the utmost care,” the commission advised.

The need for caution in the Arctic is pretty clear, as both the spill commissoin and a recent report from Pew Environmental Group have concluded. The region is covered with ice eight to nine months out of every year. Sub-zero temperatures are the norm. It’s dark most of the day during the winter months. High winds, major storms, and heavy fog are common. Organizing a spill response there would be quite challenging, and cold environment also means that oil would degrade more slowly. In addition to an inhospitable climate, the nearest Coast Guard station is 1,000 miles away and doesn’t have the kind of vessels that would be needed to deal with a spill in the ice. It’s also a rich ecosystem, home to whales, walruses, and bears, among other species.

The commission recommended that the Department of Interior take steps to “ensure that the containment and response plans proposed by industry are adequate” and backed up by demonstrated financial and technical resources. They also advise that the Coast Guard and oil companies “carefully delineate their respective responsibilities in the event of an accident,” and that Congress provide adequate funding for the Coast Guard to fulfill those responsibilities.

For now, enviros argue that the Arctic exploration plans should be put on ice until there’s more information available. Moving forward now would be “reckless,” argued Bill Eichbaum, vice president of marine and Arctic policy at the World Wildlife Fund. “We think that the Department of Interior should suspend the consideration of any further permitting or leasing for oil development activities until they have addressed each of these issues,” he said.

Shell has invested $3.5 billion in its Arctic exploration program, but it’s already faced several set backs. Earlier this month, environmental groups successfully challenged Shell’s air quality permit. (Shell did not respond to a request for comment about the spill commission’s findings.*) Whether the commission report will prove to be another obstacle is unclear. “Secretary Salazar believes we need to continue to take a cautious approach in the Arctic that is guided by science and the voices of North Slope communities,” said Salazar spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff in a statement on Tuesday.

But enviros are hoping the spill commission report will serve as validation of their concerns about Arctic drilling plans. “Until Shell can prove they can clean up an oil spill, allowing drilling to go forward is the wrong decision,” said Leah Donahey, Arctic Ocean campaign director at the Alaska Wilderness League.

*UPDATE: Shell sent over a comment on the report on Wednesday afternoon outlining steps that the company has taken to “make an already-robust Arctic exploration plan, even stronger.” Spokeswoman Kelly op de Weegh said the company has undertaken “dozens of Arctic studies” and believes that “significant data exists to proceed with an exploration program.”

“We look forward to achieving a more thorough understanding of the Commission’s recommendations and assessing perceived gaps against the unprecedented steps Shell has taken to pursue safe, environmentally responsible exploration in shallow water off the coast of Alaska,” said op de Weegh.

In its review, the agency relied on climate projections from the Fourth Assessment Report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which predict that by 2050 November sea ice formation in areas inhabited by both species will be 50 percent lower than current conditions. 
The agency’s models predict wide geographic disparity, with year round ice free zones in parts of the Arctic, and much diminished ice pack lasting for only a few months, closer to land masses.
Both species use snow drifts on sea ice to create birthing and whelping dens for pups and the predicted decline in ice formation is accompanied by a decline in average snow fall for the rest of the century, reaching the point around 2050 when ringed seals will no longer be able to build dens in their current range.
The bearded seal is the largest of seals dependent on northern sea ice formation, with adults reaching nearly 800 pounds. The ringed seal is the smallest, with adults averaging just over 150 pounds.
The agency requests public input on listing the two species as threatened, and is specifically interested in information related to developing critical habitat designations for the seals.

Aluksraq, on the other hand, would indicate the less sinister ‘young ice punched by seals forming a seal blowhole’, while agiuppak might not even rate a mention, as it reveals little more than a harmless ‘smooth wall of ice along the edge of landfast ice formed by other moving ice’.

It would take a lifetime to acquire the discriminating Inuit eye, but after half a dozen seasons in the polar regions I can at least recognise old sea ice from young. First-year ice is greyish, multi-year ice blueish (another clue: multi-year ice is thicker, so sticks out of the water further). Salt gets pushed out when sea ice freezes, as it does not fit in the structure of the crystal, and the older the ice, the less salt it contains, which is why, as every expeditioner once knew, you can wash with melted first-year ice, cook with second-year ice, and make tea with multi-year ice.

I remember a Zodiac journey among young ice off Franz Josef Land, an uninhabited archipelago at 80 degrees north. It was -20C. The boat’s ripples died under a film of grease ice that followed the contours of the swell, its saltwater pockets flexing. Where the film had thickened, it had turned white, like a rind: isigoanjazuk. Green water filled basins under the pressure cracks, and frost smoke wafted from the gaps. Among shattered panes murmuring in the shallows, shapes overlapped in quilted patterns. The diaphanous light, the tinkling platelets, the rearing bergs lofting into periwinkle sky – a polar landscape has its way of lifting the spirits.

Out beyond the islands, a dazzling stripe on the underside of distant stratocumulus indicated the presence of sea ice below. In a polar phenomenon called iceblink, clouds are lit from underneath by sunlight reflected up from a patch of pack ice in a contrasting dark area of water. It guided the first travellers. One of them, the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen, is the polar explorer’s polar explorer, a man for all seasons who understood the attenuated, fragile beauty of the Arctic. When he first came upon iceblink, Nansen wrote, ‘I felt instinctively that I stood on the threshold of a new world.’

Back on board the mothership (a Russian icebreaker), I watched the captain nose us into splodges of ice that lay like a map on bruised water. A cover of milky cloud had moved in, masking the sun. By late evening we had entered open water, the ice reduced to the occasional islet and biomorphic berg. By 3am, the clouds had rolled back, and freshly formed bergs floated past in a spangled parade, the multifaceted walls and chambers fissured and dimpled and streaked with moraine – Coleridge’s ‘sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice’. I stayed on deck so long that the airborne ice crystals known as diamond dust burnt my nostrils.

The Arctic Ocean covers almost 5.5 million square miles, which is one and a half times the area of the United States and 60 United Kingdoms. Ice covers almost all of it in winter, and about half in summer. The icecap grows and shrinks with the seasons, the freeze and thaw replacing the rise and fall of sap. Owing to an acceleration of the thinning process already in train, permanent winter ice is now half its 1976 thickness. A cold period may allow it to recover. But since a blizzard of studies have shown a faster melt than expected (and even a sharp decrease in the extent of winter sea ice, as well as thickness), most scientists are predicting an Arctic Ocean entirely free of summer ice before the end of the century.

Will future generations ever stand on the threshold of Nansen’s new world? Or will they look at these images and long for the in­effable glow of an iceberg in the sun?

The loss of the vital reflective properties of ice is a major factor both in accelerated melt and in the rapid warming of the Arctic in general. Ice operates as a reflective lid, bouncing the sun’s heat back into the atmosphere, whereas open water absorbs about 90 per cent of the sunlight that hits it. The albedo of an object – from the Latin for whiteness – is the extent to which it diffusely reflects light from the sun; albedo can range from zero per cent (no sunlight reflected – all absorbed – hot earth), to 100 per cent (all sunlight reflected – none absorbed – cold earth).

Anything that changes the earth’s albedo, such as an increase in sea-ice melt, therefore also changes the amount of energy the planet absorbs. As more ice melts, more heat goes in, which causes more ice to melt, and so it goes on. Both polar regions are losing ice, but in different ways.

The Arctic is ocean surrounded by land; the Antarctic land surrounded by ocean. Antarctic sea ice is both less extensive and less sensitive than its northern counterpart – but the shelves! The Ross Ice Shelf is larger than France. I camped on the edge once. Lying in a small tent on top of 12ft of ice, I heard Weddell seals calling to one another in the Southern Ocean beneath my head.

The role of the polar oceans and their ice in climate change is complex and occluded in uncertainty. At a macro level, alterations in temperature, salinity and reflective properties affect currents and heat transportation in ways that have a fundamental impact on our climate. At a micro level, a warming Arctic Ocean has begun to recalibrate the planet’s carbon exchange by heating billions of lifeforms in the microbial soup at the bottom of the food web. These processes are improperly understood, and outcomes can be good as well as bad. A shifting phytoplankton population in an ice-free ocean may result in an abundance of fish, solving, at a stroke, the planetary protein deficit.

Whatever happens, the lascivious promise of hydro­carbons hitherto locked below the ice lid has shunted the Arctic to the front pages as oil-thirsty nations hurtle north. The Arctic already produces about a 10th of the world’s oil and a quarter of its gas. As you read this, geologists and palaeontologists from many nations are chipping indicator fossils from bedrock to locate more, the roar of their submarine drills an elegy for what Nansen called the Arctic ice’s ‘endless song of silence’.

Two years ago I flew from Greenland’s west coast up to the abiotic icecap that covers most of the country. Once the ski-equipped C-130 Hercules had crossed the coastal margins, the glaciers stretched out like paws. The active faces were toothpaste blue, some corrugated, others bunched into peaks. Up ahead, through the window of the cockpit, the ectoplasmic fog of a thousand-mile ice sheet blurred the horizon. When the tips of the coastal mountains disappeared, the pilot and I looked out over an immense flat whiteness shimmering in refracted sunlight. Nothing was said over the headsets. The landscape spoke for itself.

The early modernist artist Rockwell Kent spent several seasons in Greenland in the 1930s, in flight, he said, from the chaos of modern America. Often he camped out on the sea ice to work for days at a stretch, holding a paintbrush through holes cut in his mittens. The starlit winters and uncluttered landscapes allowed him to reflect on mystical aspirations. ‘In Greenland,’ Kent wrote, ‘one discovers, as if for the first time, what beauty is.’

Gas locked inside Siberia’s frozen soil and under its lakes has been seeping out since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. But in the past few decades, as the Earth has warmed, the icy ground has begun thawing more rapidly, accelerating the release of methane — a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide — at a perilous rate.

Some scientists believe the thawing of permafrost could become the epicenter of climate change. They say 1.5 trillion tons of carbon, locked inside icebound earth since the age of mammoths, is a climate time bomb waiting to explode if released into the atmosphere.

“Here, total carbon storage is like all the rain forests of our planet put together,” says the scientist, Sergey Zimov — “here” being the endless sweep of snow and ice stretching toward Siberia’s gray horizon, as seen from Zimov’s research facility nearly 350 kilometers (220 miles) above the Arctic Circle.

Climate change moves back to center-stage on Nov. 29 when governments meet in Cancun, Mexico, to try again to thrash out a course of counteractions. But U.N. officials hold out no hope the two weeks of talks will lead to a legally binding accord governing carbon emissions, seen is the key to averting what is feared might be a dramatic change in climate this century.

Most climate scientists, with a few dissenters, say human activities — the stuff of daily life like driving cars, producing electricity or raising cattle — is overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, methane and other gases that trap heat, causing a warming effect.

But global warming is amplified in the polar regions. What feels like a modest temperature rise is enough to induce Greenland glaciers to retreat, Arctic sea ice to thin and contract in summer, and permafrost to thaw faster, both on land and under the seabed.

Yet awareness of methane leaks from permafrost is so new that it was not even mentioned in the seminal 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which warned of rising sea levels inundating coastal cities, dramatic shifts in rainfall disrupting agriculture and drinking water, the spread of diseases and the extinction of species.

“In my view, methane is a serious sleeper out there that can pull us over the hump,” said Robert Corell, an eminent U.S. climate change researcher and Arctic specialist. Corell, speaking by telephone from a conference in Miami, said he and other U.S. scientists are pushing Washington to deploy satellites to gather more information on methane leaks.

The lack of data over a long period of time casts uncertainty over the extent of the threat. An article last August in the journal Science quoted several experts as saying it’s too early to predict whether Arctic methane will be the tipping point.

“Arctic Armageddon Needs More Science, Less Hype,” was its headline.

Studies indicate that cold-country dynamics on climate change are complex. The Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, a scientific body set up by the eight Arctic rim countries, says overall the Arctic is absorbing more carbon dioxide than it releases.

“Methane is a different story,” said its 2009 report. The Arctic is responsible for up to 9 percent of global methane emissions. Other methane sources include landfills, livestock and fossil fuel production.

Katey Walter Anthony, of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, has been measuring methane seeps in Arctic lakes in Alaska, Canada and Russia, starting here around Chersky 10 years ago.

She was stunned to see how much methane was leaking from holes in the sediment at the bottom of one of the first lakes she visited. “On some days it looked like the lake was boiling,” she said. Returning each year, she noticed this and other lakes doubling in size as warm water ate into the frozen banks.

“The edges of the lake look like someone eating a cookie. The permafrost gets digested in the guts of the lake and burps out as methane,” she said in an interview in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, en route to a field trip in Greenland and Scandinavia.

More than 50 billion tons could be unleashed from Siberian lakes alone, more than 10 times the amount now in the atmosphere, she said.

But the rate of defrosting is hard to assess with the data at hand.

“If permafrost were to thaw suddenly, in a flash, it would put a tremendous amount of carbon in the atmosphere. We would feel temperatures warming across the globe. And that would be a big deal,” she said. But it may not happen so quickly. “Depending on how slow permafrost thaws, its effect on temperature across the globe will be different,” she said.

Permafrost is defined as ground that has stayed below freezing for more than two consecutive summers. In fact, most of Siberia and the rest of the Arctic, covering one-fifth of the Earth’s land surface, have been frozen for millennia.

During the summer, the ground can defrost to a depth of several feet, turning to sludge and sometimes blossoming into vast fields of grass and wildflowers. Below that thin layer, however, the ground remains frozen, sometimes encased in ice dozens or even hundreds of meters (yards) thick.

As the Earth warms, the summer thaw bites a bit deeper, awakening ice-age microbes that attack organic matter — vegetation and animal remains — buried where oxygen cannot reach, producing methane that gurgles to the surface and into the air.

The newly released methane adds to the greenhouse effect, trapping yet more heat which deepens the next thaw, in a spiraling cycle of increasing warmth.

Curbing man-made methane emissions could slow this process, said Walter Anthony.

“We have an incentive to reduce our fossil fuel emissions. By doing so, we can reduce the warming that’s occurring in the Arctic and potentially put some brakes on permafrost thaw,” she said.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in its 2010 Arctic Report Card issued last month, said the average temperature of the permafrost has been rising for decades, but noted “a significant acceleration” in the last five years at many spots on the Arctic coast.

One of those spots would be Chersky, an isolated town on the bank of the Kolyma River at the mouth of the East Siberia Sea.

The ground in this remote corner of the world, 6,600 kilometers (4,000 miles) east of Moscow, has warmed about 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) in the last five years, to about -5 C (23 F?) today, says Zimov, director of the internationally funded Northeast Science Station, which is about three kilometers (2 miles) from town.

The warming is causing the landscape to buckle under his feet.

“I live here more than 30 years. … There are many (dirt) roads in our region which I used or built myself, but now I can’t use anymore. Now they look like canyons,” he says.

Buildings, too, collapse. The school in Chersky, a Soviet-era structure with a tall bronze statue of Karl Marx on its doorstep, was abandoned several years ago when the walls began to crack as the foundations gave way.

The northern Siberian soil, called yedoma, covers 1.8 million square kilometers (700,000 sq. miles) and is particularly unstable. Below the surface are vertical wedges of ice, as if 15-story-high icicles had been hammered into the soft ground, rich in decaying vegetation, over thousands of years.

As the air warms, the tops of the wedges melt and create depressions in the land. Water either forms a lake or runs off to lower ground, creating a series of steep hillocks and gullies. During summer, lakeside soil may erode and tumble into the water, settling on the bottom where bacteria eat it and cough up yet more methane.

The process takes a long time, but Zimov has done a simulation by bulldozing trees and scraping off moss and surface soil from 1 hectare (2.5 acres) of former larch forest, rendering it as if it had been leveled by fire.

Seven years later the previously flat terrain is carved up with crevices 10 to 15 feet (3 to 5 meters) deep, creating a snowy badlands.

Gazing across a white river to the apartment blocks on a distant hill, Zimov said, “In another 30 years all of Chersky will look like this.”

The country needs a “comprehensive threat and vulnerability assessment” that not only examines northern vulnerability to threats like terrorism and illegal shipping, but also investigates how economic development can influence security, the Conference Board of Canada suggests in Security in Canada’s North: Looking Beyond Arctic Sovereignty.

The security of the vast northern stretches of the country has gained importance in recent years, as diamonds and hydrocarbons show economic potential while the retreating polar ice cap opens shipping routes. An intelligence assessment uncovered last week said organized crime and human traffickers have already attempted Arctic forays.

But the Conference Board suggests Canada look beyond establishing military sovereignty and consider instead the well-being of northerners, something the report terms “community security.”

That means working to protect northerners from “the widest possible range of threats and hazards,” author Bjorn Rutten wrote.

“To those living in the North, security concerns are likely to focus on the capacity of communities to meet the basic needs of their inhabitants and to become more resilient.”

Parts of the North continue to confront a lack of work, poor housing, high crime rates and the difficulties of providing good roads, water, education and health to isolated outposts. When industrial projects like new mines are approved, community infrastructure is often not upgraded to support the increased activity.

And in a part of the country where the elements are fierce, help usually comes from Trenton, Ont., which is roughly the same distance from Canadian Force Station Alert, on Ellesmere Island, as it is from Bogota, Colombia.

It is these issues that pose the “greatest threats to the security and resilience of Canada’s northern communities,” Mr. Rutten finds.

Some believe the greatest threats to the North are from outside, and we need a military to protect against rogue tankers or terrorists. But Rob Huebert, associate director of the University of Calgary’s Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, said Canada should be asking not only how it can hold onto the North, but why.

“Everything we’re doing in preparation for the new Arctic that’s arriving on our doorstep – we’re doing it in the context of preparing it for the betterment of Canadians, and in particular northern Canadians,” he said.

The North has recently found itself the object of much federal attention. Yet funding has yet to materialize to build a long slate of pledged projects, such as ice-strengthened navy ships, a deep-sea port on Baffin Island, an Arctic army training centre and a Far North research centre.

Still, the Harper government has created a Northern Economic Development Agency and “the Prime Minister himself has been talking about the importance of social and economic development as a component of Canada’s northern strategy,” said Michael Byers, global politics and international law chair at the University of British Columbia.

But, he said, Ottawa has been loath to dedicate the kind of funds that would help alleviate problems with housing and education in places like Nunavut, where strides in Inuktitut-language instruction could enable a more prosperous future. Even a multibillion-dollar investment would pale compared to the value of northern Canada’s resources, he said.

This report was first covered by The Globe and Mail.

The explorers were helped by the Inuit, who have found ways of telling where water and land are without the aid of satellite mapping. This is a useful survival skill in regions that freeze over or thaw out unpredictably. One of their key indictors is “ice blink”, seen as a white line on the horizon. This is the reflection of ice on the underside of low clouds, showing there is an ice field beyond. Its counterpart is “water sky”, in which the clouds are marked by dark streaks, showing that there is sea water underneath.

Even with this assistance the quest for the Northwest Passage was fruitless. In 1795, after two centuries of searching it was determined that no continuous channel existed. The route between Atlantic and Pacific can be traversed, but the journey takes years as vessels get frozen in place for months at a time.

However, thinning ice has meant that in 2008 the first commercial vessel made its way along the coast. As the ice recedes, the navigators’ dream may come true and the Northwest Passage may become a reality at last.

There is a new board of directors at the Canadian Polar Commission, which had been without a board for over two years.

Indian and Northern Affairs Minister John Duncan has announced the appointment of 10 new directors to Canada’s lead polar research agency, including chairman Bernard Funston.

Funston, a lawyer, northern circumpolar affairs consultant and longtime member of the Arctic Council, was born and raised in the Northwest Territories but is currently based in Ottawa.

Nellie Cournoyea of Inuvik, N.W.T., was chosen as the commission’s vice-chair. A former premier of the Northwest Territories, Cournoyea is currently head of the Inuvialuit Regional Corp., which represents the Inuvialuit people of the western Arctic.

Other directors are:

• Barrie Ford, who led International Polar Year research efforts in northern Quebec’s Nunavik region.
• Martin Fortier, executive director of the ArcticNet research network and chair of the Polar Continental Shelf Program’s advisory board.
• Robert Gannicott, a geologist and chief executive officer of Harry Winston Diamond Corp.
• David Hik, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Northern Ecology at the University of Alberta.
• Robert Huebert, an Arctic sovereignty expert and associate director of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary.
• Maxim Jean-Louis, president of Contact North, a distance-education and training network that operates in small, remote and northern communities.
• John Nightingale, president of the Vancouver Aquarium Marine Science Centre.
• Darielle Talarico, a strategic planning consultant based in Whitehorse.

The Canadian Polar Commission is a federal advisory agency set up in 1991 to promote, monitor and disseminate scientific research on Canada’s Arctic.

While the commission does not grant its own research funding, it does advise the federal government on what direction Arctic research should take.

The commission had been operating without a sitting board of directors since October 2008. Appointments to the board must be made as orders-in-council from the offices of the prime minister and the Privy Council.

Duncan announced the board appointments in a news release dated Wednesday, one day after Arctic researchers and opposition politicians raised concerns about the two-year absence of a functioning board at the commission.

CBC News Reports.