Season 2: Episode 7

Hello, Central!

If there's one thing everybody's heard about the Arctic, it's that sea ice is melting, and that's bad news. But what's less well-known is that some people see opportunity in sea ice loss. This time, take a seat in the captain's chair of a Finnish icebreaker, sing along with a very musical Alaskan mayor, and find out what it means when the world gets a whole new ocean.

Read More

2018 Arctic summertime sea ice

Arctic sea ice follows seasonal patterns. It increases during fall and winter and shrinks during spring and summer. But in the past decades, increasing temperatures have led to rapid decreases in the minimum summertime extent of Arctic sea ice. 2018 tied for the sixth lowest on record.

Changes in Arctic Sea Ice over 60 years

Working from a combination of satellite records and declassified submarine sonar data, NASA scientists have constructed a 60-year record of Arctic sea ice thickness. Watch the video here.

How a warming Arctic speeds up climate change — and spreads its damage

A warming Arctic has consequences for the entire planet. Learn more in this article from CBC.

What Happens in the Arctic Doesn't Stay in the Arctic

The Aspen Global Change Institute uses watercolors in this video to explain the causes and consequences of polar amplification.

Credits

Transcript

[00:00] INTRODUCTION

AMY: Where do you stand when you are out, like, when you're doing this? I want to stand next to you. We'll pretend we're on the ice.

PASI: OK, OK. 

AMY: Welcome to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and I'm inside a giant ship docked in the port of Helsinki, Finland. It's an icebreaker named Polaris, and Pasi Järvelin is the captain.

PASI: It's very exciting, I like ice breaking a lot, yes. 

AMY: We're up on the bridge, at the top of the ship. It's so tall we actually took an elevator to get here. An icebreaker is a special kind of ship designed to cut channels into sea ice so other ships can get through. They're like the offensive line of the ship world, they power through the ice cutting pathways for research boats, oil tankers, military ships -- basically, any craft hoping to travel through polar oceans may need assistance from an icebreaker.

PASI: So you can go and sit there.

AMY: That's your seat?

PASI: Yeah.

AMY: The Polaris is very new – the bridge is sleek and modern, with huge tinted windows. From Pasi's seat, I'm looking at dozens of screens and panels full of inscrutable switches and knobs.

AMY: I feel like I'm in some combination of a dentist's chair and the USS Enterprise. that's ah – whoa!

AMY: Pasi had pushed a button that made the chair I was sitting in roll forward and lock into place, apparently so the captain can stay right where he or she needs to be, even when the seas get rough.

AMY: Like if we were going through ice right now, what does it look like from up here, like what would you be seeing? I mean is the ice piling up on either side of you?

PASI: (laughs) Well it's a quite masculine job yes, I would say. (laughs)

AMY: You feel like a badass is what you're saying? (laughs)

PASI: Yes, like a badass, yes.

AMY: Tell me more, like what, what, how're you feeling when you're out there breaking up some ice?

PASI: Well, like they say in Titanic, I'm the king of the world. (laughter)

AMY: You know you're in the presence of a confident icebreaker captain when he has no qualms about referencing the Titantic while standing on his ship.

MUSIC

AMY: The whole point of an icebreaker, is, of course, to break ice. And that might seem like an odd thing to do, because if there's one thing almost everyone has heard about the Arctic, it's that the sea ice is breaking up all on its own. In this episode, we're going to find out why loss of sea ice matters – not only for the animals and people that live in the Arctic, but for all of us. But we're also going to explore an aspect of this story that you might not have heard about: the melting of Arctic sea ice could actually lead to a huge economic boom in the region, in all kinds of sectors – including, somewhat ironically, icebreaking. In the long run, climate change will almost certainly be humankind's most expensive folly ever. But as economist John Maynard Keynes famously said, in the long run, we're all dead. And in the meantime, there's money to be made in a melting Arctic. We're going to dive into this confusing mixture of threat and opportunity on this episode of Threshold.

MUSIC: THRESHOLD THEME

“Basically we will have a new ocean in the world. Totally new ocean.”

“It was always frozen like the end of October. It no longer is.”

“We understand the basic science here. We have got this nailed down. Climate change is real and it is us.”

“People sometimes don’t realize how important it is to them until it’s disappearing or some cases unfortunately, till after it goes.”

“You know there’s those saying maybe it’s too late, well you know, I’m an old gypsy from New York. It’s never too late.” 

“Hello, central!”

[03:54] SEGMENT A

AMY: So, let's get a little sea ice 101 here, starting with the obvious –  what is sea ice, exactly?

MARK: Yeah well what sea ice is, sea ice is any form of ice that forms on the ocean. 

AMY: This is Mark Serreze, the director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado. 

MARK: Now sea ice can range from a thin veneer you know half an inch thick or less up to in places maybe even 10 meters thick or more, so it's quite variable. 

AMY: You might have heard sea ice referred to as a “polar ice cap,” but that sort of makes it sound like a fixed, stationary thing. Actually, sea ice changes dramatically with the seasons – it grows in the winter, when the Arctic is very cold and dark, and then dies back every summer, when the region gets pounded by non-stop sunlight. And, Mark says, sea ice moves.

MARK: It's not just some featureless slab. The sea ice is in constant motion under the influence of winds and ocean currents.

AMY: Those currents send the ice around the Arctic along fairly predictable routes. It gets pushed out of the Arctic in some places, and piles up in others. And while all of this is happening, the sea ice is also aging.

MARK: Now how this works is this. Let's say we have a big open water area in the Arctic. Well fall comes along and sea ice forms. Some of that sea ice that forms in the autumn is just going to melt away the next summer. 

AMY: But, some of it will survive – it will make it through the summer intact, and then harden and grow in the fall, when the sea starts to freeze up again. That makes it second-year ice. If it survives another year, it becomes third-year ice, etcetera. And as the ice ages, it gets thicker and stronger. Mark says the whole combination of age classes and thicknesses in a certain area is known as an “ice regime.” And if a group of climate scientists hasn't already formed a metal band under that name, all I can say is – you're welcome.

MARK: So ice is always forming in the Arctic, and we're always melting ice in the Arctic, during the summer, but some of it's always being exported as well. And if we thought of a steady climate, there would be just an overall balance between these processes over a number of years. 

AMY: You lose some sea ice every summer, you gain some back every winter, but the total amount of sea ice stays more or less stable. 

MARK: But what we're seeing now is that that balance has been disrupted.

AMY: One of the ways scientists can see this is by measuring sea ice extent – the total surface area covered by ice.

MARK: The extent is dropping. Ahm, since the dawn of the modern satellite record, ah, 1979, it's decreasing in all months. In September especially. September is the end of the melt season in the Arctic and that's when the biggest trends have been occurring. Something like 13 percent per decade it's tremendous. 

AMY: But that's not the only thing scientists are watching carefully these days. 

MARK: There's very, very strong evidence that the ice cover is also thinning as well. Everything we look at is saying it's thinning.

AMY: As we warm the climate, Arctic ice regimes are getting younger, and weaker. 

MARK: Basically it’s getting so warm now that it's hard to form all this really old thick multi-year ice and some of that old thick multi-year ice just melts away. And some of it is exported out of the Arctic Ocean. But we really can't regenerate it anymore.

AMY: So if you think of the Earth as a cupcake, and the sea ice as the frosting, what Mark's saying is that less and less of the top of that cupcake is getting frosted each year, and the frosting layer is getting thinner and thinner. Or, in more technical terms, smaller surface area, less volume. And that means --

MARK: The health of the ice cover is not very good.

AMY: And this is a big deal, for lots of reasons. One of the most important is something called albedo. And whether or not you've heard that word, you're almost certainly familiar with this concept from your own experience. If you're wearing a dark shirt on a bright sunny day, you can feel it absorbing the heat from the sun. A lighter-colored shirt keeps you cooler. And if you think of this on a planetary scale, for all of human history, the sea ice in the Arctic has been a big white shirt – a giant reflective shield, bouncing heat away from us. That's albedo. 

MARK: Well if we think about what, what sea ice is, it's one of the higher albedo surfaces of our planet.

AMY: And when it comes to albedo in the Arctic, it's what happens to sea ice in the summertime that really matters, of course, because that's the only time the polar north gets any significant sunlight. So, if the Arctic can hold on to that white sea ice during the summer months, it can reflect a lot of that solar energy back out into space. But if a ton of ice melts away in the summer and the Arctic turns into mostly dark blue open ocean, a lot of that heat gets absorbed instead, adding more warmth to the climate. Basically, as we melt the Arctic sea ice were turning what was a heat shield into a heat sponge. And you can probably already see the feedback loop here: less sea ice means a weaker albedo, which in turn leads to more warming. Which leads to more ice loss. And on and on.

MARK: And so it has a big effect a very strong effect on, ah, on our planet.

AMY: And sea ice does tons of other stuff for us too – it helps to keep the jet stream moving, which affects weather across the northern hemisphere. It has a big impact on the circulation of the Atlantic Ocean. Honestly, it would probably take several episodes to describe all of the ways sea ice affects the planet, but the key takeaway for each of those processes is the same: just like permafrost, sea ice is providing a lot of services for us. And as we warm up the planet, we're making it harder for the ice to do that work on our behalf. Trying to predict when we'll have our first ice-free summertime in the Arctic has become something of a macabre guessing game. But whether it's in 5 years or 50, it looks quite likely that that's where we're headed.

MUSIC

RICHARD: Oh we ain't got a barrel of money, maybe we're ragged and – I like the old stuff – funny. But we'll travel along, singing a song – Ethel Merman was my idol – side by side. 

AMY: I'm now in Nome, Alaska with Richard Beneville.

RICHARD: B-E-N-E-V-I-L-L-E. First name Richard. And I'm mayor of Nome. And it's a kick in the ass. 

(Nick and Amy laugh) 

AMY: Nome is a town of about 38 hundred people, sitting on the southern side of the Seward Peninsula – the knob of land that sticks out into the Bering Sea toward Russia, way out on Alaska's western coast. It was a gold rush boom town, and it still feels kind of wild-westy, with lots of bars and streets that turn into gravel roads as soon as you leave the main drag. Richard grew up in a completely different reality – he was born in New Jersey and spent a lot of time in New York City. He's giving producer Nick Mott and me a tour in his van.

RICHARD: My ambition all my life been the theater. I'm a song-and-dance man! Give me a microphone and a top hat and a pair of tap shoes – I started tap dancing when I was six! Hello central!

AMY: That's his catchphrase. Richard says he was an up-and-comer in the New York theater scene in his youth, but he had a drinking problem, so his family intervened and sent him to live with his brother in Alaska. And Richard never left. He's spent the last 36 of his 73 years in the state. He founded a tourism company, led popular after-school programs for the kids of Nome for decades, and he was elected mayor in 2015. 

RICHARD: This is a cool town, this is a really cool town. And it's a cool time to be mayor because so many exciting things are happening.

AMY: Like what?

RICHARD: The opening of the Arctic. I mean, we could start there.

MUSIC

NICK: When you say the opening of the Arctic what do you mean?

RICHARD: You ask what's happening? What's happening is the increased accessibility of going through the Bering Straits for a longer period of time each year because of climate change, and the opening up of what is referred to by many as a new ocean. And that would be the Arctic.

AMY: More ships of almost every type are coming to the Arctic – including cruise ships. 

RICHARD: When you think of cruising as a vacation, world-wide -- for many, many years it was pretty much the Mediterranean and equatorial. Well, that's changed. And it's changed because of a number of things, but most importantly climate change.

AMY: Richard says cruise ships have been coming to Nome for at least 20 years, but these days there are a lot more, and they're bigger.

RICHARD: If people can get there, they'll go. Tourism according to Dicky. (laughs)

AMY: Some Arctic communities aren't very excited about the increasing cruise traffic. Many of the ships carry groups of people several times larger than the populations of the towns they stop in – one person on the Norwegian island of Svalbard told me about how cruisers tend to walk in and out of her home as if it were a shop or a museum. And ships can bring other problems too, pollution and disturbances to wildlife. But they also bring a lot of money, and Richard welcomes the ships to Nome with open arms.

RICHARD: It's an opportunity for us to shine – not just Nome, but the region.

AMY: Richard wants to deepen Nome's port, so more big ships can dock there. And he's hopeful those ships will bring more than tourists – he sees a future with Nome as a major way station, with Arctic ship traffic driving a growth in population and jobs and prosperity. He's not blind to the downsides of losing Arctic sea ice. But, as mayor of Nome, his focus is helping his community, and if he can harness the forces of climate change to do that, he will. 

RICHARD: Now we have a cruise that begins in Seward, Alaska, comes up, spends...as I say, you know, 800 people come to tea, and ah, then goes on across Northwest Passage, Greenland, and down the eastern coast, Nova Scotia, all of that, and then ends in New York City. Well, now that really is an interesting thing!

AMY: He's talking about a ship called the Crystal Serenity. In 2016, it carried 1,700 passengers and crew from Anchorage, Alaska to New York City in 32 days. It was the first large cruise ship to navigate the Northwest Passage, the fabled route that goes north over Alaska and cuts through the vast high Arctic Canadian archipelago. And the Serenity did the trip again the next year. Nome was one of the first stops on both of those journeys, and Richard finds the whole thing very exciting.

AMY: Do you think you'll ever get on that boat, and go back to New York?

RICHARD: Oh there's nothing more I'd like to do then to go back and to arrive in New York on the Serenity or on a big cruise. No, that would just thrill me to death, are you kidding? First of all, I love ships. Secondly, New York Harbor's about a kick in the butt, hello central. Ah, and thirdly, then go back to New York where I once lived, yeah, it would be very exciting.

AMY: If that happens, I want to come document the mayor of Nome meeting the mayor of New York City.

RICHARD: Well, you know, we're mayors here.

AMY: And you're a New Yorker!

RICHARD: I'm a New Yorker, you know!

AMY: But Richard is just as much of a Nome-y as a New Yorker, and above all else, he is a performer. And one thing every performer knows, is that come hell or high water, the show must go on.

RICHARD: Yeah I love the role from Cabaret and the opening, what a wonderful opening for an actor. Black stage, spotlight, drum roll, and a white face in a white tux and cutaway tails. Comes down with my cane and… sings song from Cabaret…

AMY: It seems worth mentioning that the musical Cabaret was based on a novella called The Berlin Stories, set in early 1930s Germany. A review of that book in The LA Times describes it this way: “The offbeat vagabonds the narrator meets are lost in hedonistic pursuits, oblivious to the horror massing on the horizon.”

AMBI: Richard singing a song from Cabaret

AMY: We'll have more after this short break.

Break

[17:06] SEGMENT B

TERO: There is approximately 130 icebreakers in the whole world, and around two-thirds of those have been designed and built in Finland.

AMY: Welcome back to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and I've returned to Finland. I'm talking to Tero Vauraste. He's the CEO of Arctia, a state-owned company which owns and operates nine icebreakers, including the Polaris, which I was touring at the beginning of this episode. Tero says this country of just five-and-a-half million people makes more icebreakers than any other nation.

TERO: So we dare to say that we are the world champion in icebreaking. Not in ice hockey, not every year, but in icebreaking.

AMY: And the icebreaker industry is growing, thanks in large part to climate change.

TERO: There are now new areas and new types of operations which can be conducted with the help of an icebreaker which were more or less impossible 20, 30, 40 years ago. 

AMY: I met Tero in Arctia's floating office building in the heart of Helsinki, right next to where the Polaris was docked. He's a high-energy man of 50 -- in addition to running Arctia, he's the chairman of the Arctic Economic Council. It's kind of like an international chamber of commerce for the Arctic – they promote and facilitate business development in the polar north. And Tero says, for people looking to make money in the Arctic, the future is bright.

TERO: There will be definitely new opportunities for investors and new opportunities for the global value chain thinking in here. 

MUSIC 

AMY: The melting of Arctic sea ice is stimulating growth in many industries, and shipping is one of the big ones. Tero says there are three main shipping routes that are opening up in the Arctic.

TERO: Which are the Northern Sea Route, going along the Russian coast, the Northwest Passage going through the Canadian archipelago, and the so-called Polar Route.

AMY: So let's break those three routes down for a minute here. Let's call route number one the Northwest Passage, that's the one Richard Benneville was excited about, on the North American side of the globe. Route number two is the Northern Sea Route, it skirts the Russian coastline and goes up and over the Scandinavia Peninsula. You can think of it as a way to connect Asia to Europe without having to go around India and through the Suez Canal. Depending on where you launch and land, the Northern Sea Route can be several thousand miles shorter and 10 – 15 days faster than that traditional southern path. The third route Tero mentioned is the Transpolar Sea Route, which cuts more or less straight across the top of the world. It won't really become usable until or unless we have consistently ice-free summers in the Arctic Ocean. But in the meantime, traffic on the other two routes is on the rise – especially on the Northern Sea Route. And that means a greater demand for icebreakers. 

TERO: Absolutely. So I'm often asked, well, the ice is melting, who needs icebreakers? But it's actually vice versa. Yeah, there is less ice, but it doesn't mean that the conditions get easier. They actually are more variable.

AMY: Given the fact that we are losing so much sea ice when we break the ice with icebreaking ships, does it actually accelerate the melting of ice?

TERO: So it depends on the conditions. But this type of environmental impact is marginal. 

AMY: Tero says the channels that the icebreakers open up generally refreeze pretty quickly. What's much more significant, he says, is the waste the ships can generate, and the specter of an oil spill. The volume of goods being moved along the Northern Sea Route has been growing by millions of tons every year, and many of those ships use or carry heavy fuel oil, which releases a particularly nasty form of carbon into the atmosphere, and would be extremely hard to remove from frigid Arctic waters in the event of a spill. 

TERO: There will be increase in the transit traffic, increase in tourism, and of course the great investment potential which is worth one trillion. One trillion dollars is spread around the Arctic. 

AMY: In 2008, the US Geological Survey released a report that said that the Arctic holds 30 percent of the world's undiscovered natural gas and that it's the biggest area of unexplored petroleum left on the planet. Countries and companies around the world are eyeing those deposits, trying to figure out if or when or how it will become economically feasible to go after them. Some of that oil and gas is onshore, but a lot of it is under the sea. In Canada, there's currently a ban on offshore oil and gas development in the Arctic. President Obama instituted a similar ban, which was then overturned by President Trump. In fact, as we were preparing this episode for release, the U.S. Department of the Interior gave provisional approval for the Liberty Energy Project, off the North Slope of Alaska. There's more permitting that needs to be done, but if the project goes forward it will be the first oil to be extracted from U.S. Arctic federal waters.

TERO: But the biggest investment potential is in the Russian areas. About 20 percent of the Russian GDP is coming from the Arctic areas.

AMY: Russia is already extracting huge amounts of natural gas in northern Siberia, then liquefying it, putting it into tankers, and shipping it out along the Northern Sea Route, bound for Europe and Asia. And fossil fuels aren't the only resources in the Arctic. There are also minerals, and metals – including the rare Earth metals that are used in our cell phones and computers. And Tero says there's potential for developing renewable energy in the Arctic too.

TERO: The common thinking that well this is an issue which is related to oil and gas. Yes, it is one part, but it's not the whole story. 

AMY: Still, the prospect of all of this development raises some questions.

AMY: Do you feel like there's a danger of profiting off of this global disaster?

TERO: Well that's what everybody tries to put me to. But I'm not going there. Because I'm saying that the Arctic is not a park to be preserved. Nor is it a dirty area where big nasty companies conduct their dirty business. But it's an area where you need to have a holistic approach on whatever you do.

AMY: I asked Tero what he meant by a holistic approach, and he said it meant thinking about environmental impacts and the people who live in the Arctic, not just profit. But is there a holistic, environmentally sound way to ramp up extraction of oil and gas? There are certainly ways to drill that are more or less damaging, but even if we don't spill a drop of oil during the extraction process, once we drill it, we burn it. And that damages the Arctic, and the rest of the planet.

TERO: We have to bear in mind that the developments in the Arctic are mainly a result of human activities outside the Arctic. So the actions to be taken to make sure that the Arctic will not be damaged totally have to take place outside the Arctic. And this is an issue which is so often forgotten, that we need to work on the Paris Climate Agreement goals and other sort of environmental goals. But the main actors and the main problems are definitely not coming from the Arctic areas.

AMY: That's true. As a region, the Arctic has contributed a very small proportion of climate-warming emissions. But that's largely because it's been frozen, which has kept the population low and limited the very sort of development from which Arctia and many other companies are now poised to profit. 

MUSIC

AMY: And it only takes a quick glance around the globe to see that when oil and gas are found, conflict often follows. Already, there have been troop increases, military base expansions, and other forms of saber-rattling in the north.

MARK: The Arctic is a place where climate change and geopolitics are just becoming incredibly intertwined.

AMY: Again, Mark Serreze.

MARK: Remember Vladimir Putin some time ago had a couple of submersibles going down and putting a Russian flag at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean to claim it as theirs, right? It's the sort of thing that has people concerned because it's this brave new world up there in the Arctic. So it is becoming more accessible as we lose the ice cover, and we'll see if that development is peaceable or not.

AMY: There are reasons to hope that this development could be peaceable: an intergovernmental forum called the Arctic Council has been working for decades to that end. This is a different organization from the Arctic Economic Council that Tero Vauraste leads – if that's the chamber of commerce for the Polar North, the Arctic Council is kind of like a mini-UN. All eight Arctic countries are part of it, along with six indigenous organizations. And the members of the Council collaborate on a big range of scientific projects, and they've made agreements to help each other out on search and rescue missions, and potential oil spills. This kind of work isn't flashy – it's a lot of meetings, and memos, and long reports – and it's not going to stop the development of the Arctic. But it does hold some promise for a mutually agreed-upon set of rules. Some high-ranking Arctic Council officials have suggested the region could become something of a demonstration project for how countries can work together to solve climate change. But that would mean leaving massive oil and gas deposits untapped. Mark Serreze says it comes down to facing a very fundamental fact:

MARK: We built an entire society around fossil fuels. But what we didn't really understand, or maybe did not want to understand, is that it's a trap. 

AMY: When you say that our fossil fuel society is a trap, can you explain a little bit more what you mean by that?

MARK: Oh I mean you know it's a trap because incredible amount of energy and a lump of coal or a gallon of gasoline and we've built a whole society around that. All our buildings, our cities, everything OK. The trap is that we're changing the very nature of our atmosphere and changing our very climate. That's the trap. 

MUSIC

AMY: And even as we become aware of this trap that we've set for ourselves, we can’t seem to resist stepping further and further into it. We’ve talked about feedback loops and permafrost and albedo. Well, this is the human version of the same concept. As we warm the planet by burning fossil fuels, it's allowing us to access more of those same fossil fuels. Which, if we drill, and burn, will create more warming. And although we might wrangle and even fight over who owns what in the Arctic for the next several decades, in a few centuries, all of that will really just be a footnote to the big story here: if we continue to melt the Arctic sea ice, we're heading for a radically different planet. It will have a much less stable climate, and probably, much less stable human societies.

DAVID: Long time ago, that ah, good ice all the time. Really not good ice anymore. Yeah, ice isn't ah, you know. Not good anymore.

AMY: This is David Leavitt, he's 88 years old, and for him, this connection between loss of sea ice and cultural disruption isn't theoretical, and it's not in the future. It's now. We'll meet him and other Arctic hunters next time on Threshold.

Credits

NICK: Our production partners for season two of Threshold are Montana Public Radio and PRI's The World. Our reporting was funded by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and the Park Foundation.

AMY: Threshold is made by Nick Mott, Rachel Cramer, Cheryl Skibicki, and me, Amy Martin, with help from Frank Allen, Jackson Barnett, Josh Burnham, Michael Connor, Rosie Costain, Matt Herlihy, Rachel Klein, Zoë Rom, Nora Saks, Maxine Speier and Zach Wilson. Special thanks to Lassi Heininen (HAY-nin-en], Andres Jato [AHN-dres JAH-toe], Michael Kodas, René Söderman [SEH-dehr-MUN], Jim White and Tom Yulsman. Our music is by Travis Yost.

MUSIC

AMY: One of the best ways to understand what's going on with Arctic sea ice is to look at it from space. If you want to do that, we've got links to some great satellite pictures and videos on our website. And while you're there, we hope you'll consider casting your vote for Threshold by making a financial contribution to our show. You can give monthly, you can make a one-time donation – however you want to do it, and whatever amount fits your budget, we are so grateful for your support. Just go to threshold podcast dot org and click donate.

Threshold Newsletter

Sign up to learn about what we're working on and stay connected to us between seasons.