the Arctic loses nearly 21,000 square miles of ice
each year, and the experts who prepared the 2014
National Climate Assessment predict the Arctic
Ocean will be ice free in summer before 2050.
“It’s all happening much faster than any-
one thought,” said Michael Sfraga, director of
the Polar Institute at the Wilson Center in Wash-
ington, D.C. “There’s an ocean opening before us
in real time.”
Along the new frontier, the contest will not
be about claiming new territory. Except for a
few disputed tracts, mostly on the seafloor and
including the North Pole itself, the Arctic’s bor-
ders are settled. Instead nations and corporations
are now seeking a share of trillions of dollars’
worth of minerals—including gold, diamonds,
and rare earth metals—petroleum, natural gas,
and fish, as well as access to potentially cost-
saving new shipping lanes.
Retreating ice has been followed, in some
places, by heavy investment. Russia and Norway
have been the most active Arctic nations, spending
billions over the past decade on natural gas and oil
infrastructure, deep-water ports, and ships capable
of navigating the Arctic Ocean’s still-icy waters.
Meanwhile China has sought its own footholds
in the region, backing Russian gas projects and
offering development loans to other Arctic nations.
The Chinese also are building their own fleet of
icebreakers, a clear bet on the future by a nation
that lies more than 2,500 miles south of the pole.
By contrast, most Western nations, including
Canada and the United States, which together con-
trol nearly half the Arctic coastline, have virtually
ignored the north. The U.S. has five functioning
icebreakers (compared with Russia’s 51) and no
deep-water ports north of the Arctic Circle. That
disequilibrium has, in turn, been dogged by a
creeping tension, and the new frontier narrative
has been accompanied by one of looming conflict,
even the possibility of a new Cold War. These fears,
finally felt in the U.S., were the real reason behind
Pompeo’s appearance at the Arctic Council.
“The region has become an arena for power and
for competition, and the eight Arctic states must
adapt to this new future,” he said. “We’re entering
a new age of strategic engagement ... complete
with new threats to the Arctic and its real estate,
and to all of our interests in that region.”
The problem, of course, was that if Pompeo
wanted to think of the Arctic as an arena,
presumably where a race might be run, some
nations already had a solid head start.
N KING WILLIAM ISLAND,
the rangers traveled west
in a long line of snow-
mobiles. Some pulled
wooden sleds, heavy with
food, camping gear, and
military equipment. I
joined the procession on a
borrowed machine, and after several frigid hours
driving into the enormous night, we reached a
frozen lake called Kakivakturvik.
In bright beams of headlamps and headlights,
the rangers scattered over the lake and began
setting up large canvas tents on the ice. Caribou
skins and tarps were dragged in, then foam mat-
tresses, sleeping bags, coolers filled with food.
Soon the tents glowed with lantern light and
whispered with the sound of kerosene stoves.
Steaming cups of tea were passed around, a few
stories shared about favorite sled dogs, and then
it was back outdoors. In small groups the rangers
fanned out over the lake, chopped holes in the foot-
thick ice, and dropped fishnets into the black water.
Across the Canadian Arctic, ranger patrols mix
military exercises with traditional activities such
as hunting and fishing that are still a necessary
part of life in the far north. Over the next several
days Marvin’s group tried to balance these with
the martial stuff of navigation drills and training
on GPS devices.
Strong winds hurtled off the frozen sea, and
thick fog and clouds hung low over the tundra.
The temperature rose toward freezing a couple
of times, then fell again and stayed far below
zero. All this was typical for late November, and
soon our lives collapsed into the small white and
gray world around camp.
Days began and ended at the fishnets. The haul
of iqalupik, arctic char, was so plentiful that soon
each tent was flanked by a small stand of stiff pink
bodies, stuck tails first into deep drifts of snow.
When we got hungry, we simply slipped an arm
out the door and snagged a fish. Sometimes we
cut it up and made soup. More often we ate it raw,
slicing the char into our mouths. Frozen sushi,
Marvin called it, fresh and cold, almost tasteless,
with a note of steel from the knife blade.
Beyond the nets, our hours vanished into a
well of small tasks. In the day’s few hours of weak
sunlight, there were stoves to tend, ice to melt
for drinking water, tents to relocate when the ice
below them turned to slush. Snow mobiles regu-
larly broke down in the unforgiving cold. At one68 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC