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May 2008

Eveny reindeer herders in theTomponski district of fareastern Siberia. The melting of the permafrost is threateningtheir ancient way of life.

Photographs by Subhankar Banerjee.

The Arctic Oil RushThere have been many expeditions to the North Pole, but it was Russias, lastsummer, that touched off a furor over who owns the Arcticand the oil that is

becoming more and more accessible as the ice disappears. From the halls of Moscows scientific institutes, where global warming is not part of the officialstory, to Siberias permafrost tundra, where reindeer are dying and a powerfulgreenhouse gas is bubbling from the ooze, the author probes the secrets of

Yakut shamans, woolly-mammoth skeletons, and a new Great Game: energy exploration.

By Alex Shoumatoff

n August 2, 2007, two 26-foot-long Russiansubmersibles, Mir-1 and Mir-2, descendedthrough a hole in the ice at the North Pole.The Arctic, which has been losing almost 10

percent of its ice per decade since 1953, was in themiddle of its biggest summer meltback on record, but theice at the pole was still five feet thick, and the hole had to

be opened by the nuclear icebreaker Rossiya. Once below the surface, the submersibles sank more than twoand a half miles down, to the ocean floor.

At the helm of Mir-1 was Anatoly Sagalevich, head of the Deep Manned SubmersiblesLaboratory at the Russian Academy of Sciences P. P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology.

Although they officially belonged to the academy, the two Mir s were Sagalevichs babies.Sitting in his office in Moscow, Sagalevich recalls being inside the cockpit and watchingthe hole at the pole above him grow smaller and smaller until it finally disappeared.

The ships spent about eight and a half hours underwater, and 90 minutes at the bottom.Using a robotic arm attached to his submersible (Not submarine, please, he insists;submarines are military), Sagalevich collected geologic samples and planted a titaniumRussian flag in the murky sediment. The pressure at this depth would have compressedhim to the size of a mouse had he ventured outside. He shows me a Styrofoam cup he putout deep underwater off the coast of France two years ago, when he investigated the wreck of the Nazi battleship Bismarck. It had been shrunk to the size of a thimble.

With their mission accomplished, the two Mir s headed back to the surface. This was the trickiest part: finding

the hole in the ice, which, in addition to being two-thirdsfrozen over, had already drifted at least a mile from

where it was when they went down. The Arctic ice pack is constantly moving, at a rate of six or so miles per day.Sagalevich had to calculate not only the speed of the ice

but also the effect of the currents beneath it while

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More from Alex Shoumatoff: The Thistle and the Bee,May 2008

Waiting for the Plague,December 2007The Lazarus Effect, July 2007An Eco-System of OnesOwn, May 2007Brotherhood of theMountain, September 2006PLUS: Hear Too Too Much,his song with Kate McGarrigle.

maneuvering the ascending submersibles.

There were other notable figures aboard the two vessels.The great polar scientist Artur Chilingarov, who alsohappens to be the vice-speaker of the Duma (Russiaslargely cosmetic parliament), was on Mir-1. With him

was the oligarch Vladimir Gruzdev, who has anestimated net worth of $820 million. Hes in the Duma,too, but had to pay to join the expedition. Along for themission, according to press accounts, were other payingexplorers: Swedish businessman Frederik Paulsen;Ibrahim Sharaf, a sheikh from the United Arab Emirates,

who wore his traditional robes under his polar suit; and Australian adventurer Mike McDowell, who paid areported $3 million. The two submersibles wereplastered with the logos of eight sponsorsthe Kremlin

was 100 percent behind this expedition, in every way except its funding.

The arctonauts returned to a heros welcome in Moscow not seen since Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut,returned from outer space. The reception was coolerelsewhere in the world, especially in the four other countries with Arctic coastlines: the

United States, Canada, Norway, and Denmark, which controls the vast territory of Greenland. This isnt the 15th century, protested Peter MacKay, Canadas foreignminister. You cant go around the world and just plant flags. As elated as he ever allowshimself to be, Vladimir Putin tried to smooth international hackles: Dont worry.Everything will be all right. I was surprised by a somewhat nervous reaction from ourCanadian colleagues. Americans, at one time, planted a flag on the moon. So what? Why didnt you worry so much? The moon did not pass in the United States ownership. JohnB. Bellinger III, legal adviser to the secretary of state, told me, We knew they were goingto the North Pole, but we didnt know they were going to plant the flag. It was aprovocative action, and took us aback.

All this outrage may have been a bit overdone. Frederick Cook planted an American flag at what he claimed was the North Pole in 1908, and Robert Peary did the same thing a yearlater. Chilingarov himself was photographed at the South Pole last year with a group of

American scientists and the flags of both countries.

Chilingarov wasnt above fanning the flames of nationalism in public. In Moscow, he told agroup of well-wishers, I dont give a damn what all these foreign politicians are sayingabout this. If someone doesnt like this, let them go down themselves and try to putsomething there. Russia must win. Russia has what it takes to win. The Arctic has always

been Russian.

Its only natural that our dive had great patriotic impact, and of course we planted theflag, as Americans would do in a similar case, Chilingarov told me. I dont understand

why there is all this noise in the international community. If anyone wants to plant a flagdown there, theyre welcome to. Theres plenty of room. And Sagalevich told me,Everybody knows now that a pure Russian crewsupported by Russian helicopters,

submersibles, research vessel, icebreakercan go to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. Weknow how to do it, and we can do it again.

This stunt fueled by a return to czarist impulses, coup de thtre, Kremlin-sponsoredact of bravado aimed at boosting national pride, as it was variously described in the

Western press, is just one of many signs that the Russian bear is once again rearing itshead.

Like much of what happens on the world stage these days, this expeditionand thediplomatic flap it causedwas really about oil. By some estimates, 25 percent of the

worlds remaining fossil-fuel reserves are buried under the Arctic Ocean. With the ice capshrinking by 28,000 square miles a year, and gigantic pools of open water appearing as itsplits, the possibility of getting at them is improving daily. Meanwhile, oil supplies aredwindling, and prices are rising to historic highs, making expensive oil exploration moreand more worthwhile.

It all adds up to a renewed interest in the Arcticthe last large piece of non-jurisdictionalreal estate on the planetwhich went off the screen when the Cold War ended. Now theres a new Great Game onthe Cold Rush.


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the laws of extraction

According to an obscure clause in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of theSea ( UNCLOS )also called the Law of the Sea Treaty, or LOST , by its criticsif you canprove that your continental shelf extends beyond the 200 nautical miles that signatory states with coastlines are automatically entitled to, you have sovereign rights to its oil, gas,and minerals. The Russians Arctic claim hinges on an underwater formation called theLomonosov Ridge, which runs 1,240 miles from Siberia through the North Pole nearly tothe juncture of Ellesmere Island (Canadas northernmost point) and Greenland, and

which Russia says is an extension of its shelf. Actually, it is claiming only half of theridgethe half on its side of the pole. This has the rest of the world nervous. Much of Europe depends on Russias natural gas, and the Kremlin has already turned the faucet off once, on Ukraine, and threatened to do the same to Belarus. If it starts tapping the Arcticdeposits, Russia will be back as a superpower and may become the worlds dominantenergy supplier. There would then be a Fifth Russian Empire, presided over by theincreasingly autocratic Putin, who has sidestepped the presidential two-term limit by making himself prime minister.

The U.S. hasnt even signed UNCLOS . Its ratification has been blocked for years by a few conservative Republican senators currently led by Oklahomas James Inhofe, who isfamous for dismissing the human contribution to global warming as the greatest hoaxever perpetrated on the American people. These senators dont want to cede an inch of

American sovereignty to the U.N. and apparently find the treatys designation of the highseas as the common heritage of mankind to be intolerably Marxist. So the U.S. isnt on

the 21-country Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, which will decide onRussias claim. It has some fancy footwork to do if its even going to be a player in thescramble for the Arctic.

Russia isnt the only country whose Arctic aspirations are unnerving the Americans. Lastsummer, Canadas Northwest Passage was nearly free of ice and completely navigable fora few weeksfor the first time since records have been kept. This fabled route to theOrient, which eluded Henry Hudson, Sir Francis Drake, and Martin Frobisher, and wasfinally navigated by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen in 1905, would reshape global trade,

being thousands of miles shorter than most currently used shipping routes, though it wont be clear long enough to be commercially viable for at least another 15 to 20 years.Canada has claimed the passage as its internal waterway since the early 1970s, but the U.S.maintains that it is an international strait, through which any vessel, including submergedsubmarines gathering intelligence, has the right of transit passage.

ny way you look at it, Russia has the greatest legitimacy in the Arcticgeographically, historically, demographically, hydrologically (it has six majorrivers that feed the Arctic Ocean, while the other countries have one or two),and, it now hopes to prove, geomorphologically and geologically. Twenty

percent of the country lies above the Arctic Circle, and almost two million Russians livethere today. If the world were an orange with 18 segments meeting at the top (the NorthPole), roughly 8 of them would be in Russia, Canada would have 4, Denmark 2, andNorway, Sweden, and the U.S. just one apiece. Only a sliver of Alaska, on the Beaufort Sea,lies above the Arctic Circle.

The new accessibility of the Arctics deposits is not going to make the effort to curb global warming any easier. Ironically, fossil-fuel emissions are making more fossil fuel available.

Its as if someone on the verge of bankruptcy were suddenly to get a huge inheritance froma distant relative he didnt even know. Compounding this vicious circle is anotherfeedback loop that is making the top of the planet warm twice as fast as anywhere else: asmore bare land and open water are exposed by melting, more solar heat is absorbedinstead of being reflected back by white ice and snow. With global warming already stressing the Arctics animals and its million or so indigenous people, its newfound wealthcould be the coup de grce.

party lines

The Sheraton Palace Hotel Moscow is full of American businessmen. Million-dollar dealsare being discussed in hushed tones in the bar. There is ser ious money to be made in thiscountry. One of the businessmen, who is building a chemical plant in Siberia to purify locally mined silicon so it can be used in solar panels, tells me, Its going to cost so muchto get the oil in the Arctic out that they will need partners. Gazprom, Russias energy parastatal, is already partnering with Frances Total and the Norwegian energy giantStatoil, in the Shtokman Field, just over the Russian border with Norway. Russia doesnthave the sophisticated technology to tap the huge deposits of natural gas below theseafloor, or the estimated $20 to $30 billion it will cost, and the partners do.


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An Eveny woman and herchildren.

I catch a cab to the Russian Institute of Geography, which is on a side street in OldMoscow, in a building that used to be a poorhouse during the time of Ivan the Terrible and

whose ratty dcor is still U.S.S.R. circa l960. Nikolai Osokin, a glaciologist who has beenstudying the Arctics shifting ice for 45 years and is an authority on its fossil-fuel deposits,shows me the line that Stalin drew from Murmansk to the pole to the middle of the BeringSea in l926, which he declared to be the l imits of the Russian Arctic. It is still inpost-Soviet atlases, and no one, Osokin says, has ever disputed it. Canada had similarly defined its Arctic territory, shooting lines from its eastern- and westernmost points to thepole a year earlier. Traditionally, all the Arctic countries mention their own sectors,Osokin says. Only in the last 10 years is the discussion about unfairness of definition of sectors. This is how the seven countries with claims in Antarctica divvied up thecontinent in l959, agreeing not to use their sectors for military purposes or to exploit theirresources until 2048. (The claims had been asserted in the first half of the 20th century,

beginning with Britainon the basis of its disputed ownership of the Falkland Islands andits explorations, going back to Captain John Strong in 1690and fol lowed by France,Norway, Argentina, Chile, Australia, and New Zealand.)

Many feel the best thing for the Arctic would be a similar arrangement. The ships that passthrough the Arctic Ocean could be taxed by an international body, and the proceeds could

be used to help the indigenous people and wildlife, whose eco-system and livelihoods aremelting from under them.

Osokin unfolds a map of the Arctic sea bottom. The Russian shelf goes out much further

than 200 nautical miles not because of Russian greediness but geological reality, he says.The currently accepted edge of the Russian shelf goes a little more than halfway to thepole, but the Lomonosov and Mendeleyev Ridges and the Podvodnikov and Makarov Basins [other, parallel-running features] extend the territory to the pole and from the polein lines to Murmansk and the eastern coast of Chukotkajust like Stalins boundary. Infact, with the 200 miles of shelf that its northernmost archipelagoes are entitled to, Russiaalready has the right to almost all that it is claiming in this new submission.

How do you know there is so much oil there?, I ask. Seismic profiles establish that at the bottom of the North Ice Sea is a large amount of oil-bearing structures analogous to thestructures of western Siberia that formed 38 million years ago, when the Arctic Ocean was

beginning to be formed, Osokin assures me. Then he drops something of a bombshell:But the interest in the oil will soon be decreasing, because of new information that global

warming is almost over, and the Arctic ice pack will soon be refreezing.

Say what? What about all the information from Westernscientists that the ice pack has been losing almost 10percent of its ice per decade over the last 50 years, thatthis year open sea the combined size of California andTexas was exposed, and that the Arctic could have an entirely ice-free summer as early as2040?

There is no evidence that the warming is going to continue, he maintains. In fact, some

of our meteorological stations on the eastern-Siberian coast have been registering coldertemperatures since l995. The Holocene interglacial warm period has been going on for11,000 years, already longer than any previous one. Its end is overdue.

This, I will learn after talking with half a dozen other scientists in Moscow, is the Russianparty line: it is starting to get colder, and the effect of human CO 2 emissions on the worlds


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Cleaning and preparing fishfor drying in the Yukaghir

village of Nelemnoye, in the Verkhnekolymskiy region.

climate is negligible.

Its true that the Arctic ice pack, expanding and contracting seasonally and in response to amultiplicity of natural rhythms, is, in Newsweek s phrase, a notorious shapeshifter. Thenow ice-capped southern tip of Greenland had thriving boreal forest, with spruce, pine,alder, and yew, 450,000 years ago. Four to eight thousand years ago, willows, birches,roses, and heathstundra plantswere growing on the northern tip of Swedens SvalbardIslands, which are now covered with ice. Even in the l930s, the Russian Arctic was warmerthan it is today, and the Great North Way, along its coast from Murmansk to the BeringSea, was completely open. And this summers record meltback, a recent paper in Natureargues, was the result not only of man-made global warming but also of the cyclicalnorth-south shift in the energy in the Arctics atmosphere, which Osokin told me about.

The global climate is a complex interactive system, with all kinds of nonlinear feedback loops. According to Robert Corella climate scientist at the Heinz Center, in Washington,D.C., who chaired the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment on how the poles are beingaffected by climate changethe last 10,000 years have been the most stable period in theclimatic record, with a temperature range that was ideal for humanity to flourish. Butnow, he says, were moving out of the sweet spot. The vertiginous hockey stick rise inmean global temperature since 1970 is something that can be explained by only one thing,a powerful new force in the climate system: us. According to the 737 scientists and otherexperts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, our contribution actually

began to kick in around l750, at the beginning of industrialization (also when our

population began to take off). Theres a less than 10 percent chance the current warmingtrend could be natural.

With the Polar Year in full swing, no fewer than 200 expeditions with scientists from 60countries are collecting baseline data in the Arctic. Every week brings a new study aboutthe breakdown of another component of the eco-system. So why are the Russian scientistssaying its getting colder? Michael MacCracken, a Washington, D.C.based climatescientist and policy expert, explains that Russian climate science is based on paleoclimaticreconstruction and is hierarchical. You adopt the position of the head of your institute,and the Russian Academy of Sciences chief climatologist, Yuri Izrael, maintains that itsgetting colder and the human contribution is negligible. Western climate science, however,is based on modeling what is happening now and where its going, and is confrontational.The scientists are always challenging one anothers findings. Corell goes as far as to accuseRussian climate science of being dictated by conservative Russian politicians, who dont

want the warming to stop, because it will open up the Great North Way again and makeRussia the maritime power it has always wanted to be.

But outside the walls of academe, the native people of the Russian Arctic, who are living with what is happening, will tell me a very different story.

awakening the spirits of the underworld

I fly to Yakutsk, in far-eastern Siberia, six time zonesahead of Moscow. Yakutsk is the capital of Yakutia, or,more correctly, the Sakha Autonomous Republic,

which is as big as India but has only a million people ,instead of a billion. In that region, the permafrost, thelayer of permanently frozen soil that covers as much

as 25 percent of the earths land, is the deepest in the world, a mile and a half thick in the Viliui River basin.The Lomonosov Ridge shoots off to the pole fromclose to the New Siberian Islands, in the Laptev Sea,above Yakutia. The coldest confirmed temperature inthe Northern Hemisphereminus 67.8 degreesCelsiuswas recorded in Verkhoyansk, which is alsothe oldest European settlement in the Arctic. I want togo there and look for mammoth tusks that are beingheaved up by the melting permafrost, a welcomedevelopment for the again-flourishing ivory market.

Woolly mammoths were hairy pachyderms that died out during the last big warmingevent, 10,000 years ago. Their tusks, nearly circular (while those of modern elephantshave a more gradual curve), are also made of ivory, and are turning up with increasingfrequency in Hong Kong and in mainland China.

I also want to meet some of the Yakut horse breeders, whose traditional lifestyle is beingthreatened by the great thaw. They and the other native people of the Yakut Arcticthe

Yukaghir and the Eveny and Evenki reindeer herdershave powerful shamans, although


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only a handful are left. Some are said to be able to drum themselves into a trance and become winged reindeer, flying up into the sky to see where the game is.

The shamans have been persecuted since czarist times, as devil worshippers by theOrthodox priests, and as enemies of the people by the Soviets, who threw them out of helicopters, saying, You want to fly? Heres your chance. Animism is the main religion in

Yakutia. Three-quarters of the people still live close to nature, attuned to the animals andplants, and are acutely aware of the changes that are occurring because of the mildtemperatures.

You dont have to be a shaman to see what is happening to the tundra; its visible from theplane window. The tundra is pitted with circular depressions known as alases. Some of them are filled with water from the thawing permafrost; some are empty craters from

which the meltwater has drained as it found new exits in the iceless soil. The thermokarstlakes, as the water-filled ones are called, are bubbling with methane that had beentrapped in the ice. Methane is at least 20 times more powerful a greenhouse gas thancarbon dioxide. (The Siberian permafrost zone alone contains an estimated 500 gigatonsof carbon. The entire annual human output is about five and a half gigatons.)

No one knows how much methane is being released, because we dont yet have thecapability for spot measurement, Corell tell s me. But its a ticking time bomb, enough toturn the world into a cauldron, should it all get into the atmosphere.

Only about 10 percent of Yakutia, however, i s methane-emitting tundra. Most of it is taiga,forest dominated by larch trees, which are taking carbon out of the atmosphere, so thetundra and the taiga more or less balance each other out. The taiga is spreading north withthe rising temperature, pushing the tundra to the edge of the Laptev Sea, forcingmigrating cranes and geese to relocate their historic summer nesting sites. Drunkenforests, whose trees slant every which way, because the roots have lost their purchase inthe liquefying, buckling soil, are becoming increasingly common.

hirty percent of Yakutias economy comes from diamond mining. The republic ispractically a private fiefdom of Alrosa, the worlds second-largest diamondcompany (after De Beers), which was nationalized by Putin last year. Yakutiaspresident was also once the president of Alrosa. Most of the mining is done

around Mirny, where there are rich seams of diamond-bearing kimberlite, and where the biggest man-made hole on earth has been gouged. Yakutsk is a wide-open, incredibly wealthy frontier town. A travel blog says that one of the hotels offers armoured roomsand that its dangerous to eat in the restaurants because of the presence of diamondmafiosi.

The city of nearly a quarter-million is celebrating its 370th birthday. Most of the buildingsare four-story barracks-like concrete apartment houses, but here and there one of thecenturies-old, elaborately stenciled log isbas still stands. Some of them have been tilted atrakish angles by normal, seasonal frost heaving over the years. The new buildings areconstructed on pilings sunk 50 feet down, so theyre stable. The buckling wreaks havoc

with Yakutias roads and railroads and is undoubtedly getting more severe with the warming. If it cracks the 2,500-mile oil pipeline thats being built from western Siberia tothe Pacific, there will be an ecological disaster. Theres already a lot of radioactive andotherwise toxic waste from the mining of gold, uranium, diamonds, and practically every

other mineral from antimony to zinc.

I visit the Permafrost Research Institute, the worlds only one. First I am taken down tothe dug but not sided basement by a guide named Pavel. The ceiling is coated withsparkling hexagonal ice crystals. Pavel points out where the active layer, the part thatthaws and refreezes every year, stopsfive and a half feet underground, in the middle of the basement walls. Below it the soil is frozen solid for a thousand feet. He says the activelayer hasnt gotten any thicker in the last 10 or 20 years. Theres a plaster cast of Dima, analmost intact 39,000-year-old baby mammoth that was found in the late 70s. Recently aneven better-preserved, 37,000-year-old baby mammoth, with possibly enough intact DNA to enable it to be cloned, with a modern elephant as its mother, was found on the YamalPeninsula, west of Yakutia.

The Eveny and Evenki people (same way of life, different linguistic heritage) have beenrelying for centuries on reindeer (known in the Nearctic as caribou), which providetransport, food, shelter, and clothing. There are still a few thousand nomadic reindeerherders in Siberia, moving with their animals in the largest territory of any remainingtraditional people. But the wild and domesticated reindeer have been experiencingmassive die-offs in the spring and fall, Im told by Eveny and Evenki activists. Reindeer eat


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As the permafrost melts, larchtrees lose their footing,creating drunken forests, anow common sight in far

eastern Siberia.

mainly lichen, and now when the seasons change there is more rain that freezes at night,often with melted snow, into a sheet of ice that the reindeer cant break through with theirhooves, so entire herds are starving to death.

Vyacheslav Shadrin, the head of the council of Yukaghir elders, tells me that in the UpperKolyma basin, 700 miles north of Yakutsk, where he is from, last November andDecember, when it is normally minus 40 degrees Celsius (also FahrenheitCelsius andFahrenheit converge at 40 below), it rained. That means it was 72 degrees Fahrenheit

warmer than usual. The Yukaghir are one of the oldest aboriginal peoples of Siberia.There are only 1,509 of them left, as of the last census, and only 23 who still speak thelanguage fluently. They are a culture on the way out, unless something is done fast to keepit going.

The Upper Kolyma Yukaghir are hunters and fishermen whose main source of income istrapping sable. Usually in one season a hunter can get 20 to 25 pelts, half of them in themiddle of October, when the sables all go to their winter hunting ground, Shadrin says.By then the snow comes thick and the lakes are frozen and the hunters can go out to the

winter routes on snowmobiles. But now its no longer safe to go out until mid-November, because the snowmobiles can fall through the ice, so the hunters are losing the mostimportant month and a half for their income.

Every year the pasture for the wild re indeer, which the Yukaghir hunt, is getting less andless because the taiga is coming up from the south, Shadrin goes on. Grasses, birches,

and some bushes like willow are covering the lichen. And the reindeer no longer come totheir traditional river crossings, which is the best place to kill them. The hunters no longerknow where they are going to be, so they lose time and are less successful.

The quantity of wolves is growing, he says. Before, we used to have only tundra wolves.Now were getting taiga wolves, too, which run in bigger packs. The wolves kill many reindeer and give trouble to the herders. So for all these reasons, both wild and domesticreindeer are disappearing. Also, geese and sea ducks have changed their migratory routesand schedules. Hunters used to wait for them where they rested at night in the beginningof June; now they dont know what time to go. Last few years the waterfowl have beenappearing in very small quantity. They must have changed their route to another river

basin. Trapping polar foxes was a big part of our traditional life, but in the last 10 or 15 years there have hardly been any. No one knows why.

Now the runoff from the breakup of the ice and snow is greater, every spring watercomes more, and there is more danger from flooding and erosion to our villages, whichare all on the riverbanks. At the same time, some of our best lakes for fishing aredisappearing. These must be thermokarst lakes being drained by new subterraneanstreams in the thawing permafrost.

Shadrin continues: Polar bears are coming intoCherskiy [a town near the mouth of the Kolyma River].Usually at the end of summer, when the ice pack ismelting, the pregnant bears come to the land to have

their cubs, and afterward, with the small bears, they return to the ice and spend the winter hunting seals. Theice used to be a short swim from the shore, but now it is

very far away. The bears cannot even see it, so they stay onshore and try to find foodaround the places where people live. By some estimates, as many as half of the worldsremaining polar bears may be in Russia.


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What are the old people saying about these changes?, I ask. Theyre saying nature is lyingto the people, Shadrin says. It is not respecting them, because the people are doing many

bad things, killing many animals, cutting many forests, many plants, dirtying rivers andlakes. They forget that they live in a natural world and are not respecting old traditions, sonature is returning to people their bad actions. One of the results of the melting is that toomany mammoth bones appear on the land and people are collecting them, but in ourtradition the mammoth is the spirit of the underworld and we cant take their bones. Sothe elders are saying we have awakened these underworld spirits. The main thesis of ourtraditional view is: Dont take from nature more than you need; if you take more, you arenot respecting nature. But all our economic basis now is to take more and more.

An Unwelcome Warming

I fly up to Verkhoyansk in an old Antonov An-24, a no-nonsense piece of Sovietmachinery. Im the only non-Asian on the plane. Below is the Lena River, the worlds10th-longest, and the largest river youve never heard of. In another two months it will befrozen 15 feet thick and will become a highway for trucks and jeeps. We fly over thesnow-covered Verkhoyansk Range and touch down at Batagay, a charmless outpost of three-story barracks built in the 1930s. Its raining and overcast. The next five days will belike being in a grainy black-and-white movie. My driver Sergei and I set out down a road

built by gulag prisoners through the endless expanse of golden larch. This was the gulagheartland. The camps had no walls, because escape was impossible; there was nowhere toescape to.

There has been terrible flooding in the last few years. The worst flood in living memory was in 2004. We come to a washed-out bridge, where I have to change cars to completethe trip.

A cozy burg of l,800 which has been having a rough time since the end of Sovietsubsidizing of remote rural communities, Verkhoyansk was founded in 1638 by Cossackssent out by Czar Mikhail I to conquer the surrounding region. Its on the Yana River,

which flows into the Laptev Sea, and is older than St. Petersburg. Many early explorers,including Vitus Bering in the early 18th century, passed through here. The prisoners did alot for our town, the mayor, Pyotor Gabyshev, tells me. They introduced potatoes andcucumbers. One of them did the first ethnography of the Yakut, which the Yakutthemselves, who have forgotten many of their ceremonies, now consult. They built ameteorological station, which in 1892 recorded the temperature of minus 67.8 Celsius. Butnow even 55 below has become very rare. Before, it would drizzle for 10 days straight.Now there are hard rains, which are more destructive. People are hunting for freshly exposed mammoth bones for extra income. He gives me a certificate stating that I have

been to the Pole of Cold.

The next morning I go to a camp of traditional Yakut horse breeders. The Yakut, or Sakha, were mounted warriors who arrived a few centuries before the Cossacks and conqueredthe reindeer herders and the Yukaghir, and were in turn subjugated by the Cossacks.

Driving back to the washed-out bridge, we stop to make offerings at a shamanic place, adead larch tree draped in prayer flags like Tibetan Buddhist shrines, its base strewn withcucumbers, coins, cigarettes, candy. The tree is a unifying element in Yakut cosmology. Its

branches reach to the nine upper levels of the heavens, its trunk is in middle earth, where we and the animals live, and its roots are in the eight-layered Lower World. Each of us has

three soulsa mother soul, earth soul, and air souland several years after you die thefirst two reincarnate and are infused with a new air soul, unless you were a bad person, in

which case you are buried facedown and are not reborn.

We turn up a road that leads to an abandoned prison camp called Ustakh, a cluster of logcabins with a caved-in log church. Some of the prisoners had been there so long that whenthey were released they didnt know where to go and just hung around, working as

woodcutters. The last of them died two years ago.

he horse-breeding camp is 15 minutes down the Yana by motorboat, then a15-minute slog through the muddy taiga. There are three huts with flat tops andslanted walls, where two breeders, three haymakers, and an old man who issupposed to have clairvoyant powers are living and taking care of 130 horsesthe

hardy native Yana-Indigirka breed, which is thought to be close to the original horse.Everyone is feasting on Arctic hares and tuganok, small white fish from the river. Bracesof freshly shot white hares hang from the rafters. This is the time of year when every able-bodied person in the region is hunting hares. I will eat almost nothing my whole timein the Arctic but hare and sour cream so thick you can stand a spoon in it.


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There is a local cycle of 10 years of rain, followed by 10 dry years, the old man, whosename is Zachar, tells me. We are in the fifth year of the rainy cycle. Spring is coming weeksearlier, and winter weeks later, Zachar says. Strange birds are appearing, ones that havenever been seen in the region, and a little deer called the kosulya has just shown up fromcentral Yakutia. I dont know where the cold has gone. Maybe to the other side of theplanet, where you live . Afraid not, I say. In another month these six men will be on theirown, living on pike, duck, and moose. This is a dying way of life, Leonid, who owns theherd, tells me. Its hard to find strong young men who are willing to spend the winter insuch isolation anymore.

On the way back to the river, we see, sitting on a pond in a bog, one of the ducks that werent here before, a gray selezen, with greenish tail feathers. All kinds of animals andplants are moving up into Yakutia, whose biodiversity has increased across the boardexcept for reptiles and amphibians. If this seems like a silver lining, it is not good news forthe Arctic species. And while the active permafrost layer may not be getting any deeper,after a few days of steady rain it has become a muddy soup. Our jeep gets stuck and ittakes an hour of prying with pine logs to get it out.

Betenkes, a farm community on the bank of the Adycha River, which I reach by nightfall,is the muddiest place I have ever been. It can flood so badly in the spring, the old womanIm staying with tells me, that the water comes up to the windows of the houses, eventhough theyre built on five-foot pilings, and the only way to get around is by motorboat.

In the morning we head down the extravagantly meandering Yana in a motorboat until wecome to where the river is maybe half a mile wide and the gently curving bank rises from20 feet high to more than 100 for a mile and a half. The place is called Ulakhan Suullurand is a famous cemetery for mammoths and other Pleistocene mega-fauna, including

woolly rhinos, musk oxen, and cave lions. The most popular theory is that it was a swampthousands of years ago when the last ice age was coming to an end, and the big mammalsgot stuck in its mud. The mammoth was basically done in by climate change. The last onessurvived on Wrangel Island, north of Chukotka, until 3,700 years ago. According to Eveny mythology, mammoths scooped up dirt with their tusks to form the first dry land.

A steady, fine rain is sifting down, eating away at the khaki-gray sandy loam of the bank.On the top of it, larch trees are teetering and toppling into the river. Every 15 minutesthere is a thunderous avalanche of slumping silt, and every hundred yards, as I walk the

bank, there is a gully, cut by rainwater running down to the river. The silt in the deltas atthe bottom of these gullies is so fine it is like quicksand. I sink up to my thigh trying tocross one. Its not hard to imagine huge animals getting inextricably stuck.

Two fishermen, on the way home with a sack full of 20-pound taimens, pull up. One of them spots a fresh yellow bone sticking out halfway up the bank and climbs up to get it.Its not a mammoth tusk, but the femur of a giant deer or horse. Its still heavy, having just

been washed out of the solid wall of fossil icewith ancient carcasses frozen in it like fliesin amberthat is visible in places where the bank has just collapsed. The bank and the

bone-filled permafrost behind it are undergoing active, rapid disintegration. Face-to-face with such a vast slice of time, my individual life seems like a mote, not even a hiccup. Ourhunter-gatherer ancestors who roamed the earth 10,000 years ago hunted these massivemammals, but we were still very low on the totem pole. Weve come a very long way in justthe last 10,000 yearsmaybe to the end.

ne of the scariest parts of the Arctic meltdown, which only a few scientists aretalking about, is that some 40,000-year-old Ebola or anthrax-like virus that wehave no resistance to could be lurking in the carcass of one of these long-extinctcreatures that are being coughed up. Thats one way nature deals with species

whose population has gotten out of hand. A 300-year-old Yakut mans skeleton wasrecently disgorged by the melting permafrost near Yakutsk; he could have died of smallpox. There was a big epidemic in Yakutia around then, introduced by the Cossacks.So we could see the return of smallpox. In the first half of the 20th century, a hundredthousand reindeer a year died of anthrax on the Yamal Peninsula. The spores lie dormantin the soil and periodically break out. More than 10,000 foci of anthrax have beenregistered in Russia in the last hundred years. In Greenland, RNA from the tomato mosaictobamovirus was recently detected in 140,000-year-old ice, and a host of bacteria, fungi,

yeasts, green algae, cyanobacteria, and mosses are coming up from columns that are beingdrilled in three-mill ion-year-old ice at the mouth of the Kolyma. So maybe the Yukaghirs

belief that the mammoths are going to take their revenge for what we are doing to natureisnt so far-fetched.

Back at Batagay airport, I share a bottle of vodka with three licensed mammoth-tusk


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dealers. A pair of tusks in good condition can fetch $35,000, so the melting permafrosthas spawned a new, opportunistic cottage industry. The airstrip is too muddy for landingor takeoff, so my plane to Yakutsk is delayed, as is the helicopter the dealers havechartered to fly them to a village on the Sartan River, where one of their diggers has founda 130-pound tusk. The dealers employ 10 diggers and five craftsmen in Yakutsk who carvethe tusks, and they move 3.5 tons of ivory a year. One ton goes to their craftsmen, and therest ends up in Hong Kong, to be carved along with the tusks of poached Africanelephants. The Chinese nouveaux riches, already as numerous as the entire population of Japan, are clamoring for ivory statuary.

Most of the bones from around Cherskiy, in the Lena Delta, end up at the History of theIce Age Museum-Theatre, in Moscow, which is part of the National Alliance, a private

business owned by the oligarch Fyodor Shidlovsky. The National Alliance has agovernment license to excavate and export prehistoric relics. Museums and privatecollectors in the U.S. and Korea are paying as much as $250,000 for a reconstructedmammoth skeleton, $20,000 for a well-preserved tusk.

the common heritage of mankind

Back in Moscow, I visit Yuri Leonov, the director of the Russian Academy of SciencesGeological Institute, who is analyzing the samples that Sagalevich brought back from thefloor of the Arctic Ocean. It doesnt look like they have proof that the Lomonosov Ridge ispart of the Russian continental shelf. These probes were insufficient, Leonov tells me,but Russia does have some scientific data in favor of this claim. The geological evidence

that Lomonosov Ridge is part of the Russian continental shelf is not an easy question Wecan say that this is not just a ridge, but part of a whole system from Russia to Greenlandand Canada The Arctic is a shallow epicontinental sea on a continental base. Most of the

bottom has more characteristics of earth crust than ocean floor. The Lomonosov Ridgeused to connect Russia, Canada, and Denmark 20 to 30 million years ago, but due to someprocess we do not understand for the moment very well, this bridge collapsed at roughly the 30th meridian of north latitude, and sank to its present depth, 15,000 feet at the pole.So we cannot call this a bridge anymore. The question is whether the commission willaccept a paleo shelf as a shelf. I hope I dont get into trouble for saying this, but I think it

would be smart for Canada to accept our claim, because it would only strengthen theirs.From point of view of oil and gas, the bottom of the pole is not important, because almostall of deposits in Russian Arctic are within 200 miles of coast.

I pay a call on Pyotr Aleshkovsky, a writer and intellectual, who is skeptical about theestimate that 25 percent of the worlds remaining fossil fuel lies beneath the Arctic Ocean(a figure attributed to the U.S. Geological Surveythough it denies ever having put itoutwhich has taken on a life of its own in the media and even among scientists). Theresa lot of oil in Evenkiaan autonomous republic in western Siberiathat they havent evenstarted to drill, Aleshkovsky tells me. And what about the oil sands in Alberta, Canada,

which are supposed to have 65 percent, and in the upper Orinoco of Venezuela, whichsupposedly has 25 percent? Hes right: the figures dont add up. In fact, its more like 14percent, if that.

A geologist who works for an American oil company estimating oil reserves in the NorthSea will explain to me a few months later that oil reserves are a made-up number, andtheres an incentive to make it as large as you can. If the oil price goes up, there are morereserves, because it becomes more economically worthwhile to drill for them. Its a real

black art.

I meet with Vasiliy Gutsulyak at a sushi restaurant near the Center of Maritime Law, inMoscow, of which he is the director. There is no maritime law in the Arctic, he tells me.Until very recently the deep oceanmore than 600 feet deepwhich makes up 90percent of the worlds oceans, was considered as the high seas. Piracy was common.England got rich by preying on the Spanish galleons bringing bullion back from the New

World. The coastal states territorial sea extended only 3 nautical miles, as far as acannonball shot, until the Law of the Sea Treaty extended it to 12 miles in 1982; the treaty also granted to its signatories 200 miles of their continental shelf as an E.E.Z. (exclusiveeconomic zone). Russia applied for an extension of its shelf in 2001claiming the sameshelf area that it is preparing to reclaimbut the Commission on the Limits of theContinental Shelf requested more information.

John Bellinger, the State Departments chief legal counsel, who is spearheadingCondoleezza Rices push to get UNCLOS ratified in the Senate, tells me that the conservativecongressmen opposing it are laboring under two misconceptions. The first is the notionthat the characterization of the high seas, the part of the ocean that is beyond anyonesE.C.S. (extended continental shelf), as the common heritage of mankind came from


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Elisabeth Mann Borgese, a Canadian socialist and alleged admirer of Karl Marx. Althoughshe was one of UNCLOS s main original supporters, the phrase actually came from a speech

by Richard Nixon, who declared in a farsighted moment on May 23, l970, I am today proposing that all nations adopt as soon as possible a treaty under which they wouldrenounce all national claims over the natural resources of the seabed beyond the point

where the high seas reach a depth of 200 meters, and would agree to regard theseresources as the common heritage of mankind.

The other misconception, Bell inger continues, is that signing UNCLOS would be a vastgiveaway of American sovereignty to the U.N. The Commission on the Limits of theContinental Shelf is not a U.N. agency, and ratifying the treaty would, in fact, give the U.S.its biggest increase in territory since the Louisiana Purchase. Three sonic-probingmissions by the Coast Guard cutter Healy have determined that Americas Arctic shelf could potentially be the size of three Californias, and could extend 600 miles further outthan the 200-mile limit. But our extended shelf needs international blessing, because no

banks will be willing to put money into [oil-drilling] ventures in such legally murky waters, he explains.

eanwhile, the U.S. is treading a fine line, trying to have it both ways. It claims200 miles of its shelf by customary lawciting UNCLOS , which it hasntratifiedbut it wont acknowledge Canadas claim that its Northwest Passageis an internal waterway, even though it threads through thousands of islands

in the Canadian Arctic. The American position is that its an international strait, which is

defined as a waterway that connects high seas or E.E.Z.s. At stake is the right of transitpassage. Foreign submarines are permitted to remain submerged in a strait, but they have to come to the surface in an internal waterway, and there are a hundred straits in the

world, so the Department of Defense regards the guarantee of free passage to naval andcommercial vessels as the crown jewel of the Law of the Sea Convention, Bellinger tellsme.

In 2001 we inherited 100 or so treaties that had not been ratified from the Clintonadministration. (Basically, the U.S. doesnt ratify anything that cramps its style. It has stillnot ratified the Kyoto Protocol, which Russia has, and Russia doesnt recognize the humancontribution to global warming.) The problem with UNCLOS was that the deep-seabedpart, Part XI, was flawed. The landlocked countries, feeling left out of the original treaty,had eked out an income-distribution and mandatory-technology-transfer clause. If the bigcountries can go and mine in the deep seabed, they should transfer the technology to theless developed countries and share the profits with the landlocked ones. Reagan refusedto sign the treaty because he thought this section was too socialistic. There was arenegotiation in l994. The technology transfer was stripped out, the incomere-distribution was changed, the U.S. got a permanent seat on the Council of theInternational Seabed Authority, and the appl ication fee for mining seabed was knockeddown from a million to $250,000. But still, UNCLOS languished because the political will

wasnt there.

Bellinger continues: After lengthy review, this administration concluded in 2004 that itsin the interest of the U.S. that the treaty be ratified, but only this year [2007, starting witha statement released by the White House in May] has there been a big push. The navy

wants it. So do Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips, two Alaska senators, theenvironmentalists, Alaskan fisherman, and fiber-optic-cable companies like Verizon, who

can lay their lines in E.E.Z.s. Even the stalwart Republican [senator] John Warner is for it. What else can you think of that so many disparate parties all agree on? We think weve gotthe votes67 at this pointand will bring it to the Senate floor in December.

But as of mid-March, this still hasnt happened. UNCLOS is back in limbo. Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, is not going to take up something so contentious unless he issure the votes are there, and this being an election year, the conservatives are ramping upthe invective, and UNCLOS , with what they believe to be its hidden Communist agenda, isone of their favorite whipping boys. Even John McCain, who in 1998 urged the SenateForeign Relations Committee to support the treaty, has flip-flopped and opposes itsratification.

As for Russias claim, Bellinger tells me, were not happy about it, but we dont have a basis to have a position. Privately, the U.S. is perhaps not so averse to Russia getting itsshelf extended, so America can get in on the action. All kinds of deals are being made

behind the scenes, a Washington insider told me. Bush would much rather get hisenergy from Putin than have to deal with the madness of the Middle East.

Last fall the first project to tap Arctic oil and gas deposits, 90 miles off the coast of Norway


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and 340 miles above the Arctic Circle, came on line . Its called Snhvit, Norwegian forSnow White. All the production equipment is on the ocean floor, so the drifting ice is nota problem, and the wellhead links by 89 miles of pipe to a small island just off Hammerfest. There the gas is cooled to 325 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, shrinking its

volume by 99.8 percent and turning it into liquid that can be shipped in tankers. Norway is about to launch an oil-drilling ship it has developed that can withstand the movement of the ice.

So, as technology keeps improving, the price of oil keeps rising, and the ice keeps me lting, Arctic energy is bound to be an increasingly bigger part of the global mix.

going south

Antarctica is held up as the model of international cooperation in the administration of our fragile and all-important polar regions. Fifty years ago it was the scene of a similarshowdown among Britain, France, Argentina, Chile, Norway, New Zealand, and Australia,each of which had asserted claims to the continent. It ended with the seven countriesandfive others, including the U.S.signing a treaty that divided the continent into sectors andforbade nuclear tests, military deployment, the dumping of radioactive waste, and theexploitation of any resources until 2048. So the news, late last year, that Britain wasdrawing up a submission claiming 386,000 square miles of seabed off northwestern

Antarcticawhich seismic tests suggest could contain 60 billion barrels of oilas anextension of its sectors continental shelf took the international community even moreaback than Russias flag planting two months before. The territory is disputed by Chile and

Argentina, who are sure to submit counterclaims, and the U.S. has made it clear that it willhold Britain in violation of the Antarctic Treaty. Bellinger doubted that the Brits weregoing to go through with the submission. If they do put in a claim, they will do it only notionally, as a placeholder.

But this is only one of Britains five proposed shelf extensions, and nine other countrieshave submissions in the works which will affect the status of 2.7 million square miles of sea bottoman area roughly the size of Australia. Canada is hastening to map its answerto the Lomonosov Ridge: the Alpha Ridge, a 1,300-mile-long submerged chain of ruggedpeaks and deep canyons that starts at Ellesmere Island and goes through the North Pole,possibly all the way to the Russian Arctic coast. The ocean floor, particularly at the poles,is the new frontier of real-estate speculation, territorial expansion, and resourcereplenishment. What the Russians kicked off is just the tip of the iceberg.

Alex Shoumatoff is a frequent contributor to Vanity Fair and the author of the 1988 book African Madness. His writings can be found online at Dispatches from the Vanishing World.


the arctic oil rush

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