The Bellwether Ocean
The modern history of the Arctic Ocean is marked by its increasing role as an indicator, or bellwether, of global climate and environmental change.[809] This is a remarkable position for a region that only a few generations before was seen from the south as marginal and isolated from the rest of the world.
This reflects a new scientific understanding, both of the Earth system and the role of the Arctic in it. Sea ice is a central component of that change. If cold, ice and snow were always in play as determinants of anthropology and history, we now also have a literature on the retreat of ice, especially a discourse of the warming Arctic.[810] What used to be an Arctic trope, the coming and going of ice and snow, the capricious play of climate with culture in that remote stretch of human presence, has expanded to become a global predicament in which the Arctic Ocean is an indicator of global climates and a factor in global anxieties.The waning ice of the Arctic Ocean links excesses of modern consumer society and industrialism to disastrous impacts on the innocent original populations, whose vulnerability, despite a long history of successful adaptation, is aggravated when the ice melts.[811] At the same time the question can be asked where the authority of knowledge about this elusive material rests. Local communities - carriers of traditional knowledge and technology - are increasingly living alongside scientifically trained ice and glacier experts.[812] The latter have made direct observations on ice concentrations spanning the Arctic since the middle of the twentieth century. Since the arrival of satellites for monitoring of the global cryosphere from around 1970 there has been a comprehensive record of sea-ice data from the Arctic Ocean with the modern satellite records starting in 1979.[813] Since the 1990s, data show a consistent co-variation with the increased rates of atmospheric CO2, only that the effects on sea ice are disproportionately big.
The same goes for Arctic temperatures that exceed the global average. This ‘Arctic amplification’ of global climate change has a strong ocean component.[814] Today it has to a large extent taken over the narrative of the Arctic, which is commonly linked to threatened polar bears and economic opportunities following the waning ice, putting at peril a more integrated, historically informed understanding including local populations and issues of power, voice and social context.[815]The bellwether trope of the Arctic Ocean has co-evolved with broader changes in the scientific description of the Earth system. But an essential component was a rapidly growing body of knowledge from the ocean itself. During the nineteenth century there had been several expeditions, some motivated by the search for the Northwest Passage or the North Pole and their scientific findings transformed the understanding of the Arctic Ocean from a basin of low diversity and few species to one of rich marine fauna. Towards the end of the century Russian scientists and marine officers initiated sea-ice observations and started to accumulate the data that provide the baselines for later changes, assisted by the mighty Arctic icebreaker Yermak from 1899. Oceanographers Nikolai Knipowitsch and Nikolai Zubov could establish a warming trend in the Barents Sea in the interwar period and a persistent pattern of diminishing sea ice.[816] The interest in melting and strangely behaving sea ice resulted in a significant growth of publications in several countries, not least on research methods and terminological issues; the trope of the icefree Arctic Ocean required technologies and research infrastructures, and became increasingly linked to security and national economic interest.[817]
In the 1930s Soviet scientists stood out as exceptionally active and skilled, playing a key role in the Second International Polar Year, and in 1937 the USSR opened its longstanding program of ice floe research which was to last throughout the Cold War.
The first base was set up on 3-metre thick ice close to the North Pole in March 1937, furnished by several airplanes and boasting measuring instruments in the air, the ice and the ocean beneath. In February 1938 the ‘North Pole’ station drifted out to the Greenland Sea, and after several attempts, the camp was evacuated successfully with the help of an icebreaker. The lingering ideas about the lifeless deep Arctic Ocean were disproved. It was also discovered that rain, fog and unstable weather were typical for the central Arctic Ocean. After 1954, Soviet field work on the drifting ice became regular; every year one, two or sometimes even four ice camps operated in the Arctic Ocean.[818] In the early 1950s the US initiated a similar, but more short-lived, programme on massive concentrations of ice, so called ice islands, north of Barrow, Alaska.[819] The US Navy began charting seaice conditions from reconnaissance flights in 1947 and began a sustained ice observing and forecasting programme a few years later.[820] Canadian agencies were asked to contribute with station-based monitoring data.Alongside the major powers, oceanographic research grew in scope and intensity, and was increasingly based on permanent research stations and long-term programmes; availability of data grew. Among those who attempted to predict future ice conditions was the head of the Canadian Defence Research Board’s Arctic division, Graham Rowley, who suggested in 1952 that ‘an open polar sea’ was a possibility in less than thirty years.[821] Rowley’s US Army counterpart, the bio-geographer Paul A. Siple, likewise predicted, in 1953, a possible ice-free Arctic Ocean in half a century. Both Rowley and Siple related the vanishing of summer sea ice to (likely natural) climate variation, that now rose to the status of national security concern.[822]