North of Oslo, north of Longyearbyen, almost as north as North itself, the National Geographic Endeavor breaks pack ice in endless daylight through a gray-teal sea. The expedition has been cruising near Svalbard, a group of high arctic islands larger than Denmark. Ashore, this arctic desert is so harsh natives wisely never settled here — only men digging coal, trapping arctic fox and polar bear, and hunting whales were foolish enough to come. A forlorn whaling camp remains. Whalers searched for oil in blubber and bone to light their economy. Now the question arises: Is this last wilderness being changed by another kind of oil? This desolate, grand, forgotten sea has suddenly come to the center of world attention for one reason: The pace of climate change is faster than expected. In the last 50 years, as much as half of summer sea ice has gone missing. Another few decades could mean that ice disappears entirely. The absence of ice in water has little to do with raising sea levels; it is water stored on land in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets that could overfill the oceans like a brimming bathtub. But since ice acts as a kind of mirror, less ice means less reflected sunlight, which means that the arctic could heat at twice the rate of the rest of the world. And in the last five years, some of Greenland’s glaciers have shown accelerated melting as well. Water rising With this melting from ice sheets and glaciers — and the nat ...
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