Oil shipments from the White Sea and the coast of the Barents Sea have soared, said Mikhail Kalenchenko, director of the World Wildlife Fund's branch in
Murmansk, the Russian port at the top of Scandinavia.
"It was supposed to increase over the next 10 years, up to 20 million tonnes of oil," he said. "It's 20 million this year," or 146 million barrels. At this rate, he said, "we can expect up to 100 million tonnes, over 10 to 20 years, to be transported through our area."
Western countries have paid millions to help Russia dismantle its aging fleet of nuclear submarines in the area and safely store the nuclear material aboard them, but Kalenchenko said far less attention had been paid to the environmental risks of expanding oil shipments in the same area, most in single-hull tankers.
"What has never happened before is a big accident in the high seas in the Artic," he said. For the entire Barents region, he said, Russia has only two bases with the equipment necessary to fight an oil spill. "In Norway, they have at least 50 bases of this kind," he said.
David Dickins, an engineer from San Diego who has spent 30 years studying how to clean up oil spills in icy waters, said that while the ice impeded the use of tools like booms that hold a slick in place, the ice also naturally contained the oil, giving response teams more time to act before environmental damage occurred.
One day last summer, the 1,200 residents of
Pangnirtung, a windswept outpost on a fjord in Nunavut, Canada's Inuit-administered Arctic territory, were startled to see a 122m European cruise ship drop anchor and send several hundred tourists ashore. While small ships have stopped in the Canadian Arctic, visits from large liners are increasing as interest grows in the opening Northwest Passage, said Maureen Bundgaard, chief executive of Nunavut Tourism, a trade association.
Bundgaard has been training villagers how to stage cultural shows, conduct day tours and sell crafts and traditional fare -- without being overrun. "We're not prepared to deal with the huge ships, emotionally or in other ways," she said.
Inuit leaders say they are trying to balance tradition with the inevitable changes that are sweeping their lands. The Inuit Circumpolar Conference, which represents 155,000 Inuit scattered across Canada, Greenland, Russia and the US, has enlisted lawyers and movie stars like Jake Gyllenhaal and Salma Hayek to draw attention to its imperiled traditions.
The group's leaders hope to submit a petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in December, claiming that the US, by rejecting a treaty requiring other industrialized countries to cut emissions linked to warming, is willfully threatening the Inuit's right to exist.
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