While most geopolitical discussions of the Arctic focus upon the Cold and World War II to frame our understanding of Arctic geopolitics, it is important to look further back in time for a more planetary perspective of Arctic geopolitics, in both human and geological time scales.
Indeed, understanding the interplay of not just human life (since the Beringian migrations of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM)) but life itself (starting with “Snowball Earth”) on polar ecosystems across this vast stretch of time can yield new insights into Arctic geopolitics that are relevant to our own time, and provide a more diverse view of the interconnections of the Arctic to our entire planet across a vast sweep of geological time, reflecting the global and enduring interconnections of the Arctic region to the nonpolar world, and its fragile and yet resilient web of life that increasingly unites humanity to so many polar species that humanity has sought.
Each of these periods noted above may be understood as a distinct Age of the Arctic, with Snowball Earth being the age when all the Earth became a polar icescape, suggesting that “Arctic” (commonly understood to be the northern “end of the Earth,” and one of the two “polar regions” (with some considering the high Himalaya a “third pole” of its own) is of itself a narrowly conceived era of divergence between both the nonpolar world and the frozen extremes of the Earth (whether the North and South polar regions, or the high alpine, glaciated components of Earth’s cryosphere), and between an unchanging temporal and spatial frozen state, and our current era, the Anthropocene, with its accelerating polar thaw driven by anthropogenic climate change (what Canadian Arctic expert, author and journalist Ed Struzik foresaw in 1992 as a looming “End of Arctic.”(Struzik, Ed. “The End of Arctic,” Equinox, No. 66: November/December 1992, 76-91.]
But in between these poles of divergence, the polar world has, in fact, ebbed and flowed with a dynamic cycle evident in the geological record, even though the human experience of Arctic is bookended by the frozen world of the ice age during the LGM, and today’s warming (and sometimes burning) Earth.
Below, we will journey through prehistory, from Snowball Earth some 600 million years ago to the more recent LGM some 20,000 years ago, when humanity began its very first wave of Arctic globalization, to our own time, the Anthropocene, with its polar thaw and consequent acceleration of Arctic globalization.
When teaching these many ages of the Arctic that appear in history (and prehistoric deep history), I often start with the prescient architect of America as an Arctic state, William H. Seward, who as U.S. Secretary of State during and after the Civil War, positioned the recently reunified United States for its global rise by expanding to the polar region; author Ed Struzik, whose prescient “The End of Arctic” cover story in Equinox magazine (noted above) was published in 1992, decades before most of us became aware of the polar thaw; and pioneering Arctic international relations theorist Oran Young, whose equally prescient 1985 Foreign Policy article, “The Age of the Arctic” [Young, Oran R. “The Age of the Arctic.” Foreign Policy, No. 61 (1985): 160–79. https://doi.org/10.2307/1148707.] framed Arctic geopolitics through a geopolitical lens centered upon the North Pole just five years before Struzik foresaw the Arctic’s very end).
Whether we joyfully welcome the arrival of the Age of the Arctic proclaimed by Young or mourn the End of Arctic as foreseen by Struzik, it becomes clear that these contending visions of the Arctic span a diverse range of sentiments regarding what we may gain versus what we may lose, much as experienced at the dawn of life on Snowball Earth, and later at the dawn of human globalization during the LGM.
Whether we are at the dawn of a new Age of the Arctic or in the first spasms of the End of Arctic, we find ourselves in Hegelian dialectic that seems to oscillate across the ages between Oran Young’s optimistic Age of the Arctic and Ed Struzik’s pessimistic End of Arctic, and this oscillation can be traced all the back to Snowball Earth 600 million years ago, and all the way up to our present time.
Indeed, my view is that these are all ages of a pendular Arctic dynamism that resonates across the ages and may even apply to our quest for life beyond Earth, where the interface between ice and liquid water, whether on the icy moons of Jupiter or deep in Pluto’s core, or on exoplanets circling distant stars in those solar systems’ habitable zones. Back here on Earth, if we broaden the time scale of our discussion, and consider human prehistory and deeper geological history as a continuous story, we can christen a new and enduring “Age of Arctic Dynamism” that extends from deep into Earth’s past into our own time.
The immediate relevance of deep history to the present may not always be obvious, since it not only predates the evolution of humanity, but marks the transition from single-celled life to more complex multicellular life. But as metaphor – to help us understand the range of changes in Arctic climate that we observe across the eons (measured in billions of years) – we come to understand the Arctic as an inherently dynamic place where change in many ways is the norm, and not the exception.
In such a world, Arctic climate change is not a crisis or ephemeral event but the status quo for at least the last quarter of our planet’s (and solar system’s) very existence. Arctic dynamism embodies a dynamic fluidity and perpetual motion that greatly contrasts with the traditional view of a frozen and unchanging Arctic. Whether we look much deeper into the past, to geological history (millions of years ago), or less deeply to human prehistory (tens of thousands of years ago), or even more recently to the colonial era when globalization began to modernize (measured in hundreds of year), we find some intriguing connections to and parallels with the Arctic of our own time.
Indeed, when we turn our attention to the many worrisome manifestations of Arctic climate change today, we find not a break with the past but a reconnection to it that is often overlooked.
In the murky depths of geological and human history, we can both contextualize and transition from the contending Ages of the Arctic to a broader discussion of Arctic climate (and its dynamic change) reaching deeply back in time, indeed, all the way back to the Cryogenian period (from Greek kryos (cold) and genesis (birth], when our entire planet is believed to have been entirely covered in snow and ice from pole to pole with a planetary-wide cryosphere that in essence defined our entire planet to be Arctic some 600-700 mega annum ago – in striking contrast to today’s world, defined since the end of the LGM by a much smaller cryosphere in just our polar regions and in high alpine glaciers like the Himalaya (called by some the “Third Pole”), where what remains of the Arctic is a mere fraction of the Earth’s earlier cryosphere, and even when combined with the other cryospheric holdovers (such as terrestrial glaciers in addition to pack ice in the southern ocean) from deep antiquity, conveys not only an extreme of climate and geography, but a dynamism as well.
By broadening our time-scale of Arctic dynamism, and considering both prehistory and geological history, the immediate relevance of such deep history to understanding our present-day Arctic will become clear; indeed, understanding the range of changes in Arctic (and global) climate that we can observe across the eons, we are reminded that Arctic is dynamic and where change, in so many ways has been the norm, one that is accelerating in our time, but well within the range of climatic variation that deep history presents to us.
