Polar Environments

Polar Region

Public and scientific interest in polar environments has never been greater. The twentieth century witnessed expanding concern for the Polar Regions which built on earlier limited contacts. First interest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was commercial, with the entry of whaling and fishing fleets from Europe and the United States. The nineteenth century witnessed the dramatic attempts in the Canadian Arctic by Royal Navy expeditions to find the North West Passage. Similarly in the Russian Arctic hectic exploration brought increasing geographical knowledge. The pace of contacts and ‘map making’ has quickened relentlessly in the twentieth century. Public   interest was ignited by the heroic exploits of Peary, Cook and Stefansson in the Arctic, and of Scott, Amundsen and Shackleton in the Antarctic, together with the first whaling activities in the southern ocean in the early 1890s. Interest between the First and Second World Wars was based on questions of sovereignty over Arctic land, with the United States, Canada, Denmark, Norway and Russia, in particular, wishing to stake their territorial claims. Increased whaling, and political agreement over the Antarctic continent, typified a more collaborative approach in the southern Polar Regions.

Since 1945 renewed interest has come from several new directions. The ‘Cold War’ between the West and the former Soviet Union brought great defense interest in the Arctic regions with the advent of intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) systems, military early warning systems (e.g. the DEW line – Direct Early Warning) and the reality of nuclear submarines operating beneath polar ice. Also, the period from the 1950s to the 1970s saw a great expansion in the search for non-renewable mineral resources (especially petroleum and non-ferrous minerals) by a commercial sector worried about the future availability of such materials. During the 1980s and 1990s came three further stimuli. First, there was concern about protecting and conversing ‘wildness’ which brought steps in setting up wildlife sanctuaries and national parks, on both a national and an international scale. Second, there grew up increasing concern for the welfare of aboriginal peoples in popular areas and a desire to give such peoples more ‘right’ and greater voice in how their environment  should be used. Third, there was growing concern about global environmental changes – climate warming, ozone depletion, pollution of ecosystems, biodiversity; such concern is rightly the province of the general public, as well as of the international science community. It is very clear that polar landscape play a vital role in all these world-wide systems; polar landscapes act as an early-warning device, a kind of environmental quality barometer, and also play a pivotal role in regulating the direction of these global problems. It can confidently be predicted that interest in polar landscapes is set to soar to new levels in the twenty-first century.

Polar ecosystems have low productivity and ecological diversities. Animal species have to hibernate or out-migrate during the harsh winters, and all biological activity is concentrated in a brief summer period. Soil processes and ecological mechanism act at a low intensity. Although Polar Regions are still widely regarded as remote and pristine environments, in reality they have been subject to pollution from distant sources in Europe, North America and Eurasia. Indeed, in the 1950s the discovery of DDT residues in Antarctic penguins was one of the first indicators that population is a global problem. Although the concentrations of contaminants are generally lower than in temperate regions, their presence is serious because of their persistence, due to slow turnover rates in polar ecosystems. Cold temperatures slow down degradation processes and tend to condense volatile organic pollutants. The cold slows evaporation rates also, and this may lead to a continuous transfer of organic chemicals from warmer parts of the world. Mammals and birds in Polar Regions are long-lived organisms, at the top of long food chains (e.g. whales, seals and polar bears) and they have high levels of body fat, which stores contaminants in the body. Many native Arctic peoples eat large amounts of wild game or ‘country food’; fat, liver, kidneys and heart (often regarded as the ‘choicest’ parts) are organs where the pollutants are most liable to accumulate.The geomorphology and soils are dominated by the presence of permafrost in the subsoil. As permafrost is sensitive to any change in the surface vegetation it is easily disturb by human activity. Any interference with the insulating properties of soil and vegetation, and in any addition of heat to the surface (perhaps through industry and building), will inevitably cause permafrost melting and ground subsidence. Polar ecosystems have a low resistance to outside impacts, and low resilience means that recovery is a long-term process. Polar ecosystems are also very variable in time and space. Soil and vegetation conditions change quite rapidly over short distances, under the influence of the catena relations of soils, plants, permafrost and slope. Time variability causes big contrast in weather and biological activities from one year to the next. It is another factor which makes polar environments so fragile and so unpredictable.

Polar environments have become better understood since the great strides in exploration and discovery of the final years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. The Antarctic region is unique on Earth in being the only entire ecosystem to be managed under the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), which came into effect in 1982 under the Antarctic Treaty System. The convention confers a degree of protection unparalleled elsewhere. In the Arctic the eight Arctic countries (Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States) have adopted the Arctic Environment Protection Strategy (AEPS), which aims to protect the fragile polar ecosystems. However, so far there is no unanimous view on how the Arctic should be protected, as conservation is defined as ‘rational use’. There is little agreement on how ‘rational use’ should be interpreted; some countries define it as ‘no use’, whilst others clearly intend to use the area for non-renewable resources (metals and energy) and even for the harvesting of marine renewable resources (fish, seals, wheels). The maintenance of healthy ecosystems remains an important responsibility which will not be easy to fulfill in the Arctic.