Free The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future by Laurence C. Smith Page A

was familiar but surreal, exhilarating but perturbing, all at once—in short, the typical reaction most Arctic scientists have at summer’s end when they migrate from north to south, like overeducated birds, to reintroduce themselves to society.
    What makes coming home so jarring, compared to other returns from other exotic places—isn’t simply culture shock. It’s human shock, seeing so many people again after dwelling in a place so empty of them. Even Iowa farmlands seem crowded after one has steamed for days along the Labrador coast or flown hundreds of miles overland, seeing virtually no trace of humans. To experience true northern solitude is both spooky and thrilling, like being time-warped to another planet without us. The question is how many more years things will remain like this.
    The number of people wishing to visit, exploit, or simply become informed about the Arctic grows larger every year. The count of prospective students contacting me to pursue graduate degrees has leapt from none to dozens per year. At annual conventions of the American Geophysical Union, research presentations about the Arctic now overflow giant convention halls where before there was a tiny room of lifers talking only to each other. Some ten thousand scientists and fifty thousand participants from sixty-three countries participated in the 2007-2o09 International Polar Year.
    Research and development spending is rising too. The U.S. National Science Foundation alone now funnels nearly a half-billion dollars annually toward polar research, more than double what it did in the 1990s. I wish that this trend meant winning a research grant was half as hard, but with so many new young scientists around, they are more competitive than ever. Global investments in the International Polar Year totaled some USD $1.2 billion. NASA and the European Space Agency are developing new satellites to map and comprehend the polar regions as never seen before. NASA’s investment alone will likely reach USD $2 billion by the middle of this decade. 529
    Thanks to heavy media coverage, images of drowned polar bears, bewildered Inuit hunters, and satellite maps of shrinking sea ice are now commonplace in people’s minds. In a remarkably short span of years these phenomena have changed the world’s perception of the Arctic from unconquerable ice fortress, to militarized zone buffering two nuclear superpowers, to frail ecosystem on the verge of collapse (or business bonanza, depending on one’s point of view). A place perceived as a maritime graveyard and killer of men even into the 1980s is now perceived as dissolving into a frontier ocean, laden with natural-resource riches for the taking. With so few actual Arctic residents around to protest these frames, all of them have been freely cemented into public consciousness by the words and images of their times.
    On the following page, the image on the left reflects the height of the Arctic exploration craze in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The one on the right is a popular stock photo currently circulating on many climate-change Web sites and blogs. Both portray the same geographic location—the Arctic Ocean—but to very different effect. At left ( Abandonment of the Jeannette, circa 1894) it is a darkly foreboding place, deadly and impregnable. At right ( The Last Polar Bear, circa 2009) it is a place of sunny skies, an alluring glass-calm sea, and a magnificent animal doomed to extinction.
    Both are stylized, of course. The craggy spires ensnaring the Jeannette more closely resemble alpine mountains than sea ice; upon magnification, shadow angles and other subtle details in the photo reveal that the polar bear has almost surely been digitally inserted. Each has its own message it is trying to advance. But stylized or not, it is images like these that powerfully reflect—and shape—the perceptions of their times. And, as any good advertising executive knows, when it comes to spending