Arctic plants are very scarce, and for good reason. This region is so cold that few plants can actually survive in the weather. The plant life that calls the arctic home has to be very steady and able to withstand all of the different elements. There are some flowers, moss, and shrubs to be found, along with some grasses. However, because of the weather and the fact that the soil is only a few centimeters deep across the continent, there is simply not a mass of plants that call this continent home.
Arctic plants that you will find in this region include things like grasses, lichen, cloud berry flowers, wildflowers, herbs, dwarf and arctic willows, and more. There are only a few short months of sunshine in the arctic, and the weather is still cold and windy all the while. Still, many plants have managed to adapt and call this region home, no matter what the weather is like. Adapting is a slow process that requires the plants to adjust to their new surroundings and get used to the temperatures and lack of sunlight in the region.
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February 14, 2011 – 3:49 pm
After creating a share-swap deal, Rosneft and BP were set to drill in the Arctic waters of Kara Sea, but there were some complications in the swap part of the deal that got in the way. Alfa Access Renova are the existing BP partners in Russia that have created TNK-BP as a partnership and thereby placed a court order that halted the swapping of shares with Rosneft due to a breach of an earlier agreement, the company claims. Apparently, BP made a suggestion that TNK-BP would be able to join the deal with Rosneft in Russia, and they weren’t too fond of being excluded after that statement.
The agreement was put into place to ensure that TNK-BP could get involved on the action going on in Russia and there have been many talks about joining the deal, but the company still feels that it is not an acceptable solution. They don’t have the experience, personnel, or technology according to the CFO of Rosneft, which is why it doesn’t seem like it will be successful. The oligarchs (as TNK-BP is known) and BP will now begin arbitrations in the United Nations Court in Sweden to determine the next steps.
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January 19, 2011 – 11:57 pm
Canada has made several recent moves that show the fact that Canada seeks to establish itself as an Arctic power. The country’s government recently bolstered its presence in the Arctic which, with increasingly warm weather, has become increasingly accessible. The promise of rich resources such as oil and natural gas has pushed Canada to try to take more control over its northern waterways. The Canadian government has, in recent months, made its Arctic territory a location for official visits, as well as military exercises taking place both above and below water. This came at roughly the same time as an incident in which Russian bombers were chased away by Canadian fighter jets because they had flown a little too close to the border of Canadian aerospace.
Many of the nations that have a foothold in the Arctic have been researching various areas of the ocean floor and continental shelves, which have shown that they may contain a huge amount of natural resources. In fact, the Arctic may contain as much as one third of the total undiscovered oil in the entire world. The extension of continental shelves has caused some confrontation between countries, with a dispute regarding which country an area of the Arctic Sea rich in natural resources belongs to. Canada and Russia have both laid claim to the land, although Norway has urged both countries to settle the dispute and lower tension.
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January 18, 2011 – 12:28 pm
Alaska recently filed a petition to try and overturn the Obama administration’s hold on any drilling in federal waters in the Arctic. Officials from the Department of the Interior, on the other hand, have insisted that no such moratorium exists.
Alaska’s legal petition asserts that the Department of the Interior’s “arbitrarily and capriciously imposed” hold on drilling in federal waters after the Deepwater Horizon disaster was brought about “without considering and weighing the potential effects on Alaska, including economic harm to the State of Alaska and Alaska residents.”
The Governor of Alaska, Sean Parnell has backed the petition, based on the economic damage he says the hold could cause. Parnell said in a statement regarding the petition,
“Development of Alaska’s (Outer Continental Shelf) resources is of critical importance to Alaska’s future and the economic and security interests of the United States.”
He added,
“We are taking this action to ensure that the federal government abides by applicable federal law, including its legal responsibility to make the OCS available for expeditious and orderly development.”
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November 7, 2010 – 12:10 am
Anyone who was a grade school student in a United States public school recently inevitably did a report or paper focused on Arctic animals or the Arctic region in general. This area is a fascinating ecosystem at the northern end of the earth and is well known for its extremely cold temperatures, Northern Lights, and eternal summer as some call it. The eternal summer reference comes from the fact that during the summer months, the sun continues to shine in the Arctic, even through out what is normally considered nighttime hours. This remote location is the natural habitat for polar bears, Arctic foxes and wolves, caribou, and musk ox to name a few.
Other Arctic animals that thrive in cold, northern temperatures include the snowy owl, collared lemming, Arctic hare, walrus, and narwhals (whales). Narwhals, also called corpse whales because they often float upside down on their backs for prolonged periods, travel slowly in Arctic waters in pods. As they travel, they communicate with amazing clicks, squeals and whistles so they can stay together. Narwhals eat squid and have an interesting and distinctive tusk that sticks out like a tooth on the whale’s head that can grow to about nine feet long.
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November 7, 2010 – 12:01 am
Petroleum exploration in the Arctic has increased in the last few years mostly due to the increase in oil prices and continued demand across the world for this resource. Several major companies have taken on new or extended projects in spite of a higher Petroleum Profits Tax as levied by the State of Alaska. Companies like Shell, Alaska Petroleum, Anadarko Petroleum and continue to play major roles in drilling, testing, and hopefully tapping more oil. Exploration is mostly concentrated near the ANWR border east of Prudhoe Bay, in the southern area of the Brooks Range foothills, and west of the NPRA (National Petroleum Reserve).
Petroleum exploration in the Arctic has long been a conflicting issue for the world from a political standpoint as well as an ecological one. Many people worry that continued exploration is going to be at the cost of losing natural areas and wildlife habitats that are crucial to the chain of life. Conversely, oil is still a necessary and highly sought after resource. Oil exploration is at an all time high and more people are employed as a result. Searching for oil costs a great deal of money and as many have recently observed in the BP leak in the Gulf, clean up can also be very expensive and take its toll on the surrounding environment and wildlife, not to mention human impact.
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October 31, 2010 – 12:01 pm
A recent press release from India’s leading firm for oil and natural gas, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) shows India to bid for share in Russia’s Arctic oil reserves. ONGC is the only foreign company that will be placing bids for Russian oil deposits, and will be bidding through its Russian subsidiary company, Nord Imperial. The area that ONGC will be bidding on, which includes parts of the Trebs and Titov regions, holds oil reserves estimated to total at about two hundred million tons.
The Minister of Natural Resources for Russia said that although the oil reserves in these regions is classified as a “strategic resource” (as opposed to a luxury or economic resource), the Russian government will be allowing ONGC to bid, but the Russian government will most likely be going with a national company. Some sources suggest that ONGC could be planning to partner up with Rosneft. Because of the rapid rate at which domestic demand for oil is rising in India, the Indian government has been looking into a number of foreign oil reserves for consideration. Coal and oil reserves around the world have been looked at by the Indian government with the intention of expanding the amount of resources it can acquire.
The Indian government has also begun plans for creating a sovereign wealth fund, in order to help cover the financial needs of companies owned by the state, such as ONGC, as well as Indian Oil Corporation and Oil India Limited. Each of these companies bid for various types of energy assets (such as oil, gas, and coal) around the world. In 2009, China spent roughly thirty-two billion dollars on energy and resource acquisition around the world. In contrast, India spent only roughly two billion dollars.
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October 19, 2010 – 3:02 pm
The Arctic is a fascinating region. It is cold yet is home to some hearty animals and some plant life that can handle a challenging existence. Most people associate the arctic with being in essence, the top of the World. The top 5 Arctic facts are hard to narrow down because there are so many interesting things to know about the Arctic and its place in the world ecosystem. One interesting fact that movie goers will enjoy is that the ill-fated ship called Titanic struck an Arctic iceberg. Titanic was supposed to be an unsinkable ship and as Cameron’s movie demonstrated, many aboard perished because they waited too long to try and rescue themselves, thinking Titanic would stay afloat.
Other top Arctic facts include how the sun shines for several summer months all the time, even at midnight. Imagine trying to get any sleep if it was always bright and sunny. Scientists who study the Arctic and travel there during the summer months are careful to balance their exposure to the constant light so it interferes as little as possible with their bodily functions and balance. They must also deal with the constantly extreme temperature which averages about thirty below zero on most days of the year, or much colder with a bitter wind chill factor. It’s also interesting to note that the Arctic can get warm, so to speak, reaching fifty degrees in some places during the summer.
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October 15, 2010 – 9:45 pm
Russia Presents Vision for Arctic Wealth: An international forum recently held in Moscow was, according to Sergei Shoigu (President of the Russian Geographical Society), designed to
“present the world community with a picture of the region’s future as it is seen by the Russian experts.”
Shoigu is also the Russian Emergencies Minister, and is concerned with how a tremendous amount of untapped oil and natural gas reserves in the area will be exploited. Here, we’ll take a brief look at how Russia’s vision for taking advantage of this wealth within the Arctic will play out.
A recent study by the United States Geological Survey estimated that the amount of “undiscovered, technically recoverable” sitting north of the Arctic Circle was roughly double the amount that has been discovered to date. There is also estimated to be almost three times as much undiscovered natural gas as there is oil, much of which sits within the area of the Arctic Circle currently under Russian control. Russian government representatives recently announced that geographers would begin working on an updated version of the Arctic atlas, which Shoigu describes as requiring “extensive, serious work.”
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October 15, 2010 – 9:13 pm
The Arctic is a highly unique area of the world, in that a number of countries that are otherwise nowhere near each other (Russia and the United States, for example) all have part of their countries extending into this region. This proximity to each other only in a specific area of the world has sparked the need for each of these countries to cooperate with one another to best make use of and protect the Arctic Circle, and here we’ll go over some of the different aspects that go into Arctic cooperation and politics.
The first aspect of Arctic cooperation and politics is that there are eight primary arctic nations. These are the United States, Russia, Canada, Denmark (including Greenland and The Faroe Islands), Iceland, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. While most of the population of these countries lives below the Arctic Circle, they each have some amount of territory that stretches into it. These countries make up the members of the Arctic Council, which deals largely with environmental treaties, and not so much the addressing of boundary disputes and the allocation of resources.
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