More to the point, much of this bonanza in theory belongs not to the penguins, or even humanity, but to His Majesty’s Government. Consider the numbers. A new discovery in British Antarctic Territory could hold more oil than the North Sea’s entire output over the last five decades, while the world’s largest fish stocks are found at the poles too. 

Yet we shouldn’t necessarily expect Britain to suddenly become another Opec member overnight. Apart from the legal hurdles — there are strict rules around industrial exploitation at the poles — it’s unclear whether London could protect these far-flung territories even if it wanted to. With rivals circling, and foreign investors already rushing ahead with claims of their own, Britain risks losing out, particularly when its rulers seem so unwilling to protect their possessions overseas. 

Britain has interests around both the North and South Poles. As far as its vast British Antarctic Territory is concerned, that’s clearest around black gold. Beyond that striking comparison with the North Sea, experts believe that the most recent oil discovery, in May 2024, could meet the entirety of global demand for almost 15 years. 

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The North Pole, for its part, is important less for physical resources — and more for communications. Modern staples like GPS and satnav can only happen because many satellites connect to Earth via Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago some 2,000 kilometres north of Oslo. Whether it’s home food deliveries or Nato missile guidance, both would be impossible without Svalbard’s network of satellite ground stations. No less important, these barren islands also host a vital high-speed internet cable. No wonder Sir Tony Radakin, head of Britain’s armed forces, has stressed that the region represents a fulcrum of British security.

Now, however, this security looks threatened. In January 2022, someone cut the main subsea cable in the area. In April this year, the cables at the Evenes Airbase were disabled too, especially ominous as it’s where Norway and Nato keep a fleet of F-35 aircraft. The Norwegians have investigated both events and concluded that there is no clear culprit. But some believe that they’re skating around the problem because they don’t want to provoke a direct confrontation with Russia. 

Given all this, at any rate, it’s unsurprising that Whitehall is upping its presence both north and south. In 2023, for instance, the Ministry of Defence announced it was founding a Royal Marines camp near the Norwegian town of Tromsø. As I write, the UK is also upping its presence on the other end of the planet too, promising repairs to a key RAF base on the Falkland Islands. This surely makes sense: its Argentine rival has clearly noticed that the Antarctic oil fields stretch as far north as the Falklands, with Britain preparing to tap oil from 23 wells in the Sea Lion oilfield.

In practice, though, Britain’s commitment to its territorial defence remains suspect: just look at its surrender of the Chagos Islands and Diego Garcia. Sensing a cash cow, meanwhile, Argentina’s foreign minister has now vowed to “recover full sovereignty” over what he calls Las Malvinas. Britain officially insists its position is “unwavering” — but Keir Starmer appeared, at least at first, surprisingly reticent about keeping the Falklands British.

Even if Britain suddenly turned its foreign policy on its head, meanwhile, it seems unlikely that it’d actually make use of its vast polar hoard. For one thing, London strictly abides by the 1998 commercial protocol of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which prohibits seabed extraction. The UK seems equally unwilling to approve of deep-sea mining in its oceanic preserves, particularly now that scientists have discovered so-called “dark oxygen” some 4,000 metres beneath the surface of the chilly Southern Ocean. To quote Nick Owens, director of the Scottish Association for Marine Science: “The fact that we’ve got another source of oxygen on the planet other than photosynthesis has consequences and implications that are utterly profound.” 

Yet whatever Britain’s ethical scruples, it’s now becoming much simpler to harvest resources at both poles. One reason is climate change: with the ice sheets melting, the goodies below are easier to access. Another factor is technology: China recently unveiled the Kaituo 2, a 14-tonne deep-sea mining vehicle that can dredge the polar seabeds below a record-breaking 4,000 metres. Britain, for its part, has no such machines. 

There are signs, in short, that the polar regions could soon be subjected to an industrial rush. Indeed as we approach 2048 — the year the Antarctic Treaty can finally be renegotiated — Beijing and Moscow are already trying to gather enough allies to overturn the 1959 ban. They’re prospecting too: it’s no accident that the recent mega-discovery in the British Antarctic Territory was found not by the Royal Navy, but by Russia. Nor are the West’s headline geopolitical foes alone here. As one Iranian rear admiral recently (and somewhat implausibly) claimed, the Islamic Republic has “property rights” in Antarctica. 

The interest of national governments is echoed in the private sector too. Chinese investors recently tried to buy Søre Fagerfjord, which was the last remaining parcel of private land on Svalbard. China thought the 60 square kilometres of pristine wilderness was a steal at $326 million. In the event, the Americans and British apparently warned their Norwegian counterparts of the deal, and the acquisition was squashed. Unperturbed, China is teaming up with Russia to invest in mining firms, scientific research stations and policy programmes right across Svalbard. That echoes a long-standing Russian policy: the Svalbard town of Barentsberg has long been dominated by Russian miners, many of whom later went off to fight in Ukraine. 

While, therefore, our minds may first go to Ukraine or the Middle East, the poles could yet become geopolitical flashpoints. Svalbard, after all, is just 400 nautical miles from the Russian mainland. Elizabeth Buchanan, head of research for the Royal Australian Navy, has described the South Pole in similar terms. Fair enough: what if Russia or China started drilling there, or else erected critical infrastructure, just as Beijing has done in the South China Sea? 

Nor is this necessarily just a theoretical threat. China currently has five research stations right across Antarctica. The 1959 treaty specifically prohibits military activity anywhere on the icy continent. In practice, though, it’s hard to tell what China is up to because they seem to use radar to block overhead satellites. Rumours abound that they park their planes sideways on their runways, so that no one else could land even if they wanted to. At the same time, Western observers worry that the People’s Republic’s new Qinling Station is being used to spy on Britain and her Five Eyes intelligence partners.

Given all these opportunities for conflict, at any rate, could Britain and its friends defend their varied polar interests? Perhaps not. Faced with draconian spending cuts — day-to-day spending on defence has been slashed by nearly £10 billion since 2010 — the Royal Navy now only has 16 “major surface combatants” in its fleet. To offer just one point of comparison, the Chinese navy is the world’s largest, boasting almost 800 vessels of various sizes. 

To be fair, 2021’s Aukus treaty means that London could rely on US and Australian support in any Antarctic conflict. And there are signs, too, that London isn’t totally insensitive to the threat. Apart from dispatching troops and repairing airfields, Britain has also led the charge in encouraging the building of two entirely new subsea cable systems to Svalbard. One is the so-called IOEMA Project, which is due to go live by 2027. NORDUnet is another. Linking Svalbard with Scandinavia — as well as Japan and other Western allies — it’ll bypass Russia and China entirely.

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Yet Britain’s resolve will only truly become clear if and when a contest for polar assets — or indeed fully-fledged polar war — finally arrives. And in the event, any showdown could come sooner than we think. Long-term oil reserves are one thing. But Russia also has a profound strategic interest in the Arctic in the here-and-now. Last February, Norway’s normally reticent intelligence service publicly warned that nuclear weapons could be present on Russian vessels in the High North. No less important, Sweden and Finland’s accession to Nato also brings the possibility that Western nuclear weapons might be deployed in the Arctic too.

China, for its part, needs the Arctic as well. With sea lanes in the Red Sea threatened by the Houthis, and the Panama Canal with problems of its own, Beijing needs a reliable route from its port at Dailan to Rotterdam in Europe. The Arctic is the obvious choice here, not least when Chinese ships can now make the journey in less than 25 days, and when its economy would surely struggle without it. Britain, in short, seems unwilling or unable to exploit its polar bounty. But its future here may ultimately depend on decisions taken by others — something Keir Starmer and his admirals would both do well to remember. 

In 1947, the mercury here plummeted to -62.8ºC, so cold that reportedly frozen droplets of moisture in exhaled breath tinkled to the floor like shards of broken glass. In the summer of 1915, meanwhile, temperatures reached 37.8ºC, a record that stands to this day. Over the past 40 years, as the Arctic has warmed at a rate anything up to four times faster than the rest of the planet, the Yukon Flats, which straddle the Arctic Circle, have recorded the biggest temperature increases of all. Winters here are now on average 4.9ºC warmer than they were in the Fifties. In summer, the vast forests of spruce which span the Gwich’in territory are routinely ablaze.

Edward Alexander, a 46-year-old co-chair of the Gwich’in Council International, grew up in Fort Yukon and now lives in the Alaskan city of Fairbanks. For the past eight years, the father-of-four has worked as a volunteer firefighter, helping to tackle the devastating wildfires ravaging the Arctic and boreal north. This year, Canada has already registered its worst wildfire season on record, which has destroyed more than 52,000 square miles of the country — an area greater than the size of England. In Alaska, meanwhile, the frequency of wildfires exceeding one million acres in size has doubled in the past 30 years.

Alexander estimates that wildfires have claimed around four million acres of Gwich’in land since the Fifties, and in summer a thick band of smog often blankets the Yukon Flats. “We have had a front row seat to the beginning of the Pyrocene, as they are starting to call it,” he says. “The burning of the world.” Rain now falls instead of snow, caribou herds on which the Gwich’in rely have changed their patterns of migration, the rivers have warmed and salmon populations collapsed. And as the ice recedes, outside interests have started eying up the natural resources underneath the melting permafrost. After a deal was struck in 2019, oil and gas prospectors are currently scoping out the Yukon Flats.

A similar story is being recorded right across the High North. “Arctic amplification” is the term meteorologists use for the accelerated rate of global warming. But the same amplification is occurring with the geopolitics of the region. The Arctic is melting — one scientific study, published in June, claimed that the first summer in which all sea ice disappears could occur as early as the 2030s — and, from China to the US to Putin’s Russia, suddenly everyone wants a piece. The era of “Arctic exceptionalism” declared by Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 is resolutely over, his entreaties for the Arctic to remain a “zone of peace” free from conflict and exploitation forgotten. As climate change accelerates and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has cleaved apart the international order, the Arctic has emerged as the potential theatre of the next global conflict.

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Alexander, who also represents the Gwich’in on the Arctic council (which includes the eight Arctic states, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, the US and Russia) warns that the global race to plunder the Arctic could have devastating consequences. “If you don’t co-operate on the Arctic and we don’t get these things right, then I’ll tell you this, my friend: the world can change very rapidly.”

Russia, whose territory spans around 53% of the Arctic Ocean shoreline, and China are rapidly developing plans to expand the Northern Sea Route. The maritime passage between the east and west of the Arctic Ocean is regarded by the Kremlin as vital to avoid Western sanctions. It is already possible to navigate the route for anyone with several briefcases full of dollars to pay for the mandatory Russian ice breakers which accompany any transit as patrol vessels. In 2024, the Kremlin is planning to commence year-round navigations of the route, through which it hopes to increase the amount of cargo shipped from around 30 million annually to 80 million.

China — which has ominously declared itself a “near-Arctic state” — also harbours ambitions to transform the passage into a silk road of the far north, while in March, a Russian delegation to India held talks over new co-operation over the route. The West is similarly flexing its muscles, with Finland (and the expected accession of Sweden) extending Nato’s borders into the Arctic. In June, the US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced that the US would be opening an outpost in the far-north Norwegian town of Tromsø, stressing the need to have “a diplomatic footprint” above the Arctic Circle. “The war in Ukraine has really torpedoed this idea of Artic exceptionalism,” explains Dr Neil Melvin, Director of International Security at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). “The whole focus of northern Europe has basically now shifted to building security against Russia.”

As Melvin points out, the heavy losses sustained by Russia’s land army in Ukraine will force it to become increasingly reliant on its nuclear forces stationed in the Arctic, where the UK and US have also long operated their own attack submarines. Russia’s Northern Fleet comprises of a dozen or so nuclear-powered attack submarines as well as surface vessels, including two heavy nuclear-powered missile battle cruisers. In recent years, Russia has also reoccupied old Cold War-era Arctic bases to bolster its presence. “They will feel more vulnerable as a result of not having a strong army, and I think we are likely to see them threaten nuclear options much more as part of national defence,” Melvin says of Russia’s designs in the Arctic. “They are going to be much more explicit and threatening.”

Beneath the ice, the Arctic possesses untold riches. The region is estimated to contain a fifth of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas reserves and rare earth elements such as gold, nickel and zinc. While most of these are present within the largely undisputed land borders of the Arctic nations, it is the increasingly navigable international waters that present the most likely flashpoint. An ongoing process led by a United Nations commission is considering sovereignty rights to the central Arctic Ocean between Russia, Denmark and Canada. While Putin is cooperating with the process so far, he has also planted a flag in the most literal sense — dropping a titanium standard of the Russian Federation two miles beneath the ocean on the North Pole seabed in 2007. Fishing rights are also key; as southern oceans heat up, species will migrate ever further north, causing estimated catches in higher latitudes to increase by up to 20 per cent by 2050.

According to Professor Klaus Dodds, an expert in geopolitics and ice studies based at Royal Holloway and author of the recent book, Border Wars, the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard could prove another area of conflict. Under a treaty originally signed in 1920, a host of countries including China and Russia have rights to engage in commercial activities across Svalbard. Moscow conducts coal mining operations on the island of Spitsbergen (and insists on referring to Svalbard by the same name, to emphasise its historic claim on the land). In settlements such as Barentsburg, Russian is the predominant language.

“The concern is we know we have potential flashpoints like Svalbard which, having caused agitation and tension in the past, might be escalated very quickly,” Dodds says. Aggression could be anything from attacks on underwater cables (last year, a Russian trawler was linked to the severing of a sub-sea fibre-optic cable which linked Svalbard to the Norwegian mainland), to an outright attack on oil and gas infrastructure. “The Norwegian European Arctic will be the space where, if anything, this is most likely to happen,” Dodds says. “That would also be the ultimate opportunity for Russia to test Nato’s resolve.”

Regardless of the potential for nuclear conflict, a burning Arctic poses grave threats for humanity. The Arctic permafrost contains peatland soils which are the world’s most vital carbon sink. Globally, peatlands store twice as much carbon as all the forests combined. When this burns, it releases the carbon back into the atmosphere creating something of a doom loop. According to the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, wildfires across Canada have released 290 megatons of carbon into the atmosphere between January and August, more than 25% of the global total for 2023 in the year to date. 

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Thawing permafrost is also exposing chemical and radioactive waste and millennia-old “zombie viruses”. In 2016, around 100,000 reindeer were culled in the Russian far north after an anthrax outbreak that killed a 12-year-old boy. Plague bacillus, smallpox and other historic diseases are also feared to soon re-emerge from the melting earth. The discovery earlier this summer of 46,000-year-old roundworms lying dormant in Siberia, which are happily reproducing once again, may hold clues for adapting to climate change — but they also raise questions about what else might venture forth in a thaw. And herein lies the great lesson of the far north, Professor Dodds explains: nothing here ever happens in isolation — there will be wider ramifications across the globe. “Change in the Arctic is never restricted to the Arctic itself,” he says. “It is almost as if the Arctic strikes back.”

The time is long gone where we could think of the Arctic as a great pristine wilderness. Instead it has become the burning crucible of our climate crisis. But, as the towering glaciers melt and the seas of the Earth’s fifth largest ocean are revealed to us at last, their future looks even darker still, reanimating the biological threats of our deep past, and providing yet another site for human competition and conquest.