An emergency coordination center is needed for a new frontier.

• Author: Newton, George B.
• Position: Environment

As once-frozen areas above the Arctic Circle change with the global climate, reports almost daily in the media note unique features about the impact in the far north. For one thing, the changes in the Arctic--both at sea and on land--are larger than those in the temperate areas. The scale of these changes are documented in the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) completed in 2004 under the sponsorship of the Arctic Council and the International Arctic Science Committee. Second, these changes in the Arctic, particularly in the Arctic Ocean, are opening an international frontier that all will seek to exploit for the advantages it will offer: increased accessibility to the area will mean both shorter intercontinental transportation routes (and trips to local destinations) and also easier access to natural resources. The changes will be radical: Ships will ply ocean routes that have been defined with only marginal accuracy; land will be developed that only a decade or two ago was considered largely uninhabitable and unusable. And this move north, over land and sea, will bring more inhabitants, many (in fact, most) of whom will be experiencing for the first time a unique place, one that is poorly understood by both the migrating individuals and the rest of the world, and an environment that is potentially dangerous and unforgiving.

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Though the Arctic is a true frontier, it is quite different from the 17th century frontier of North America: Europeans would take months to reach it and often they would not be heard from for years. Since they knew very little about where they were going, they knew to prepare for their expeditions. Accidents would happen, of course: ships and lives would be lost. But the reaction in Europe was usually resignation to adversity. Accidents were the price that had to be paid to move forward and no country could "respond" to tragic incidents because there were no communications operating in anything resembling real-time communications.

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Today, people working or traveling in most parts of the world generally expect to be able to count on real-time response to any accident, insult to the environment or lesser challenge to life or limb. In the temperate world, technology enables everyone (traveler and local inhabitant) to know exactly where they are, to communicate quickly and reliably and to call upon available expertise (usually located nearby) in the face of almost any event. That is as it should be: the world today has considerably less tolerance for a slow or inadequate response to an accident that threatens loss of life or damage to the environment.

This situation is...