March of the new polar rule sets

■"The Big Melt: As Polar Ice Turns to Water, Dreams of Treasure Abound," by Clifford Krauss, Steven Lee Myers, Andrew C. Revkin and Simon Romero, New York Times, 10 October 2005, p. A1.

This will be one of the truly weird global rule-set resets in coming years: as the polar ice cap melts in the Arctic, sea lanes previously inconceivable will inevitably become routine.

Anyone who did strategic nuclear planning during the Cold War (I caught the tail end in the most oblique sense) knows that the northern route is the quickest way to get from most Core nations' A's to other Core nations' B's. It's just the shortest straight lines on the globe. That's why our sensors basically all pointed north.

So guess where the hot new future of container shipping lines will be found?

Now, with the cap melting and visions of all sorts of natural treasures in their heads, entrepreneurs of all types are competing in a strange sort of "water rush."

Scientists believe at least one quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas reserves will eventually be found in the Arctic, so please hold off--yet again--on predicting the coming oil crash that will torpedo the global economy. Instead, gentelemen, start your oil rigs!

Then there's new fishing grounds.

Put it all together and all of a sudden the old ways of who-really-cares-where-we-draw-national-boundaries-in-this-frozen-wastewater is superceded by a passionate new debate about exactly where those boundaries should lie. I mean, you have your Danes trying to argue that an underwater mountain chain at the Pole is linked geologically to one that surfaces in Greenland, which Denmark sort of "owns" as a semi-autonomous region. On that basis, the Danish say the Arctic is basically all theirs.

Kind of piggy, if you ask me.

Of course America wants a big chunk, as do Canada, Russia and Norway.

Me, I just want to take an ice-breaker up there some summer for a family cruise.

Clearly, there will be a lot of money to be made up there, along with stunning new degrees of intra-Core connectivity of all sorts.

It will be fascinating to watch.