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The state of the Arctic, which is bad, may have just made the dreaded jump to worse. This summer, the sea ice that caps the Arctic Ocean melted to the lowest level since at least 1979, when satellites first began keeping track of ice over the North Pole. By the end of August, the National Snow Ice and Data Center (NSIDC) reported that Arctic ice had fallen to 1.54 million sq. miles (4 million sq. km). That’s nearly six times the size of Texas, but it’s still 45% less than the average for August throughout the 1980s and 90s — and as of now the ice is still shrinking.

Nor is 2012 an anomaly — the ice cap has been shrinking over the years as temperatures have increased, and now some scientists believe the total volume of Arctic ice is only a quarter of what it was 30 years ago. “By itself it’s just a number, and occasionally records are going to get set,” NSIDC scientist Walt Meier said at the end of August in a statement. ”But in the context of what’s happened in the last several years and throughout the satellite record, it’s an indication that the Arctic sea ice cover is fundamentally changing.”

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, there may be more than 90 billion barrels of recoverable oil buried in the Arctic — about 13% of the world’s estimated undiscovered reserves. So as climate change — due chiefly to the burning of fossil fuels like oil — melts the Arctic ice, it becomes easier for oil companies to send their drilling ships northward and produce more oil for us to burn, thus warming the climate even further. That’s pretty much the definition of a positive feedback cycle—and it could be bad news for both the climate and the Arctic.

The process is already underway. On September 9 — four years after it paid $2.8 billion for federal leases — Shell began drilling an exploratory well 70 miles off the northwest coast of Alaska in the Chukchi Sea. It’s the first drilling to be done in the Chukchi in more than two decades, and it comes after years of debate with the Interior Department, which finally gave Shell its permit on August 30. That approval came over the criticisms of environmental groups and some residents of Alaska’s North Shore, who worry that a spill in the icy Arctic waters could prove impossible to clean up. “There’s nothing we can do now but I worry about the weather and the animals we depend on for our survival,” Steve Oomittuk, the mayor of the Alaskan Arctic village of Port Hope, told CNN. “If Shell finds what it thinks is down there then many other companies are going to come and then it will only be a matter of time before something happens out there.”

Still, President Obama has signaled that he is largely unwilling to put much of the Arctic off-limits to drilling, even after the disaster that was the BP oil spill. That’s a risky move. It’s worth remembering that the Macondo blowout — which resulted in the release of nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico — happened in the nerve center of the U.S. oil industry, allowing ships and clean-up crews to converge rapidly on the spill site. The Chukchi Sea, by contrast, is more than a thousand miles away from the nearest Coast Guard station. And if Mitt Romney wins in November, we can expect Arctic drilling to scale up even faster. Shell’s drill ship — the Noble Discoverer — won’t be the last rig to ply Arctic waters. And if we remain addicted to burning that oil, the Arctic as we’ve known it could be gone for good, melted before our eyes. http://science.time.com/2012/09/11/arctic-sea-ice-vanishes-and-the-oil
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Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA), Europe’s largest oil company, was forced to scrap plans to drill for oil off Alaska this year after a containment dome designed to cap a spill was damaged.

The need for repairs won’t leave enough time to drill deep enough to find oil this year, The Hague-based Shell said today in a statement. It will instead drill a number of so-called top holes, preparing the way for a renewed exploration campaign next year. Shell had planned to invest $1 billion in exploration off Alaska this year.

After six years of preparation, Shell started drilling this month in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea after obtaining a permit from the U.S. Interior Department. Shell has invested $4.5 billion on the offshore leases and equipment and fought at least 50 lawsuits from environmental groups opposing the first wells in the Arctic waters in about 20 years.

“Investors must now be asking whether investing such vast sums of money trying to exploit the fragile Arctic is really worth it,” Ben Ayliffe, a campaigner at Greenpeace, said in an e-mailed statement.

In July, the U.S. Coast Guard had to inspect the Noble Discoverer drillship when it slipped its mooring and drifted toward shore in the Aleutian Islands. The rig crew didn’t report any damage.

Shell had planned to start exploration in July. It had to modify the Arctic Challenger barge, brought in to help collect any oil spilled in case of a well blowout, to satisfy U.S. Coast Guard requirements.

Shell fell 0.7 percent to 2,246 pence at 9:39 a.m. in London.

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