The cold front

Gordon Omnik, a whale hunter from Point Hope, Alaska, stands on watch. “He was basically waiting for the whale that never came,” says photographer Kadir van Lohuizen

Gordon Omnik, a whale hunter from Point Hope, Alaska, stands on watch. “He was basically waiting for the whale that never came,” says photographer Kadir van Lohuizen

“Nobody ever really paid attention to the Arctic,” says photojournalist Kadir van Lohuizen as he talks me through a selection of the thousands of images he has taken of the region. “It was long seen as this white, barren desert where there was absolutely nothing, but people are beginning to realise how important it is.”

That shift in perspective is due to the area’s transformation by rising temperatures. “To see the climate crisis you have to go to the Arctic because it happens in front of your eyes,” says van Lohuizen. “We are slowly starting to understand the impact it will have on us. The Arctic is the world’s air conditioner – it’s where the sun gets reflected and if this melts, and there are predictions that by 2030 there will be no ice in the Arctic during summer, it will have an incredible impact on the climate. The sun is going to be absorbed by the oceans and the temperatures of the waters will rise even quicker and, well, the rest we understand, right?”

A worker in a Norilsk copper factory owned by Nornickel, one the world’s largest producers of nickel, platinum and copper. In June, Russian officials announced they were investigating the mining company over the pumping of wastewater from its processing plants into the Arctic tundra

Not everyone is unnerved by rising temperatures in the frozen north – some see new economic opportunities. The Arctic Circle, which covers roughly four percent of the Earth’s surface, has long been a hostile environment. But as the ice recedes a new shipping route is opening between China and the West and long-frozen mineral assets are being uncovered. This has coincided with a surge in the number of troops sent to the area by all Arctic nations, as disputed waters offer potential riches. One of the coldest places on Earth is becoming hot property.

In 2018 van Lohuizen, who first visited the Arctic in 1999, teamed up with Russian photojournalist Yuri Kozyrev to attempt to capture the changes taking place across the region. Between them they planned to cover the entire Arctic Circle, with van Lohuizen heading west to shoot in Norway, Greenland, Canada and Alaska, while Kozyrev would venture east to cover Russia’s vast Arctic expanse – but such a trip would be expensive. “We applied for the Carmignac Award, which annually funds a six-month-long photo reportage,” says van Lohuizen. “Without them this project would have been impossible.” With funding secured, the two photojournalists began their polar expedition, encountering native communities, soldiers, scientists and even tourists all experiencing what van Lohuizen calls the “new frontier”.

“The key question is ‘who owns the Arctic?’” says van Lohuizen. “And there’s no easy answer.” Whilst the status of Antarctica – a landmass covered with ice – is clearly defined, no such rules apply in the north. “The Arctic is mostly sea ice, and so it is difficult to define territorial waters,” explains van Lohuizen. “In 2007 Russia planted a flag on the seabed below the North Pole, claiming that this was where the Russian continental shelf ended.” This move, van Lohuizen believes, was driven by the opening of the North Sea Route, a new sea corridor between China and the West. “Sailing from Rotterdam to Shanghai through the Arctic can save 12 days compared to going via the Suez Canal, which takes 30-plus days,” says van Lohuizen. “This is incredible and also potentially very profitable. The Russians want to control that corridor.”

Kozyrev sailed some of the new route. “The container ship he was on was escorted by ice breakers, but they weren’t needed,” says van Lohuizen. “It was so warm that there was no ice; the crew said they’d never seen anything like it.” Van Lohuizen believes that the route will become increasingly busy, bringing with it considerable risks. “An accident with an oil tanker would be devastating,” he says. “Any rescue operation would take a long time and the Arctic is a very ecologically sensitive region. So an oil spill there would be… well, you don’t even want to think about it.”

A customer at a tanning salon in Bovanenkovo, north-west Siberia. The area lacks natural sunlight during the nine-month-long polar night

A man passes an Orthodox church in Bovanenkovo, a new settlement for those working in the nearby gas fields

According to van Lohuizen, Russia was far quicker to identify the economic potential of the Arctic than the West. “If you look at images of the western Arctic and the Russian Arctic you notice how big the gap is in terms of development. Where Canada and the US have six ice-breakers, which are all outdated, the Russians have 60 state-of-the-art vessels.” Russia’s Arctic regions were developed during Soviet times, a move which showed a great deal of foresight. “At that time it was mostly frozen, but the Russians knew that one day things would start opening up and the northern shipping routes could be used by cargo ships,” says van Lohuizen. “They have developed big cities in the Arctic, like Norilsk, and there’s infrastructure in place. They are ready.”

Van Lohuizen also points out that without walls of sea ice getting in the way, Arctic nations are realising how close they are to each other – just 55 miles of the Bering Strait separates Russia and the US. As the stakes are raised, military presences are increasing in the region. “Most of the Arctic has been declared a border military zone by the Russians,” says van Lohuizen. “Canada, the US and European nations have increased troop numbers in the region in recent years… I think we could see a new Cold War in the Arctic if things are not controlled and agreed upon.”

A dog walks past machinery in Novoportovskoye, one of the biggest oil fields in Siberia. Once extracted, oil is transported to the Novy Port, which can handle up to eight million tonnes of the commodity a year

Van Lohuizen spent March 2019 in the Norwegian Arctic documenting military exercises with Dutch, Norwegian, German and US troops. “That was a real fighting exercise,” he says. “It was serious. When I asked a Dutch commander, ‘Who are you supposed to be fighting?’ he said, ‘The Russians, obviously.’”

The growth in interest in the Arctic and the changing physical and economic climate is radically altering the lives of the approximately four million indigenous people who live in the region, says van Lohuizen. “Greenland, despite being huge, is only home to a little over 50,000 people,” he says. “They’re expecting incredible reserves of different mineral resources, gas and oil to be uncovered as the ice recedes. Some people are dreaming of becoming the Emirates of the Arctic, with everyone getting rich. In Alaska it is a different story: poverty is rampant. I’ve seen poverty elsewhere in the US, in Mississippi and Alabama, but I never imagined the poverty I witnessed in Inuit communities could exist in the US.”

Van Lohuizen spent time in Point Hope, an Inuit community within the Arctic Circle with no road or rail connections to the outside world. The local economy is dependent on whaling – a quota by the International Whaling Commission allows them to catch ten bowheads per year – but the melting ice is making the task near impossible. “They need the sea ice to hunt,” explains van Lohuizen. “The whales would use holes in the ice to surface and breathe, which is when they were hunted by the Inuit in small boats. But now, with the disappearance of the sea ice, there’s no way for the Inuit to reach the whales. They can surface anywhere. We might think, ‘great, the whales can live,’ but the marine animals have been everything to the Inuit for centuries. If they disappear, it endangers these communities and their culture.”

In Canada, van Lohuizen discovered a different threat to the indigenous way of life. “The amount of mining is mind-blowing,” he says. “I was close to Hudson Bay, where there must have been 100 sites for diamond exploration. Mining has been going on for a long time, but with the melt it becomes a lot easier and cheaper to operate.” Unlike in Greenland, there is little hope among the native population in the US or Canada that they will gain from development. “The communities are used to not benefitting from the natural resources,” says van Lohuizen. “The mining companies tend to divide the community, with the few people who own the land benefitting, but not the wider community”.

It is a situation that could get worse. On 17th August, the Trump administration finalised a plan to allow oil and gas drilling in Alaska’s 19-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. “The Inuit feel completely abandoned,” says van Lohuizen.

Dutch marines rest before training exercises in the north of the Norwegian Arctic

Van Lohuizen spent March 2019 in the Norwegian Arctic documenting military exercises with Dutch, Norwegian, German and US troops. “That was a real fighting exercise,” he says. “It was serious. When I asked a Dutch commander, ‘Who are you supposed to be fighting?’ he said, ‘The Russians, obviously.’”

The growth in interest in the Arctic and the changing physical and economic climate is radically altering the lives of the approximately four million indigenous people who live in the region, says van Lohuizen. “Greenland, despite being huge, is only home to a little over 50,000 people,” he says. “They’re expecting incredible reserves of different mineral resources, gas and oil to be uncovered as the ice recedes. Some people are dreaming of becoming the Emirates of the Arctic, with everyone getting rich. In Alaska it is a different story: poverty is rampant. I’ve seen poverty elsewhere in the US, in Mississippi and Alabama, but I never imagined the poverty I witnessed in Inuit communities could exist in the US.”

Van Lohuizen spent time in Point Hope, an Inuit community within the Arctic Circle with no road or rail connections to the outside world. The local economy is dependent on whaling – a quota by the International Whaling Commission allows them to catch ten bowheads per year – but the melting ice is making the task near impossible. “They need the sea ice to hunt,” explains van Lohuizen. “The whales would use holes in the ice to surface and breathe, which is when they were hunted by the Inuit in small boats. But now, with the disappearance of the sea ice, there’s no way for the Inuit to reach the whales. They can surface anywhere. We might think, ‘great, the whales can live,’ but the marine animals have been everything to the Inuit for centuries. If they disappear, it endangers these communities and their culture.”

In Canada, van Lohuizen discovered a different threat to the indigenous way of life. “The amount of mining is mind-blowing,” he says. “I was close to Hudson Bay, where there must have been 100 sites for diamond exploration. Mining has been going on for a long time, but with the melt it becomes a lot easier and cheaper to operate.” Unlike in Greenland, there is little hope among the native population in the US or Canada that they will gain from development. “The communities are used to not benefitting from the natural resources,” says van Lohuizen. “The mining companies tend to divide the community, with the few people who own the land benefitting, but not the wider community”.

It is a situation that could get worse. On 17th August, the Trump administration finalised a plan to allow oil and gas drilling in Alaska’s 19-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. “The Inuit feel completely abandoned,” says van Lohuizen.

Flora Galahorn having whale for breakfast in the Inuit community of Point Hope, Alaska

Nakhimov Naval School in Murmansk, Russia

The changing climate has given rise to a strange sight in Arctic waters – cruise ships full of iceberg-hunting tourists. “The big cruise ships we are used to seeing in Amsterdam or Venice are now arriving on Spitsbergen and Svalbard. It’s just crazy,” says van Lohuizen. While the photographer is clearly dismayed by the advent of mass tourism in the Arctic, he can understand why people are drawn to a region that has captivated him for two decades. “I mean, it is beautiful, you cannot deny it,” he says.

Some of van Lohuizen’s most memorable experiences in the Arctic involved the company of scientists. “Being with them gives you a real insight into climate data and how their predictions are based on meticulously collected evidence,” he says. “To spend time with the people doing this work was really enlightening. We are witnessing a climate crisis and they are on the front line.”

When van Lohuizen visited international scientific missions in Hudson Bay and on Greenland, he was shocked by what he saw. “At the Eastgrip camp in Greenland they were drilling through the ice sheet, which is 2.7 kilometres thick, to the bedrock. They discovered ice floes, frozen rivers that are now defrosting, and the deeper they drilled, the faster the rivers were flowing. [As a result of these floes] the ice sheet where the station is based was moving 15 centimetres a day towards the coast. Not a week, not a month, but a day.”

Van Lohuizen is waiting for the scientists’ full report to be published in 2021, but he suspects the findings will make for grim reading. “I think it will give further proof that sea levels are rising even quicker than we thought,” he says. “First, we saw the glaciers melting, then we discovered that seawater was warming so the ice was melting from below. And then we realised there was a melt on the ice sheet itself, and now this. The reports get more alarming yet still we don’t really do anything. Sometimes you just wonder how stupid we are as human beings.”

Tourists in Disco Bay near Illulisat, Greenland. The ice originates from Sermeq Kujalleq, one of the fastest retreating​ glaciers in the world

Scientists take samples of the sea ice in Hudson Bay, Canada.

Posted on Thursday, September 14th, 2023 - Categories: #39 - Apr-Jun 2020, App Issues.