Tempest in the Arctic Ocean
Tempers are flaring over the Arctic Ocean. The heat may melt the sea ice faster than climate change. The fate of polar bears is not the greatest problem facing humankind, but it’s a great case study of the conflict between politics and science. Since the sixteenth century, explorers have searched for a northwest passage over the Americas and a northeast passage over Asia. Unsuccessful, these searches led to two great engineering achievements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Suez…