The United States Arctic Research Commission (USARC) recently released its “Goals and Objectives for Arctic Research 2019–2020,” and other documents that read less like a strategic roadmap and more like a set of frantic maintenance instructions for a house whose foundation has already transitioned from a solid state to a muddy slurry.
The core irony of this federal directive lies in its profound temporal blindness. As Chair Fran Ulmer and her fellow commissioners attempt to “manage” a region warming at twice the global average, they are doing so with a bureaucratic toolkit that is functionally a reliquary.
They are attempting to dictate the future of the North while leaning on the “Environmental Atlas of Alaska,” a relic from 1984, and the “Cold Regions Utilities Monography,” which has not been touched since 1996. It is the institutional equivalent of checking the weather with a calendar from the Jurassic.
The Leviathan of federal oversight is currently engaged in a desperate, late-stage scramble to retrofit the apocalypse. The Commission’s primary motivation for infrastructure research is the startling realization that 70 percent of all Arctic infrastructure, the very bones of civilian and military presence, is currently perched atop near-surface permafrost destined to liquefy within the next 30 years.
This architectural expiration date is fixed and will not be moved by the lofty, hollow targets of the Paris Agreement. We are witnessing an institutional panic to rewrite the Department of Defense Unified Facilities Criteria 3-130 for Arctic and Sub-Arctic Construction, a set of guidelines so out of step with the current climate that they might as well be written for a different planet.
The Arctic is no longer a pristine wilderness. No, it is a crumbling construction site where the ground is literally turning to mud beneath the weight of building codes drawn when the USSR was still a primary concern.
The Infrastructure Farce: Roombas and Icebreakers
Goal 1 of the USARC plan, “Advance Arctic Infrastructure,” is an exercise in techno-optimism that borders on the delusional. The Commission highlights high-tech interventions as if they were enough to offset the total absence of basic geographic knowledge. They offer us toys while the house collapses.
Stated Goal vs. Cold Reality
- The High-Tech Vision: The Arctic Domain Awareness Center (ADAC) is testing Long Range Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (LRAUV) capable of producing 3-D maps of oil spills under solid ice packs for 15 days on a single charge.
- The Cold Reality: Only 4.1 percent of the U.S. maritime Arctic is currently charted to modern international standards. The federal government is attempting to navigate a “New Arctic” using sparse, prehistoric data collected in an era before the region began its current thermal nosedive. We have 3-D maps of hypothetical spills but no idea where the seafloor actually is.
- The High-Tech Vision: The “Polar Scout” research program successfully launched small cube satellites in December 2018 to enhance Arctic communication and “domain awareness.”
- The Cold Reality: This “awareness” is being broadcast to a built environment—roads, sewers, and energy systems—that relies on “decision-support tools” the Commission admits are based on environmental conditions that have “evolved significantly over the past 30 to 40 years.” We are launching satellites to monitor bases built on 1984 environmental assumptions.
- The High-Tech Vision: The Coast Guard is field-testing an oil skimmer colloquially known as the “Roomba,” a name that perfectly encapsulates the triviality of the response.
- The Cold Reality: While we play with robotic vacuums in ice-infested waters, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and other energy transport systems are facing a future where traditional pipelines are no longer viable. The Leviathan is considering “gas-to-liquids transport” and “high-voltage direct current transmission” as desperate, expensive adaptations to a landscape that can no longer support a simple tube.
Resource Extraction: The “Critical” Scramble
Goal 2 shifts the focus to “Strategic and Economic possibilities,” which is bureaucratic shorthand for the desperate scramble to strip-mine the melting frontier. There is a palpable, shivering geopolitical anxiety in the push for “Critical Minerals.”
The Department of the Interior has identified 35 minerals essential to national security—graphite, tin, platinum, cobalt—and is currently begging for new U.S. sources to decrease “dependence on foreign sources.”
The Commission looks with a certain institutional envy at the Canadian government, which had the foresight to invest $75 million (US) in a geo-mapping program to identify energy and mineral resources. Meanwhile, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is still “preparing a report to the President.” This scramble for resources is occurring alongside a biological invasion that serves as a stinging metaphor for the government’s lack of control.
Satellite imagery reveals that beavers are “colonizing” the tundra, moving northward as shrub vegetation increases. These un-permissioned engineers are reshaping hydrological systems and distribution patterns of permafrost. The beavers are effectively reshaping the landscape and exacerbating climate change with more efficiency than any federal infrastructure planner. The Leviathan is busy forming committees to discuss cobalt while the beavers have already re-engineered the plumbing.
The Environmental “Blob” and the Methane Exploded Craters
The data synthesized under Goal 3 paints a picture of an ecosystem in a state of violent, irreversible transition. Between 2014 and 2016, “The Blob,” a pool of unusually warm water in the North Pacific, decimated Pacific cod productivity by over 80 percent.
This was followed by a “Jellyfish Surge” in the Bering Sea, where soaring numbers of jellyfish are consuming the biomass that used to support fish, seabirds, and marine mammals. The Bering Strait remained virtually ice-free for the first time since 1850.
The most evocative image of this environmental instability, however, is found on the Yamal Peninsula. Craters have been discovered that appear to have “exploded up and outwards.” Unlike a standard sinkhole where the ground collapses, these cavities are formed by increasing internal pressure until the ground simply bursts. The pressure may be due to methane build up.
This is the perfect mirror for the “bureaucratic pressure” of the USARC. Just as methane builds under the permafrost, the pressure of a melting world is building under the ossified structures of the government.
The stakes are lethal: methane is “28 times more potent than carbon dioxide” as a heat-trapping gas. As permafrost thaws, microorganisms are digesting organic matter and releasing this gas, creating a positive feedback loop that the government is merely “observing.” The bureaucratic response is to recommend “attribution science” to distinguish human-caused warming from natural fluctuations. It is a pathetic attempt at categorization, as if labeling the cause of the explosion will stop the ground from bursting beneath your feet.
Community Health: The Human Cost of the Leviathan
Goal 4, “Improve Community Health and Well-Being,” moves from the geological to the personal, though the tone remains chillingly clinical. The statistics are a grim post-mortem of the human cost of living on the front lines of a melting world.
Alaska’s suicide rate between 2012 and 2017 was the first or second highest in the nation. Among those suicide decedents from 2015 to 2017, forensic toxicology indicated a 64 percent increase in opioid use.
The government’s response to this crisis is a classic exercise in bureaucratic retreat. Faced with a “critical shortage of providers,” the Leviathan pivots toward “telemedicine” and “Community Online Databases.” When all 20 of Alaska’s Native languages are classified as “threatened” or “critically endangered,” the Commission recommends monitoring their extinction via an online database. This is the ultimate retreat—healing a dying culture through a screen because the state lacks the “mental health workforce capacity” to actually show up in person.
“Language is healing.”
This quote, from a participant at the Alaska Native Collaborative Hub for Research on Resilience, stands in sharp, tragic opposition to the cold data of “Suicide Surveillance Models” and “Practice-based collaborative care.” It highlights a holistic view of health, emphasizing culture and subsistence, the very things the late Mary C. Pete championed, and that the government is fundamentally designed to ignore.
The Perpetuity of the Machine
The USARC document ultimately reveals a self-perpetuating machine of interagency committees and research initiatives designed to maintain the status quo.
From fiscal years 2011 through 2017, nine agencies spent approximately $200 million on offshore oil spill research, involving over 100 projects per year. The landscape is a thicket of useless acronyms: IARPC, CMTS, ADAC, USGS, NOAA.
Each of these entities is tasked with duties that are fundamentally passive. They exist to “recommend,” “assist,” “facilitate,” and “review.” These are the verbs of a machine that has no intention of acting. They are designed to process information, not to halt the “global nosedive” of migratory birds or the planet-wide wave of extinctions projected for shorebirds.
North American shorebird populations have already halved since the 1970s; the spoon-billed sandpiper is down to a few hundred breeding pairs while the committees discuss “simplified frameworks” for assessment.
The Commission’s final argument is a plea for “evidence-based decisions.” Yet the evidence they have collected shows that an “ice-dependent ecosystem” is losing its ice and that the ground is literally exploding. The machine continues to generate goals and objectives for a 1,000-day window, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it is trying to manage a planetary explosion with blueprints drawn in 1984.
The evidence is clear: the ground is gone, the birds are falling from the sky, and the government is still waiting for a updated report.
Bureaucracy Times 