The human geography of Arctic sea ice: introduction

Research across disciplines affiliated with geophysical, biological, and engineering sciences has created important informative models of the annual sea ice cycle, ice-dependent species, and structural capacities for human activities in regions with sea ice. In the new millennium, the widespread acceptance in the scientific world of climate change and its amplification at the poles, along with the Fourth International Polar Year (2007–2009), have created a broader interest in sea ice as a feature in the complex Arctic social-environmental system. Various disciplines have documented the use of sea ice by many different people (e.g. the Inuit, scientists), organizations (e.g. oil and gas developers and hunting and fishing associations), animals (e.g. marine mammals), and other living organisms (a whole suite of biota). However, it was not until the more recent documented trend of the thinning and shrinking of its coverage (Lemke et al. 2007; Stroeve et al. 2012) and increasing socioeconomic and geopolitical interests in the Arctic (Byers 2009; Zellen 2009) that any comprehensive approach toward analyzing sea ice from a social science perspective began to arise (e.g. Eicken et al. 2009). In light of the focus on climate change and its amplified effects at the poles (ACIA 2005), the past decade has resulted in a consideration of sea ice from a systems perspective, more specifically from a social-environmental system perspective. This perspective is defined by a suite of interactions among interdependent social, ecological, and geophysical features in a geographic space bounded by time. The sea ice system provides a suite of vital ecosystem services (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005) to the peoples of the North, and its diminishment will have profound effects on these societies (Aporta et al. 2011; Hovelsrud et al. 2011; Krupnik et al. 2010; Lovecraft 2008; Lovecraft and Eicken 2009).

To consider the implications of the changing sea ice social-environmental system from a geographic perspective, this special issue of Polar Geography brings together a cross-section of work, focusing on the sea ice cycle from the perspective of human geography. Human geography, here, is conceptualized broadly as the spatial study of human activities in a particular social-environmental system along with the human understanding(s) of this system. Arctic sea ice has been a part of human sociocultural practices as far south as Japan and as long as a millennia. Myriad examples include the ice as a place of enculturation, a platform for industry, a habitat for animals, a hazard for traffic, travelways for hunters and explorers, a buffer to coastal communities, and a part of spiritual identity. These qualities are experiencing rapid changes driven primarily by three major interconnected global forces, increasing marine traffic for shipping, security, and tourism; contaminant accumulation not only primarily from industrial production but also from marine development activities; and climatic change, especially the warming at the poles that is diminishing the earth's cryosphere.

This expansion of human activity is only one of the many pressures facing communities across the Arctic that are working to understand and adapt to new sea ice conditions. Furthermore, there is not yet a system of governance, at any scale, that comprehensively addresses sea ice system decline and the further increasing penetration of the Arctic Ocean. Consequently, as the amount of space that can preserve a diversity of sea ice system services shrinks and the use of space becomes more crowded with competing interests, social scientists need to be able to inform planning, coordination, and collaboration with research alongside the physical and natural sciences. There are complex linkages between environments, institutions, and human identity (Agrawal 2005) across the spatial and temporal qualities of sea ice. Furthermore, Arctic sea ice is a value-laden location that creates meanings for those who directly and indirectly receive its services. The eight articles in this special issue explore such linkages and meanings from fine to coarse scale.

The first four articles are case studies at the local scale from Alaska and Greenland. They demonstrate the dynamic and tightly interactive relationship that Arctic coastal indigenous peoples often have in relation to not only sea ice in general but also its differing environmental aspects (e.g. ice thickness, ice cover, multi-year ice, and annual cycles). Druckenmiller et al. explain the importance of shore fast ice in Alaska as a temporary annual location for trails between communities and Iñupiat hunters of Bowhead whales. The article discusses the long-term project between indigenous experts on sea ice and research scientists that document how the trails help track sea ice variability and how sea ice information can in turn be provided to communities to further their own understanding of the sea ice as it declines. Next Tyrrel explains the multiple meanings that human societies create from their iterative interactions with sea ice. Her work in Arviat, Greenland, reconciles concepts of place, in particular of home, in an icescape that is seasonal, dynamic, and transitory. In this case study, she posits that the Arviarmiut generally consider sea ice as fundamental to identity rather than a phenomenon of annual service provision. The third article is also a west Greenland case study. It simultaneously recognizes the uncertainties that sea ice decline may pose alongside the resilience of local people long accustomed to changing environmental conditions. Tejsner unpacks the ‘crisis narrative’ so frequently imposed on Arctic coastal peoples through research in Disko Bay. His article indicates that a complex set of daily adaption strategies for negotiating environmental changes in West Greenland creates a narrative of ‘openness’ to change in contrast to the language of risk and vulnerability often applied by those with little experience of the North. The last set of local-scale case studies is an examination of three Alaskan locations in the Northern Bering Sea, where sea ice and walrus hunting are intimately intertwined with community social-economic factors. The authors seek to tease apart social and geophysical factors that contribute to the general decline of walrus harvest since the early 1990s. Robards et al. demonstrate the complexity of social-environmental relationships through evidence that sea ice deterioration is only one of a suite of factors affecting subsistence hunting, of an ice-dependent species in Gambell, Savoonga, and Diomede. All four articles primarily address relationships between indigenous peoples and sea ice.

The second set of four articles examines Arctic sea ice with a coarser grain lens, although related to North America in different ways. In our current period of political interest in Arctic territory (terrestrial and marine), Baker and Mooney present a valuable explanation of the legal status of Arctic sea ice in Canada and the USA. In fact, there is not a singular or comprehensive set of rules for the phenomenon because it defies so many current legal categories related to water, land, ice, property, and permanence. This poses complications for human and nonhuman users of sea ice whose activities are regulated in a framework that is currently inadequate. The authors offer several principles of environmental law as those best able to characterize and contextualize sea ice within domestic and international law. The sixth article also addresses fragmentation of rules across sea ice geography but focuses on Alaska's northern coasts. Lovecraft et al. take an institutional approach to the geography of sea ice by examining how suites of rule-sets that govern sea ice-dependent activities could be better coordinated to reconcile scientific information with stakeholder's needs. Such coordination would enhance participatory capacity by people and groups who are sea ice users to engage in debates and policy-making tied to the services they value. Henshaw's piece considers the sea ice social-environmental relationship from a distinct perspective not often considered in academic scholarship and yet, in this case, of vital importance to human resilience in coastal communities. Her work avoids the simplistic discussion of vulnerability, earlier rejected by Tejsner, but does address the distinct challenges that many communities who have relied on sea ice services are facing given the rapidity of climate change. She proposes a philanthropic model that can be grounded in community leadership to create adaptive strategies. Lastly, Stewart et al. take us through the Northwest Passage to examine the interrelationships between sea ice and the suite of activities surrounding cruise ship tourism. The authors combine geophysical and social science data to explore how the physical and social geographies of this particular tourism experience are interrelated but also uncertain.