ABSTRACT
In their annual Arctic Report Card (2017), the US federal agency National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) declared that “the Arctic shows no sign of returning to [the] reliably frozen region of recent decades.” We unpack the implicit claim made in the report card. First, how and why does reliability matter and what happens when something or someplace becomes unreliable? Second, the reference to “frozen” seems an apt descriptor for a region that until quite recently was widely considered and represented as a “frozen desert,” remote and/or sparsely populated with limited communicative infrastructure. Third, the Arctic as region continues to be seen and framed as possessing a material abundance of ice and snow alongside environmental characteristics such as cold and harshness. If ice and cold are no longer “reliable” then what implications does that hold for the socio-spatial politics of the Arctic? Taking material change as a starting point, we interrogate the disruptive/productive consequences for the Arctic as assemblage of imaginaries, policies, practices and regimes of governance. The changing materiality of the Arctic Ocean is a case in point. As sea ice has retreated, thinned and even disappeared, so there has been an accompanying intensification of speculation about how the region has become more accessible, exploitable and globalised. Emerging regions such as the Central Arctic Ocean have stimulated fresh discussions about resources on the seabed and in the water column as well as opened up debates about how one governs a region of the world that is “less reliably frozen”. As we note, the Arctic as a region is intensely geopolitical, as economic interests, lived experiences and indigenous knowledge of northern communities rub against the extra-territorial and global interests and narratives of business, national and regional governmental actors, militaries and civil society. Finally, the future of the region per se, and not just in the Arctic context, does seem likely to continue to be reliably frozen.
