The World Has Laws About Land and Sea, But Not About Ice

When the Chinese cargo freighter Istanbul Bridge set sail for Europe in late September, it took an unusual route. Instead of heading south for the 40-day voyage through the Suez Canal, it tacked north. The freighter arrived in the United Kingdom at the port of Felixstowe just 20 days later—successfully launching the first-ever Arctic commercial-container route from Asia to Europe. For most of human history, the surface of the world’s northernmost ocean has been largely frozen. Now scientists predict that most of the Arctic Ocean’s 6.1 million square miles may be seasonally ice-free as soon as 2050 . Economically, a less icy Arctic spells opportunity—new shipping routes and untapped fossil-fuel reserves. Climatologically, it’s a calamity. Legally, it’s a problem that has to be solved. Much of the ocean’s center, the northernmost stretch surrounding the pole, will be subject to the lawlessness of the high seas—which will become a problem as more ships try to navigate a mushy mix of water and sea ice. And although the Arctic is the world’s fastest-warming region, and contains its most rapidly acidifiying ocean , it has few environmental protections . Scientists don’t have a clear idea of which species might need defending, or of the climate effects of unbridled shipping. (Ships puff black carbon, which reduces ice reflectivity and, in the short term, causes up to 1,500 times more warming than carbon dioxide .) In October, the United Nation’s special envoy for the ocean, Peter Thomson, called for countries to agree to a “precautionary pause on new economic activities in the Central Arctic Ocean” to buy time to study the climate and environmental risks of increased activity. Others are asking for an agreement akin to the 2020 Artemis Accords, which committed 59 nations to the “peaceful” and “sustainable” exploration of space. But some polar-law scholars argue that curbing climate catastrophe may require a more radical reimagining: to make sea ice a legal person. For centuries of seafaring, ice was an obstacle blocking people out, not an environment anyone thought to protect. Even in the Arctic, “we have laws about the land, we have the Law of the Sea, but we don’t have laws about ice,” Apostolos Tsiouvalas, a postdoctoral researcher with the Arctic University of Norway, told me. Because dealing with ice hasn’t been a major concern, even for the five nations that border the Arctic, and because ice is always transforming, its place in the law is confused at best. In many cases, solid ice extending from a coastline has been treated as legal land, and ice carried by a current has been considered water. During the Cold War, both Russia and the United States maintained scientific “drift stations” on detached ice floes. In 1970, when a shooting occurred on one American station, several nations debated where, exactly, the crime took place. Was the ice Canadian, because it likely calved from a glacier on Canada’s coast? Was it an American island? After some back-and-forth, the vessel-size chunk of ice legally transformed—by no small...

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