Arctic Meltdown

"Arctic Meltdown" is an environmental thriller that takes as its backdrop the melting of the polar icecap and the ensuing international jostling for jurisdiction over additional seabed resources, as permitted by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. A potentially complicating overlay in this real-life international situation is the path of resource rich but population poor Greenland toward independence from Denmark. With China also showing interest in Arctic resources and maritime routes, the stage is set for a suspenseful, international thriller.

The heroine, Hanne Kristensen, is a beautiful geologist who teams up with a Canadian diplomat, Richard Simpson, to lead the joint Danish-Canadian effort to gain the award by the relevant UN Commission of vast sub-sea territory along the Lomonosov Ridge that cuts right across the Arctic seabed from Siberia to Ellesmere Island and Greenland. With Chinese help, Lock McTierney, an Australian Professor of Geology at Beijing University, and a one-time casual lover of Hanne, is named to head the Sub-commission charged with considering both the joint Danish-Canadian and the Russian submissions. Hanne’s and Richard’s presentation is successful, while Russia's competing proposal is rejected. Russia withdraws from the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and claims half the Arctic based on the sector principle, previously used by the USSR in its Arctic claims. Greenland secedes with guarantees of its independence by both Russia and China and the promise of funding for resource extraction from the latter. Hanne, who is named Minister for Natural Resources in the Greenland government, has to contend with a Russian landing at a mine that the Chinese, on the counsel of their retained adviser, Lock, want to develop and where the Green Liberation Front has planned serious disruptive activity to protest the partitioning and exploitation of the pristine Arctic. She has soured on both Lock, whom she suspects of having sold out to the Chinese, and Jens, her Danish boyfriend and a GLF activist. With mounting international tension, Hanne joins her aging Russian adversary to save the world from war and the Arctic from environmental catastrophe. Along the way, there are lots of twists and turns, intrigue and sex, as well as a few surprising murders around Hanne. Although fiction, the story is heavily based on the current international situation in the Arctic, and is also prescriptive, in the sense that it suggests a possible solution to avoid such conflict over the north in the future.