The Arctic Oil Rush

In another great Vanity Fair piece, Alex Shoumatoff provides interesting insight into the geopolitics of the Arctic, the competing players and the competing interests.

There have been many expeditions to the North Pole, but it was Russia’s, last summer, that touched off a furor over who owns the Arctic—and the oil that is becoming more and more accessible as the ice disappears. From the halls of Moscow’s scientific institutes, where global warming is not part of the official story, to Siberia’s permafrost tundra, where reindeer are dying and a powerful greenhouse gas is bubbling from the ooze, the author probes the secrets of Yakut shamans, woolly-mammoth skeletons, and a new Great Game: energy exploration.