Arctic Economics

Are there enough people in Greenland for a whole country?

Greenlanders have been pressing for more autonomy from Denmark, and looking forward to independence.  Anne Sibert asks, "Undersized: Could Greenland be the new Iceland? Should it be?"  Greenland has 60,000 people, is that enough for a nation-state?

She points out that:

King Island and the Great Sickness: the Terrible Summer of 1900

In the summer of 1900 King Island was hit hard by disease.  R. Newton Hawley, surgeon on the U.S. Revenue Cutter Bear, visited the island in July and again in August and published a short account in 1901 (The World's Work, search for "Arctic Cliff Dwellers").

The Bear off Cape Romantzoff in early June, 1900.  About a month before she reached King Island.  Source: U.S. Coast Guard Historian’s Office.  

King Island and the American fur traders

Americans began trading in the Pacific in the 1780s. Trade was interrupted by Jefferson’s embargo and the War of 1812, but subsequently small American ships crisscrossed the ocean with cargoes of furs from the Pacific Northwest, sandalwood from Hawaii, copper from Chile, ginseng from the U.S. Appalachian Mountains, and silk and tea from China (Old China Trade).

Far to the north, beyond the Aleutian Islands and the Bering Sea, Eskimos, Chukchis, and Russians traded across the Bering Strait. Furs from America moved west, in exchange for glass beads and iron. Coastal and island Eskimos were active intermediaries.

Briefly, in 1819 and 1820, Americans from the Pacific tested the waters in the Bering Straits: two American brigs, the General San Martin and the Pedlar, explored regional trading opportunities. King Island flits into sight in journals and reports of these visits.

King Island, 1880

In April 2008 I posted on a visit to King Island by the U.S. Revenue Cutter Corwin in 1881 (A Visit to King Island, July 12, 1881). 

The Corwin, under Captain Calvin Hooper, also visited in 1880.  Hooper's report was published in 1881: Report of the Cruise of the U.S. Revenue-Steamer Corwin in the Arctic Ocean .

Hooper supplied his own illustrations - here's his picture of King Island from about four miles to the south:

 

Hooper's description:

Alaska's recession, so far

Source: Alaska Department of Labor

So far, Alaska has gotten off relatively lightly.  Good times or bad, Alaska's unemployment rate is normally higher than the national rate.  But not this recession.  Eleven possible reasons:

What happened to the price of oil last year?

Oil price movements in 2007-08 were memorable:

 

Source: Hamilton.

What happened?  James Hamilton of UC San Diego (and Econbrowser) takes a stab at an explanation.  Here's the short version ( in two parts from Econbrowser): Causes of the Oil Shock of 2007-08 and Consequences of the Oil Shock of 2007-08.  Here's the long version (from the Brookings Institution) - Causes and Consequences of the Oil Shock of 2007-09.

Sled dogs to snowmobiles

In the early 1990s, Alaska's Board of Fisheries had to address a controversy over the feeding of subsistence fish to dogs used for commercial purposes.  To provide some background, David Anderson prepared a paper on the use of dog teams in the Yukon River drainage, and their fish consumption, for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game's Division of Subsistence.    Anderson described the evolving role of dog sledding in the regional economy: The Use of Dog Teams and the Use of Subsistence-caught Fish for Feeding Sled Dogs in the Yukon River Drainage, Alaska.

Coastal Eskimos had been using sled dogs for a long time prior to contact with the West:

What happened to Iceland?

Michael Lewis explains, in the April Vanity Fair: Wall Street on the Tundra:

Iceland instantly became the only nation on earth that Americans could point to and say, “Well, at least we didn’t do that.” 

Stefansson and the bear

Almost 100 years ago the ethnologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson went hunting for food while traveling across the sea ice with a small party:

Snoehvit's Shaky Start

 

Snoehvit gas field and the pipeline to the LNG plant near Hammerfest.  Source: StatoilHydro.

Guy Chazan reports (Norwegian Oil Firm Goes to Energy’s Last Frontier) that StatoilHydro's Snoehvit project was ambitious. Remote-controlled gas wells at the bottom of the Barents Sea; 90 miles of underwater pipeline bringing the gas to shore; a liquification plant built in Spain, floated to a remote island in northern Norway on the world's "largest heavy-lift vessel," and floated into position on "a high tide" and "a full moon."

But things haven't gone as well as they might: