With arctic sea ice melting like ice cubes in soda, scientists want to protect a region they say will someday be the sole remaining frozen bastion of a disappearing world.

Scientists propose the creation of a large habitat preserve encompassing an area from western Greenland to the northern Canadian archipelago to provide refuge for Arctic ecosystems. (Photo: Bela Szandelszky / AP)

    Spanning the northern Canadian archipelago and western Greenland, it would be the first area formally protected in response to climate change, and a last-ditch effort to save polar bears and other animals.

    "All the indications are of huge change, and a huge response is needed if you want to have polar bears beyond 2050," said Peter Ewins, the World Wildlife Fund's Director of Species Conservation.

    National Parks have proven to be one of the most important ways to protect and preserve natural areas and wildlife. First established in the United States in 1872, national parks have since been adopted internationally. But protecting an area outside of a single country's borders could prove to be difficult.

    The arctic sea ice is composed of vast plains of three- to nine-foot-thick ice that cover the top of the northern hemisphere. Though some of the ice melts each summer, much of it remains frozen year-round - or, at least, it used to.

    Summer melts are accelerating, and winter re-freezing can no longer make up the difference. Every summer now seems to be accompanied by news of unprecedented ice loss and more waters open for the first time in known history.

    "When the (Ice Age) glaciers retreated, there was ice left in different spots around the world. Those isolated pockets of biodiversity were called refugia," said Stephanie Pfirman, an environmental science professor at Barnard College. "The same is likely to happen in the Arctic."

    If current greenhouse gas emission trends continue, the proposed protected region will be the only area with year-round ice, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

    "The IPCC reports published over the last few years pretty much agree that even if we switched off our carbon power stations and SUVs tomorrow, we'd have significant shrinkage of ice-dominated ecosystems to the middle of the century - and in reality, it could be faster than that," Ewins said.

    Protecting the ice won't be easy: a warming Arctic means new shipping routes and newly-accessible natural resources, from oil to diamonds and uranium. But this isn't the first time humanity has chosen between material wealth and icy treasure.

    "Fifty years ago, people were discussing what to do with the Antarctic. There were clearly resources under the Antarctic ice shelf and around it, but nations decided that it was so important that they should put in place a moratorium on anything but research," said Ewins. "That's a good point for thinking about what society should do in the Arctic, rather than adopting a frontier-type approach of rushing in and grabbing resources first."

    The most visible beneficiaries of the protections would be polar bears. About two-thirds of the world's 25,000 polar bears live in Canada, mostly in the high arctic, where they spend much of their lives - and kill most of their food - on sea ice. If unable to adapt, their future habitat would be restricted to the proposed protected area.

    Most experts say the polar bears' numbers are plummeting, and Canada is currently debating whether to classify them as threatened, as the United States did last year. That decision followed a contentious debate in which environmentalists alleged that endangered status was withheld not for scientific reasons, but under industry pressure.

    It's not only the fossil fuel industry, however, that says threats to polar bears are exaggerated. Inuit hunters argue that measured declines are based on short-term monitoring and flawed extrapolations that don't account for the bears' ability to adapt.

    This controversy bodes ominously for the hypothetical protected area, as hunting would be restricted and Inuit approval is necessary. But proponents stress that polar bears are not the only species involved: narwhal, beluga and bowhead whales, walrus, musk oxen, caribou, arctic wolf, and migratory birds are at risk.

    "The whole ice-associated ecosystem would be part of this," Pfirman said.

    Conflicting with environmental interests is the possibility of resource development. The US Geological Survey estimates that 90 billion barrels of oil, 1.67 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 44 billion barrels of liquid natural gas could be recovered north of the Arctic Circle. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, whose environmental status became a flashpoint of U.S. political battles, contains a mere 10 billion barrels of oil - and the shore and ocean floor of the proposed protected area also contains uranium, diamonds and other mineral riches.

    Extracting these resources without causing environmental damage is especially tricky in the arctic, where ecosystems are highly vulnerable to pollution. Oil spilled now can remain environmentally toxic for decades, and ship engine noise can travel for miles through water, confusing the echolocation used by whales to navigate.

    "It's clear that the potential is fairly high for economic exploitation," Ewins said. "There will be major accidents, and the losers tend to be wildlife and local people."

    Even if environmental protection trumps resource development, the battle will only have started. Ice in the proposed protected area doesn't form there, but drifts across the Arctic Ocean from Siberia, carrying  industrial pollutants from the region's factories.

    "It's not just enough to protect the ice," said McGill University oceanographer Bruno Tremblay. "We need to protect the source region."

    That would require considerable international cooperation. Proponents will present the concept this year to government officials from Greenland and Canada, and representatives of Canada's Inuit communities.

    In December, the United Nations will hold its next climate change meeting, out of which a global greenhouse gas treaty is expected to emerge. Hopefully a commitment to protecting arctic sea ice will be part of that deal, said Ewins.

    "Things are happening so fast," Pfirman said, "that we should focus on where the remnants of sea ice will be, and manage it in such a way that we can keep the habitat functioning as long as possible."

    But such a life extension for the ice, warned USGS biologist Steven Amstrup, are only meaningful "if humans get their act together and reduce greenhouse gases so that the ice will come back."

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