Northwest Arctic Borough, Alaska

Most of its land surface has yet to be prospected for minerals; the Arctic Ocean seafloor is among the least mapped on Earth. Some of the worldБЂ™s biggest mines are dug into Alaska and Siberia; one of the purest iron ores ever found was recently discovered on CanadaБЂ™s Baffin Island.327 The discovery of diamonds in the Northwest Territories in 1991 sparked the biggest North American staking rush since the Klondike and propelled Canada from having no diamonds at all to becoming the worldБЂ™s third-largest producer almost overnight. No one really knows what the new Arctic Ocean biology will be, but a longer open-water season can only mean more photosynthesis, more complex food webs, and the prospect of valuable new fisheries there. There are staggering volumes of gas hydrateБЂ”a sort of solid methane dry-ice that accumulates in the pore spaces of ocean sediments and permafrostБЂ”which no one has yet figured out how to recover but is plausibly a coveted fossil fuel of the future. The plainest prize of all is natural gas and oil ...»