Once upon a time there was the Arctic, its pack ice, its ocean of fourteen million square kilometres. Long forgotten by maps, too white and too cold, it is becoming, with global warming, the place where anything is possible: beneath the ice there are said to be precious metals, oil, new shipping routes. The rush to the North has begun. But nearly four million people already live up there. From Greenland to the North Pole, by way of Canada and Siberia, four stories echo one another: Inuit hunters on the pack ice, an army come to assert its sovereignty, Nenets reindeer herders on their seasonal migration among the gas pipelines, and a hundred and thirty Chinese millionaires bound for the Pole aboard the world’s largest nuclear icebreaker. Two worlds rub shoulders, that of black gold and that of the polar bear.
Inuit, Nenets or Koryak, the peoples of the Far North are racing too: “a race against time and for the essentials: hunting, eating, moving on, living!”
At the onboard auction, the captain’s signed cap, along with eight minutes at the controls of the icebreaker, goes for 7,000 euros.In Kullorsuaq, four hundred souls at the foot of an iceberg caught in the ice of Melville Bay, in north-west Greenland, a few Inuit still hunt as their ancestors did. In April, the sun no longer really sets. Ole, 43, sets off with Martika, Aqqaluk and Adam, among the last traditional hunters in the country. A sledge, dogs, a tent, a harpoon: just the essentials. “The most important thing is not to forget the oil for the stoves and the bullets for the rifles,” says Ole before leaving. For days on end, they watch for a seal on the ice. According to Inuit belief, the animal holds a spirit that must be won over for it to offer itself to its hunter. The seal feeds both men and dogs. The pack ice is shrinking, but Ole refuses to believe the seal could disappear: “Of course there will still be seals in 2050, it can’t be otherwise.” In the tent, at minus forty, the rush of men from the South stirs tempers: they come across more and more oil prospectors, fitted out with GPS by the companies. Ole, one of the last to hold out, then shows what tipped everything over: the wooden hut of Knud Rasmussen, relic of a policy that forced the Inuit to trade the tent for a house in the village. Today, he says, oil is replaying the same story.
Like everywhere else, the men up there “have the internet, they play football, they have their moments of happiness and despair”.
Emerging from a six-month hibernation, it is still minus 25 degrees when the dogs clamour to be freed “from the weight of their chains”.
“Their future depends on what the pack ice is willing to offer them.”
Two days already on three metres of pack ice, without meeting a living soul, and the hunt has still yielded nothing.
The convoy stops at the foot of an island; beneath the pack ice, the ocean goes down to 4,000 metres and “has already swallowed several boats”.
A dog fell into the water on the way. “Only once the dogs are well tethered can the men think of themselves.”
Far from the “organised massacres” denounced by so-called civilised societies, the Inuit hunt to feed themselves, “because wheat doesn’t grow in ice”.
“Hoping, the Inuit hunters’ way of the cross”: hoping there will still be seals in 2050, and that the pack ice will not have disappeared.A thousand kilometres away, Canada reasserts its sovereignty over its northernmost lands every year. Operation Nunalivut mobilises 250 men, infantrymen, navy divers, airmen and rangers, and eighty snowmobiles set off for a month towards the most remote point in the country, at minus fifty with the wind. The soldiers from the South learn the igloo in barely five minutes, from Inuit recruited to serve as their scouts. Corporal Stéphane Perrault takes care to leave nothing behind, no waste at all: in this cold, nothing decomposes, and the same rubbish would still be found in a hundred years. Planes drop barrels of fuel, the very fuel people hope one day to find beneath the pack ice, where, according to some scientists, 20% of the world’s oil wealth lies sleeping. The Pole belongs to no one, and each of the five bordering countries claims an extension of its continental shelf. Russia has planted a titanium flag directly beneath the Pole, 4,000 metres down. Under the Canadian ice, divers lay down their own. In twenty or thirty years, one soldier predicts, there will be more trade here, more tourists, more resources exploited.
Having failed to finish their igloos, the soldiers pitch the tents. The Far North, says one of them, “is about enduring, about adapting to it”.
“The igloo, the ultimate refuge of the men of the Arctic. To master its construction is to ensure one’s survival.” The language barrier and the cold make the lesson harder.
Diving under the pack ice means being ready to save lives should a ship founder in the Arctic; that day, fifteen metres for thirty minutes.
Russia, the United States, Canada, Norway and Denmark: the sovereignty of the five bordering states ends 200 nautical miles from their coasts, hence the race for the continental shelf.In Siberia, on the Yamal Peninsula, brigade number 4 sets off on a month-long, thousand-kilometre migration towards the Kara Sea, where the grass is fresher and the mosquitoes fewer. Five thousand reindeer, some thirty nomads, a few chums. “We dress in reindeer skins, we eat reindeer, we live with reindeer,” says brigade leader Nicolaï Khudi, who is 53 and has spent as many years in the brigade; in town, he feels “as if in a cage”. Yet beneath the nomads’ feet there are said to lie 55,000 billion cubic metres of gas, which Gazprom has begun to extract. The reindeer’s path now crosses the pipelines, the roads and the plants of Bovanenkovo. Andreï, born in the tundra, works for the gas giant: he misses the reindeer, but “gas is my livelihood”. To let the herd pass, traffic is stopped and white sheets are rolled out over the tarmac. By the sea, the nets bring up poisoned fish, and the brigade leader’s brother points out the sand quarries and the plants built where the camp, the cemetery and the place of worship used to be.
At the start of summer, the herd makes for the coast of the Kara Sea: “more grass there, more lichen and fewer mosquitoes”, and the reindeer put on weight.
After fifteen hours’ walking, the chums go up: “with their wooden brushes, they draw cathedrals”.
“The children, for their part, still believe they can choose their side.” In a few years, the Nenets may have traded reindeer skin for the colours of Gazprom.
Some want to run 1,500 kilometres of pipelines through it, others a path for their reindeer: all are fighting over the dry ground of the tundra.In Murmansk, a hundred and thirty Chinese millionaires board the “50 Years of Victory”, the world’s most powerful nuclear icebreaker, which in winter clears the way for oil tankers. Twenty-five thousand euros a berth, twice that for the luxury version, to reach the geographic North Pole, the hundredth time a ship has made the journey. The expedition leader, Yann Bryde, promises polar bears, helicopter rides and a barbecue on the ice. Huang, a Taoist, has come in a short-sleeved shirt to prove that one can survive the cold by meditating and fasting. On board, other voices speak of change. The captain has seen the Northeast Passage take two ships in 2009, forty last year. A mechanic remembers that the propeller would break up to three times a voyage, the ice was so thick: “You really get the feeling the climate is warming.” A nautical chart goes under the hammer for 21,000 euros, “to help the polar bears”. It is not unusual for the North Pole to be in open water in summer; they have to push on forty nautical miles to land. They plant the sign, they form a ring, hand in hand, for one last photo.
In thirty years, China has become the world’s second-largest economy; it has already sent its own icebreaker, the Snow Dragon, into the Arctic.
The bears are the most eagerly awaited stage of the voyage, “like a brochure’s promise”. “What’s the point of coming to the Arctic if the bears aren’t there?”
From amusing themselves with collapsing icebergs, the passengers “end up waking the sky”: in the fog, the icebreaker strikes an iceberg.
For a former crew member, the Pole was “quite an epic”; today, people come mainly to take their photo, without grasping what the first ones faced there.
The Pole sign is planted forty miles from the exact point; yet 90 degrees north will be enough “to prove we were there”.“Our people and our country have the chance at last to develop. How can we say no to development?”Ole, Inuit hunter
“The melting ice does not make only unhappy people. As it cracks, the Arctic seems to be opening up to the world. […] A land of conquest that this report describes as the crossroads of every antagonism. On one side, Christophe Cousin films (beautifully) what remains of traditional activity near the Arctic Circle (seal hunters in Greenland, reindeer herders in the tundra). On the other, he observes the newcomers, filmed like strange beasts, without the narration needing to underline the criticism. […] This part of the film, ferocious and chilling, heralds what looks like a slow death. ‘It’s the new Ibiza,’ says a tourist, delighted to have a barbecue at the North Pole. […] This very good edition of Thalassa breaks new ground by filming stupidity spilling over.”Erwan Desplanques, TéléramaTT · January 2015
“An edition about human folly that sends a chill down the spine.”Le MondeJanuary 2015
“Christophe Cousin delivers Il était une fois l’Arctique for Thalassa, an exceptional documentary. […] Between polar bear and black gold, everything is said. All the viewer lacks is the smell of seal and the bite of the polar cold.”TV MagazineJanuary 2015
“There are programmes like this that have grace, whose images and stories take us far, very far from a world humming with madness and violence.”Point de Vue★★★ · January 2015
“Nothing of a geopolitical documentary. Rather the story of a world in transformation, told by those living through it.”Humanité DimancheJanuary 2015
“At once a magnificent portrait and an alarming assessment of a Far North in transformation.”Télé-Loisirsprogramme-tv.net · January 2015
“it is a fascinating polar investigation, by Christophe Cousin […], this major report (very thoroughly researched) on the Far North […]”Stéphane Dugast, Embarquementsblog · January 2015