Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Politics of Place, #1)

by Tim Marshall

gets worse. Brazil does not have direct access to the rivers of the Rio de la Plata region. The River Plate itself empties out into the Atlantic in Argentina, meaning that for centuries traders have moved their goods down the Plate to Buenos Aires rather than carry them up and down the Grand Escarpment to get to Brazil’s underdeveloped ports. The Texas-based geopolitical intelligence company Stratfor.com estimates that Brazil’s seven largest ports combined can handle fewer goods per year than the single American port of New Orleans.

lacks the volume of trade it would like and, equally important, most of its goods are moved along its inadequate roads rather than by river, thus increasing costs.

Every few years, often led by Brazil, the South Americans attempt to launch their version of the EU—the latest incarnation being UNASUR, of which twelve South American nations are members. Its headquarters are in Ecuador but Brazil has the loudest voice. In this it resembles the EU, which has its headquarters in Belgium and a leading power in Germany. And there the comparison stops. UNASUR has an impressive presence on the Internet but it remains more of a website than an economic union.

However, Argentina has not always used its advantages to the fullest. A hundred years ago it was among the ten richest countries in the world—ahead of France and Italy. But a failure to diversify, a stratified and unfair society, a poor education system, a succession of coups d’état, and the wildly differing economic policies in the democratic period of the last thirty years has seen a sharp decline in Argentina’s status.

The Dead Cow, or Vaca Muerta, is a shale formation that, combined with the country’s other shale areas, could provide Argentina’s energy needs for the next 150 years with excess to export. It is situated halfway down Argentina, in Patagonia, and abuts the western border with Chile. It is the size of Belgium—which might be relatively small for a country but is large for a shale formation. So far so good, unless you are against shale-produced energy—but there is a catch. To get the gas and oil out of the shale will require massive foreign investment, and Argentina is not considered a foreign-investment-friendly country.

What Britain calls the Falkland Islands are known as Las Malvinas by Argentina, and woe betide any Argentine who uses the F word. It is an offense in Argentina to produce a map that describes the islands as anything other than the “Islas Malvinas,” and all primary school children are taught to draw the outlines of the two main islands, west and east. To regain the “Little Sisters” is a national cause for successive generations of Argentines and one that most of their Latin neighbors support.

Buenos Aires has warned that any oil firm that drills in the Falklands/Malvinas cannot bid for a license to exploit the shale oil and gas in Patagonia’s Vaca Muerta field. It has even passed a law threatening fines or imprisonment for individuals who explore the Falklands’ continental shelf without its permission. This has put many big oil companies off, but not of course the British. However, whoever probes the potential wealth beneath the South Atlantic waters will be operating in one of the most challenging environments in the business. It gets somewhat cold and windy down there, and the seas are rough.

The first recorded expedition was by a Greek mariner named Pytheas of Massalia in 330 BCE who found a strange land called Thule. Back home in the Mediterranean, few believed his startling tales of pure white landscapes, frozen seas, and strange creatures, including great white bears; but Pytheas was just the first of many people over the centuries to record the wonder of the Arctic and to succumb to the emotions it evokes.

As for the first person to reach the North Pole, well, that’s a tricky one, given that even though there is a fixed point on the globe denoting its position, below it, the ice you are standing on is moving, and without GPS equipment it is hard to tell exactly where you are. Sir William Edward Parry, minus a GPS, tried in 1827, but the ice was moving south faster than he could move north and he ended up going backward; but he did at least survive.

As the ice melts and the tundra is exposed, two things are likely to happen to accelerate the process of the graying of the ice cap. Residue from the industrial work destined to take place will land on the snow and ice, further reducing the amount of heat-reflecting territory. The darker-colored land and open water will then absorb more heat than the ice and snow they replace, thus increasing the size of the darker territory. This is known as the albedo effect, and although there are negative aspects to it there are also positive ones: the warming tundra will allow significantly more natural-plant growth and agricultural crops to flourish, helping local populations as they seek new food sources.

The melting of the ice cap already allows cargo ships to make the journey through the Northwest Passage in the Canadian archipelago for several summer weeks a year, thus cutting at least a week from the transit time from Europe to China.

The polar route was 40 percent shorter and used deeper waters than if it had gone through the Panama Canal.

Russia and Norway have particular difficulty in the Barents Sea. Norway claims the Gakkel Ridge in the Barents as an extension of its Economic Exclusion Zone (EEZ), but the Russians dispute this, and they have a particular dispute over the Svalbard Islands, the northernmost point on earth with a settled population. Most countries and international organizations recognize the islands as being under (limited) Norwegian sovereignty, but the biggest island, Svalbard, formerly known as Spitsbergen, has a growing population of Russian migrants who have assembled around the coal-mining industry there. The mines are not profitable, but the Russian community serves as a useful tool in furthering Moscow’s claims on all of the Svalbard Islands.

It takes up to $1 billion and ten years to build an icebreaker. Russia is clearly the leading Arctic power with the largest fleet of icebreakers in the world, thirty-two in total, according to the US Coast Guard Review of 2013. Six of those are nuclear-powered, the only such versions in the world, and Russia also plans to launch the world’s most powerful icebreaker by 2018. It will be able to smash through ice more than ten feet deep and tow oil tankers with a displacement of up to seventy thousand tons through the ice fields.

Other disputes include the one between Canada and Denmark over Hans Island, located in the Nares Strait, which separates Greenland from Ellesmere Island. Greenland, with its population of fifty-six thousand people, has self-government but remains under Danish sovereignty. A 1953 agreement between Denmark and Canada left the island still in dispute, and since then both countries have taken the trouble to sail to it and plant their national flags on it.

The melting of the ice changes the geography and the stakes.

As the twenty-first century progresses, the geographical factors that have helped determine our history will mostly continue to determine our future: a

Water wars are another potential problem.