The point is it is difficult operating up there. It isn’t impossible, after all, stone age peoples have thrived in that environment for thousands of years, but it is difficult. You really have to know what you’re doing, and you have to be geared up for it. It’s expensive and its dangerous and its real easy to get in big trouble in a place where the nearest help might be thousands of miles away and where nothing works the way its supposed to. And the weather really sucks, too.

Drilling for offshore oil is already hard to do, even in the subtropical Gulf of Mexico, with an enormous infrastructure base a short barge or helicopter ride away. Conducting major exploration or extraction operations in the polar regions is going to have all sorts of unexpected gotchas. And there will be some awful accidents, even for people like the Norwegians and Russians who have accumulated a lot of experience working up there. Still, I think the sonar thing sounds helpful.

* You lower boats and send men onto the ice, you quickly dig trenches (with high pressure steam hoses, if practicable), and place wooden ties in them, with cable slings around them, poking up through the ice, and let them freeze back up. Your ship can then tie up securely to that, and if necessary abandon them in a hurry, sacrificing only expendable wooden logs and wire rope. But you’ll have to train and equip your people to do this, and pay them overtime and hazard pay.

5-7-14 | Senior Editor Josh Fischman

The next big oil spill could be out of sight. Climate warming has packs of Arctic sea ice in retreat, opening up vast areas for oil and gas drilling. That is posing a new problem for spill detectors: There is still a lot of ice in the region, and people cannot see through it. Remember that giant oil slick on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blowout? Off the north coast of Alaska that kind of slick would likely be shielded by miles of drifting ice. “The risk of a serious oil spill in the Arctic is escalating,” the National Research Council warned in a report just last month. And, the council added, the U.S. is not ready to respond.

One answer could be to use sound rather than sight. High-frequency sonar chirps can reveal oil underneath ice, even when it is sandwiched between ice layers. “We were able to distinguish two different signatures: oil together with ice versus just ice alone,” says Christopher Bassett, a postdoctoral researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He and his colleagues presented their work Wednesday at the Acoustical Society of America’s meeting in Providence. Other researchers showed that sonar was sensitive enough to detect even tiny leaks, down to the level of individual oil and gas bubbles.

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