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The human geography of Arctic sea ice: introduction

Research across disciplines affiliated with geophysical, biological, and engineering sciences has created important informative models of the annual sea ice cycle, ice-dependent species, and structural capacities for human activities in regions with sea ice. In the new millennium, the widespread acceptance in the scientific world of climate change and its amplification at the poles, along with the Fourth International Polar Year (2007 2009), have created a broader interest in sea ice as a feature in the complex Arctic social-environmental system. Various disciplines have documented the use of sea ice by many different people (e.g. the Inuit, scientists), organizations (e.g. oil and gas developers and hunting and fishing associations), animals (e.g. marine mammals), and other living organisms (a whole suite of biota). However, it was not until the more recent documented trend of the thinning and shrinking of its coverage (Lemke et al. 2007; Stroeve et al. 2012) and increasing socioeconomic and geopolitical interests in the Arctic (Byers 2009; Zellen 2009) that any comprehensive approach toward analyzing sea ice from a social science perspective began to arise (e.g. Eicken et al. 2009). In light of the focus on climate change and its amplified effects at the poles (ACIA 2005), the past decade has resulted in a consideration of sea ice from a systems perspective, more specifically from a social-environmental system perspective. This perspective is defined by a suite of interactions among interdependent social, ecological, and geophysical features in a geographic space bounded by time. The sea ice system provides a suite of vital ecosystem services (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005) to the peoples of the North, and its diminishment will have profound effects on these societies (Aporta et al. 2011; Hovelsrud et al. 2011; Krupnik et al. 2010; Lovecraft 2008; Lovecraft and Eicken 2009). To consider the implications of the changing sea ice social-environmental system from a geographic perspective, this special issue of Polar Geography brings together a cross-section of work, focusing on the sea ice cycle from the perspective of human geography. Human geography, here, is conceptualized broadly as the spatial study of human activities in a particular social-environmental system along with the human understanding(s) of this system. Arctic sea ice has been a part of human sociocultural practices as far south as Japan and as long as a millennia. Myriad examples include the ice as a place of enculturation, a platform for industry, a habitat for animals, a hazard for traffic, travelways for hunters and explorers, a buffer to coastal communities, and a part of spiritual identity. These qualities are experiencing rapid changes driven primarily by three major interconnected global