While some federal agencies are expressing caution on Arctic development, the federal Minerals Management Service continues to forge ahead with petroleum exploration drilling off the shores of the remote northern Alaska coast.
…A day after Salazar's announcement, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, announced she would introduce a bill to study building a deep water port in the Arctic. That's just one piece of infrastructure missing along some of the wildest coastline of America's wildest state.
…"We don't even know enough to know what we don't know," said Michael Levine, an attorney for Oceana. "We need to understand what species are in the ocean from the bottom of the food chain to the top, how climate change is affecting the ocean system, how currents move and what risks are presented by industrial development in a changing ocean," he said.