I used to have a book addressing the problems of conducting shipping operations in Arctic waters. It was a manual for professional seamen, hundreds of pages with advice and procedures for dealing with routine issues related to navigating polar waters, everything from heating up bunker oil so you could pump it, to keeping ships' ballast water from freezing solid, to carrying specialized lubricants and paints, to tying up to pack ice.* I wish I still had it, I lost it during one of my many moves.

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.