***SPOILERS*** In an effort to become energy independent the US Government contracts a major drilling company to come up with a plan to drill, and pump out, the massive oil reserves in the pristine and untouched, by human hands, wilderness in the Northern Alaska permafrost.<br /><br />The drilling team headed by man in charge Ed Pollack, Ron Perlman, expects to finish its job before the spring thaw sets in but things don't go exactly as they expected. With team member and environmentalist James Hoffman, James Legros, checking out the weather patterns in the area he soon realizes that something strange is going on with the February temperature in the Arctic region rising to unprecedented levels! Hoffman's greatest fears is soon realized when the permafrost, that's been frozen solid for tens of thousands of years, starts to suddenly and unexpectedly thaw out. That releases gases that start to effect not only the earths atmosphere but those on the team who, unlike Hoffman, are unaware of its existence!<br /><br />Stuck because of the melted and thawed out ice and soft earth Polleck is unable to get the heavy equipment shipped to him for drilling the oil. What also happens is that members of his drilling team start to freak and go insane as their effected by the noxious gasses that's seeping out of the ground! <br /><br />The first man on the team to lose it is Maxwell McKinder, Zach Gilfrod, who was sent out by Pollack to check out the oil drilling site. What Maxwell saw, or thought he saw, at the drilling site was enough to drive him insane! Knowing that the end is coming and leaving a video tape of his experiences at the site Maxwell stripped down to his birthday suite and walks out into the frozen night where he ends up dying of exposure! As the members of the drilling start to go insane and die off it becomes evident even to the Gong-Ho Pollack that there's something very disturbing going on and it has to do with the very sudden temperature change, due to the melting snow and ice, in the frozen Arctic! It's then that Pollack, and what's left of his crew, tries to make his way back to Anchorage, or civilization, before he and everyone else with him ends up dead!<br /><br />***SPOILERS**** What Pollack & Co, with the exception of James Hoffman,don't quite realize and are soon to find out is that there's no place safe in Alaska anymore for them to travel to. The earth has been abused long enough in it being exploited by man and his unquenchable thirst in tapping its natural resources without any regards to the damage that he's causing it. It's in the, by the US and Canada, non-stop drilling in the pristine Northern Arctic wilderness that the tipping point was reached in where the earth decided to finally make a stand and strike back! And it will strike back-as we see in the final scene of the movie- with a fury, in a massive global warming, that hasn't been seen since the dawn of recorded history!