http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=570&ncid=753&e=1&u=/nm/20030128/sc_nm/environment_arctic_dc
Shrinking
Arctic Ice to Open New Trade Route
Tue Jan 28,11:48 AM ET
By Alister Doyle
KIRKENES, Norway (Reuters)
- The shrinking Arctic icecap may
open a fabled passage for ships between the Atlantic and Pacific
Oceans within a decade, transforming an icy graveyard into a
short-cut trade route.
Ship owners may be
among the few to benefit from global warming
in the extreme north, where the giant thaw is threatening
traditional habitats for indigenous peoples and wildlife
ranging from polar bears to caribou.
U.N. studies project
that the Arctic may be free of ice in
summertime by 2080. The polar passage, clogged by ice throughout
seafaring history, may come to challenge the Panama and Suez canals.
"In the next 10
years I believe we will solve the problems of
round-the-year goods transport through the Northern Sea Route,"
said Alexander Medvedev, general director of Russia's Murmansk
Shipping Company.
"You can save
at least 10-15 days on the voyage from Japan to
Europe, especially in summertime," he told Reuters during
a
visit to Kirkenes on the Arctic tip of Norway.
The company now runs
two or three ice-breaker-led voyages
a year from Europe to Japan and back, hugging the Russian
coast, and reckons the route can be opened year-round if
Moscow makes big new investments.
On the other side of
the Arctic, the Northwest Passage
past Alaska and through a maze of islands off Canada is
likely to take longer to be ice-free because it is further
north. It also passes through straits that get blocked more
easily by ice.
"For the Northwest
Passage it will take another 20 years
after conditions for the Northern Sea Route are favorable,"
said Peter Wadhams, professor of Ocean Physics at Cambridge
University in England. "I'm sure it's going to happen
-- the ice is retreating."
INSURERS WARY
Yet insurance companies
are likely to stay wary of both
polar routes. High premiums, a need for ice-resistant hulls
for ships and ice-breaker escorts may well wipe out the
advantages of lower costs due to the shorter distance.
Mariners searched in
vain for centuries for a short-cut
from Europe to the Far East -- Columbus ran into North
America in 1492 when he sailed west from Europe hoping
to reach Japan.
The search for passages
cost the lives of explorers
including Dutchman Wilhelm Barents and Englishman
Henry Hudson -- after whom the Barents Sea and Hudson Bay
are named. Barents' ship ran aground in 1596 and Hudson
died after a 1611 mutiny.
Other explorers were
victims of cold or scurvy before a
Finnish-Swedish expedition navigated the Northern Sea Route
in 1878. The Norwegian Roald Amundsen was first to get
through the Northwest Passage in 1906.
Even as the ice shrinks,
it may take billions of dollars
to open sea routes. Ports in northern Russia have deteriorated
since the end of the Cold War when nuclear powered ice-breakers
led warships between the Atlantic and Pacific.
"The obstacles
are more economic and political -- you have
to have a lot of infrastructure: navigational aids, search
and rescue teams, the ability to clean up pollution," Wadhams
said.
And environmentalists
want safeguards to protect indigenous
peoples in some of the world's largest wildernesses and
to prevent a get-rich-quick rush for resources ranging
from oil and gas to timber and minerals.
"Melting of the
ice will make access far easier to northern
Siberia and other wildernesses," said Svein Tveitdal, managing
director of the U.N. Environment Programme's polar center.
"There has to
be a strategy for sustainable development of the
Arctic. It mustn't become a sort of new Africa, where colonialists
exploited the resources." About four million people live
around
the Arctic.
U.N. studies show that
the Arctic ice has shrunk by about
three percent a decade since the 1970s and that air temperatures
have risen by about five Celsius in the past century.
The exploration of
oil and gas fields will increase the risk of
pollution such as the Exxon Valdez tanker spill off Alaska in
1989.
Norway plans to open its first gas field in the Barents Sea in
2006.
The polar regions are
most vulnerable to global warming,
caused by burning fossil fuels like oil. Scientists say the
emissions are blanketing the planet and pushing up temperatures.
In the Arctic, melting
ice and snow exposes darker soil and
rocks that trap heat. The sun's heat bounces back into space
more readily at the equator than near the poles, where low
slanting rays have to pass through thicker layers of atmosphere.
ICE RECEDES
New polar routes will
save about 4,000 nautical miles on some
routes from Europe to the Far East compared to southerly routes
through Panama or Suez. Shipments could include cargoes like
grains, frozen fish, oil and gas or cars.
And a route north of
Canada, for instance, might save
6,000-8,000 nautical miles for a super tanker from Venezuela
to Japan. Vessels too big to pass through the Panama Canal
have to go round all of South America.
Japan has also expressed
interest in transporting nuclear
waste to Europe through the Arctic, a plan denounced by
environmentalists who say it could get trapped in ice.
Rob Huebert, associate
director for the Center for Military
and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary in Canada,
said one odd spin-off of global warming is that some regions
are getting colder, complicating any shipping plans.
"In some areas
the ice is getting thicker as it breaks up
elsewhere," he said.
Willy Oestreng, a Norwegian
professor of international affairs
who led a global study of the Northern Sea Route in the 1990s,
said Russia was ahead of Canada because of factors including
more ports, albeit dilapidated, and ice-breakers.
"The differences
are striking. The Northern Sea Route is more
developed," he said. He noted that nickel had been shipped
from northwest Russia year-round since the 1970s.
