Arctic Ocean ice has shrunk during the past three summers, creating vast reaches of open water northwest of Alaska. Winter ice has thinned. Some climate models suggest that Arctic ice could disappear entirely during summer by the middle of the century.
Will ships start crossing this new expanse to cut travel time between Europe and the Far East? Will freighters, fishing boats and cruise ships be lured though the Bering Strait?
When members of the Panama Canal Authority asked those same questions during a meeting earlier this year, one of the experts they consulted was Anchorage polar scientist and former ice breaker captain Lawson Brigham.
"They were looking for the bottom line, of course," Brigham said recently. "And there were no certain answers. But the trans-Arctic navigation -- particularly through the Northwest Passage, but anywhere in the Arctic Ocean -- is probably not a near-term, couple-decade happening."
Yet if ice recedes further during coming decades, ships will steam north to Arctic destinations, he said.
Brigham is deputy director of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission and one of the lead scientists on the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment. He commanded the icebreaker Polar Sea when it made the first crossing of the Arctic Ocean over the North Pole and received a doctorate in polar oceanography from Cambridge University.
Working with the Anchorage-based Institute of the North and other groups, Brigham has been trying to sort out the future of Arctic shipping as the sea ice shrinks -- and how the United States should respond.
"The changes are so dramatic here in Alaska and in this part of the world, in some sense you stop asking why it's changing and say, 'Let's get on with the adaptations.' Because we know, I think we know, that these changes are really happening."
Q. What do we need to adapt to?
A. I've talked to about 160 media representatives in the last two years and all but a handful want to talk exclusively about the Northwest Passage. ... The "mythical" Northwest Passage, that clouds people's minds. That's not where it's likely to happen. But it's probably a good bet that you could (send ships) along the Russian Coast over what we call the Northern Sea Route. It's not as clear what's going to happen in the Northwest Passages. It might not be as open in the near term or for the next 50 years. But the main point is that in all of the Arctic Ocean, there will be increasing marine access. Fishing fleets could be moving north. There could be offshore development and offshore supply boats. And they're not using the Arctic Ocean for trans-Arctic navigation either. People tend to fixate on the idea of going from one ocean to another. ... People say, "We've got to go from Attu to Paris to use this region." No, you just use (certain navigable areas). You go in and you come out.
Q. Doesn't the Arctic offer a short cut that will draw global shipping now?
A. It's the speed, the ship's speed, that's the key. As soon as you have ice cover, it's much slower. You probably have to have a 10- to 12-knot speed to measure up and be equitable with the Suez Canal. So that's a pretty good speed that you'd have to maintain. If you're down to four or five knots and being escorted by an ice breaker, and that takes days on end, that's not going to give you the kind of economic speed that's necessary to compete with some of these alternative routes. But really it's the northern sea route on the Russian side (that's most promising). Most of the time, the analysis compares it with going from Europe to Japan. Really it's this -- Rotterdam to Osaka or someplace-- that's what people are focusing on.
Q. What do the climate models tell you about changes in ice cover along the north coast of Russia?
A. They show us increasing numbers of days where there's 75 percent ice cover. I can say that 75 percent ice cover may not be a lot of ice for some, but for ice navigators, if you've got an ice-breaking ship, that means there's 25 percent open water. Well, that's like a highway; you're just pushing the ice out of the way. To get zero ice in the Russian Arctic across the century, well, I imagine that would be a little tough. To get 25 percent ice cover, where there's a little bit of ice and a lot of open water, a ship still has to have a some ice-breaking capability or a ice-strengthened hull.
Q. How long would the route be doable each summer?
A. Sixty to 70 days. Let's say 80 days. Let's say, to be charitable, it could be three months. ... Now you have to go a step back, though, because this is a mean of five (climate models produced by supercomputer programs). Some of the models show zero ice in the middle of the Arctic Ocean in summer by 2040, and some of the models show a lot of ice. So that's kind of an average.
Q. You took the first American surface vessel to the North Pole.
A. We went, the two ships, the (U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker) Polar Sea and the (Canadian icebreaker) Louis S. St. Laurent, in the summer of 1994, went from the Bering Strait in a zigzag route all the way to the North Pole and we came out between Svaalbard and Greenland. So in fact we did sail across the top of the world, but we did it for science. It was all for taking oceanographic and atmospheric data and information about sea ice.
Q. What was it like? Were there giant ridges of ice?
A. No, not giant ridges. There were some ridges. But of course we tried to navigate around those ridges. The ice was between one meter and two-plus meters of ice, so we're talking about three, six, seven feet of level ice. But the ridges can be very thicker. We went during July and August, during the season of minimum extent, but it was between 90 and 100 percent ice covered all the way across the top. Other ships have made more recent transits, at least in the mid-1990s, several Russian nuclear ice breakers have made crossings also.
Q. Would the ice freeze around the vessel when you stopped to take measurements?
A. Yes and no, and then it moves around. ... Sometimes it might be just sitting there because there's no wind operating. But when the wind is blowing the ice is moving around and piling on top of each other. ...
Q. Did you ever get stuck?
A. On this transit we were never really stuck, no, because we had the two ships and we moved slowly and carefully in a couple places. But many icebreakers and polar ships, expeditionary ships, clearly have been stuck in many places around the Arctic Ocean.
Q. It sounds like it was thick enough and difficult enough that you couldn't be traveling that route for commercial reasons.
A. It depends on what kind of ship, how fancy it is, how ice-strengthened it is. Would you need an expensive ice breaking ship to do it commercially? Sure. But that's not what we were out there for. The answer to this stuff is that at the end of the 20th century, from 1977 up until the present, nuclear and nonnuclear icebreakers have gone essentially everywhere in the Arctic Ocean basin in the summer. I think that's an amazing story and a big change. These pioneering voyages have taken place, I wouldn't say sight unseen, but with all the other exploits -- like putting a man on the moon, and all the other exploits that we've done-- this doesn't get much visibility. But it's quite clearly very significant.
Q. How much additional ship traffic will we see along Alaska's coast?
A. That's a tough one. I don't have any good answers. I guess I would say we will see more research vessels, cruise ships, maybe fishing vessels in the northern part of the Bering Sea and in the Bering Strait. We don't know how many container ships or tankers we might see in that part of the world in the next couple decades. It's not clear. Could there be ships either going to the Russian Arctic or the Canadian Arctic to pick up some sort of mineral resources? Sure, that's a plausible scenario, because maybe there would be a longer navigation season to parts along the Russian Arctic or the Canadian Arctic. Again, these ships that sail through the Bering Strait could, but might not, go trans-Arctic. They might go to some destination in the Russian Arctic along the coast and pick up their cargo and they come back through the Bering Strait. Maybe they just do it during the summer. Now that's a possibility.
Q. If the ice has retreated so much from the Northern Sea Route, why aren't shippers using it already as a short cut to Europe from Japan?
A. It's the year-to-year variability of the ice. One year you may have open water, zero or low coverage of ice, and the next year you might have 100 percent coverage in some of these straits. But again, again, that does not mean that there will not be lots of ships -- fishing vessels, cruise ships, whatever -- using parts of the Northwest Passage (or other parts of the Arctic). It only means that trans-Arctic navigation is still a wild card.
Q. In other words, a big container ship bound for Europe or the Pacific can't just decide, "Oh, it's open this month. Let's go." Like, in July, they can't just say, "Let's shoot up over the Arctic Ocean."
A. No, no, no. I mean, this has to be planned, probably years in advance but at least months in advance. That is the tricky part. You have to have: "It's reliable. And year around. And your one ship is part of a team of ships."
Q. They can't take the chance that they would get a thousand miles up there and get delayed.
A. Particularly if the cargo is perishable. Or even the Toyotas. Well, I shouldn't say Toyotas, but the cars that are coming over. They're not perishable, but people have ordered them already, so there's this just-in-time kind thing, you've got to keep this flow going.
Q. Will we need new regulations or laws to set standards to protect Alaska from ships once it does become economic? What do we need to do to be prepared?
A. There are a number of groups working on that. We have a group of the Arctic Research Commission just beginning. Commissioner Mead Treadwell (of Anchorage) is leading, along with commissioner Duane Laible. He's from Seattle. ... And it's to scope out the research agenda for the United States for the federal agencies on just what do we need to do given that it's obvious that there will be greater marine access.
Q. The Malaysian-flagged soybean carrier Selendang Ayu lost engines in the Bering Sea in December and grounded on Unalaska island, spilling hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil. If it could happen in the Bering Sea, couldn't it also happen in the Arctic Ocean?
A. That's the issue. That's why when we're headed into the Arctic Ocean -- and when I say "we," I mean the circumpolar countries and all industry -- the systems need to be designed for both environmental protection and marine safety. All of that has to be done before the ships go up there. So if you send ships into the Arctic Ocean that have no standards for sailing in the polar region, well, that's probably not a great idea.
Q. How vulnerable are Alaska's coastal communities to this increased shipping?
A. The communities are vulnerable to unregulated Arctic or polar shipping. They're not as vulnerable if it's regulated shipping, where the ships would adhere to some higher standards of navigation and safety in the Arctic. There are some voluntary rules in the International Maritime Organization, the U.N. organization. They aren't mandatory yet. Those rules are now being developed by ... the international community. But that's a fairly slow process because Arctic shipping isn't rapidly developing, but people see that it's coming down the road. So the vision is that there needs to be greater attention to the environmental protection and marine safety aspects of marine shipping in the Arctic.
Q. We have time then?
A. Will we have time? Yes. Sure. Because, really, most of the shipping companies of the world won't take a nonicebreaking ship. They know there's ice there today, and they know it's a very complicated Arctic Ocean with sea ice cover. And they're not just going to steam through Bering Strait into the ice. They're just not going to do that.
Daily News reporter Doug O'Harra can be reached at do'harra@adn.com.
Lawson Brigham
Occupation: deputy director of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission
