The Northwest Passage at Last

The source: “In the Dark and Out in the Cold” by Magda Hanna, in ___Proceedings___, June 2006.

Captain Henry Hudson triggered a mutiny among his sailors nearly 400 years ago in the frigid bay bearing his name when he tried to get them to spend a second summer looking for a northern passage to the Orient. Now, scientists are saying that within decades this fabled Arctic sea route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans may be open for routine use by commercial ships carrying oil and other prod­ucts. Magda Hanna, a U.S. Navy lieutenant, warns that her service is unprepared and poorly equipped to navigate in such an ­environment.

Global warming appears to be melting the icecaps at the top of the globe with startling speed. Arctic ice has retreated northward by three percent a decade and thinned by 40 percent in the past 20 years, according to U.S. submarine surveys. The phenomenon appears likely to make two ­routes—­the Northwest Passage and the Northern Sea Route, claimed as internal waters by, respectively, Canada and ­Russia—­irresistible paths for shippers. Such shortcuts would be about 40 percent faster than existing routes, and save even more time for the huge tankers too big to fit through the Panama ­Canal.

The oil and gas reserves discovered under the Arctic have already made the area a leading economic development center for Russia, and multinational companies are continuing to explore in the Beaufort Sea off the coast of Alaska. As the world’s hunger for oil grows, the economic and transportation benefits of Arctic sea routes will surely increase. The Russians estimate that the volume of oil moving through the region will increase from one million to 100 million tons a year by ­2015.

Meanwhile, the Navy has cut Arctic research funds and allowed its vessels to fall into such disrepair that it was forced to lease a Russian icebreaker to resupply a polar mission last ­year.

Writing in _Proceedings_, a publication of the nongovernmental U.S. Naval Institute, Hanna notes that regular northern sea runs are hardly likely to begin soon. While the passage can be navigated during one or more months in the summer, unpredictable floating ice can make the transit perilous. According to the Arctic Climate Impact Assess­ment, years in the making, summer commercial shipping might be possible “within several decades.” Prohibitive insurance costs now rule out most uses of the ­routes.

Even so, the high probability of continued melting means that the region can no longer be ignored as a potential theater of military operations. The combination of dis­puted territorial claims, vast natural resources, and the ever-present requirements of homeland security could well create a need for an Arctic naval presence. Without plan­ning, training, and ships, Hanna says, “the Navy’s lack of preparation could leave the United States in the dark and out in the cold.”