Commercial Arctic Passage Nearing Goal
Jack Linthicum
September 4, 2009, 12:48 pm
Commercial Arctic Passage Nearing Goal
By Andrew C. Revkin
Beluga Group As the Beluga Fraternity entered Arctic waters, the crew
kept track of ice floes.
More than halfway through a rare trans-Arctic commercial voyage, two
German heavy-lift ships carrying power-plant components from South
Korea to a Siberian port were scheduled today to pass the northernmost
point on their route, the Vilkitsky Strait. The ships have been
encountering small icebergs and rafts of sea ice since they passed
through the Bering Strait last weekend, company officials say. But
they are being escorted by the Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker 50
Years Since Victory to limit risk and also have Russian pilots aboard.
Excerpts from the Sept. 3 log entries of the two German vessels, the
Beluga Fraternity and Beluga Foresight, are appended below. The ships
could reach Novyi Port, where the equipment would be unloaded, by
Sunday or Monday. They would then continue west toward home.
Some fresh background placing this voyage in context has come from
Lawson W. Brigham, a retired captain of one of America’s aging polar
icebreakers and lead author of an important report on Arctic shipping
trends and issues, the Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment. Dr. Brigham
said the Beluga shipments are probably the vanguard of what will be
decades of exploratory efforts to normalize such trade. But he doubts
that big container shipping companies, which require predictability,
will be eying such routes any time soon, given both the climatic and
bureaucratic obstacles. Dr. Brigham said that to a large extent, it is
Russian bureaucracy more than sea ice or icebergs that is impeding
international use of the Arctic route along its coast, which has in
theory been open to such transit since 1987.
He added that, for the record, the Beluga shipments do not constitute
the first commercial transit of non-Russian vessels through the fabled
Northern Sea Route (also called the Northeast Passage).
Beluga Group The bow of the Beluga Fraternity is seen in this image
from the convoy carrying power-plant components from South Korea to a
Siberian port. The two German vessels are being led by a nuclear-
powered Russian icebreaker.
Here’s what he said about earlier non-Russian use of the route (N.S.R.
is the abbreviation for the route):
In the summer of 1997, for example, the Finnish-flag tanker Uikku
sailed the length of the N.S.R. beginning in Murmansk 3 September,
1997, and discharged fuel along a number of Russian Arctic ports. It
arrived in Pevek on 12 September to discharge fuel and then sailed
through the Bering Strait on 15 September. After picking up more fuel
in the Pacific the ship sailed back along the N.S.R. discharging fuel
at several ports and reaching Murmansk on 14 October. It was also
reported by the Russian N.S.R. authorities that year that a Latvian-
flag tanker also completed a full transit of the N.S.R. in 1997.
Here are his views on prospects for more small shipments like those of
the Beluga fleet and large-scale use of the Arctic by the world’s
great container and tanker fleets:
I would say that these 2009 N.S.R. voyages do indicate that the
smaller shipping companies are looking at these routes with increasing
interest. I suspect the larger container ship & tanker companies
understand the complexities of Arctic navigation and the many
challenges to the just-in-time (seamless, integrated) systems that
they run. They will have many others, over decades, test the waters to
see how viable the northern routes are. With the extraordinary way the
Arctic sea ice is melting/ retreating, a very plausible trans-Arctic
route remains, in my mind, right across the central Arctic Ocean, at
least during a summer “window of opportunity.”
Finally, here’s an excerpt from a report on the progress of the two
ships sent Thursday by Niels Stolberg, the president and chief
executive of the Beluga Group:
Currently the weather situation is favorable, despite sporadic
snowfalls, fog and lower temperatures than a week ago. Near the
northwest side of Ayon Island the masters had to watch out for ice
fields and small ice blocks on Monday as well as on Wednesday morning
during the first miles through the Sannikov Strait. “We proceed with
utmost precaution through this area”, Captain Aleksander Antonov
assured from the bridge of MV “Beluga Fraternity”. The ice
concentration of the small floes was about 10 to 30 percent and the
mini-icebergs jutting out of the water by about one meter provided for
a situation which was mastered by the modern multipurpose heavy lift
project carriers being built with ice class E3 and the experience of
the captains. To assure for further safe passage and fulfil the
obligations by Russian government, ice pilots from the ice breaker
crew are now joining the bridges of MV “Beluga Fraternity” and MV
“Beluga Foresight” to guide the vessels through the most demanding
Vilkizki Strait. This most northerly point of the entire Northeast-
Passage will be reached within this Friday, 4th of September:
according to the analysis of the meteorologists thick ice blocks are
to be expected in the southern area of the Vilkizki Strait as well as
compact ice fields at the western exit and the entrance to the Kara
Sea. In all likelihood, thereafter the journey should be free of ice
all the way into the bay of River Ob.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/commercial-arctic-passage-nearing-goal/?hp
Jack Linthicum
Science 4 September 2009:
Vol. 325. no. 5945, pp. 1236 - 1239
DOI: 10.1126/science.1173983
Prev | Table of Contents | Next
Reports
Recent Warming Reverses Long-Term Arctic Cooling
Darrell S. Kaufman,1,* David P. Schneider,2 Nicholas P. McKay,3 Caspar
M. Ammann,2 Raymond S. Bradley,4 Keith R. Briffa,5 Gifford H. Miller,6
Bette L. Otto-Bliesner,2 Jonathan T. Overpeck,3 Bo M. Vinther,7 Arctic
Lakes 2k Project Members{dagger}
The temperature history of the first millennium C.E. is sparsely
documented, especially in the Arctic. We present a synthesis of
decadally resolved proxy temperature records from poleward of 60°N
covering the past 2000 years, which indicates that a pervasive cooling
in progress 2000 years ago continued through the Middle Ages and into
the Little Ice Age. A 2000-year transient climate simulation with the
Community Climate System Model shows the same temperature sensitivity
to changes in insolation as does our proxy reconstruction, supporting
the inference that this long-term trend was caused by the steady
orbitally driven reduction in summer insolation. The cooling trend was
reversed during the 20th century, with four of the five warmest
decades of our 2000-year-long reconstruction occurring between 1950
and 2000.
1 School of Earth Sciences and Environmental Sustainability, Northern
Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ 86011, USA.
2 Climate and Global Dynamics Division, National Center for
Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO 80305, USA.
3 Department of Geosciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721,
USA.
4 Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA
01003, USA.
5 Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ,
UK.
6 Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, University of Colorado,
Boulder, CO 80309, USA.
7 Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, 2100 Copenhagen,
Denmark.
{dagger} These authors and their affiliations are presented at the end
of this paper.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail:
darrell...@nau.edu
Jack Linthicum
wrote:
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1310
an examination and discussion of this with a map, showing both the
Northwest Passage and the Northeast Passage are relatively open.