The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [83]
However, there is a very real possibility that by 2050, if not sooner, the Arctic Ocean will become briefly free of sea ice in September, by the close of the northern hemisphere summer. The ice will always return in winter (much like the Great Lakes today), but this is nevertheless a radical transformation, one that will dramatically increase the seasonal penetration of shipping and other maritime activities into the region. For part of the year, it would change from being the domain of a handful of heavy icebreakers to that of thousands of ordinary ships.
One doesn’t need a fancy climate model projection to appreciate this. It’s already obvious today. On the following two pages, consider the seasonal cycle of shipping activity that already happens each year in the Arctic. When sea ice expands in winter, ships retreat. When it shrinks in summer, they advance.
Note the profound restriction that sea ice imposes upon shipping activity. Few, if any, vessels dare to enter the ice pack, but there are thousands of them poking and probing around its southern periphery (there were at least six thousand ships operating in the Arctic in 2004, the year that these two maps capture).361 In January, sea ice confines them to the Aleutian Islands, northern Fennoscandia, Iceland, and southern Greenland. Even the icebreakers retreat then. Only Russia did any serious icebreaking—to and from Dudinka, a port for the Noril’sk mining complex on the Yenisei River. But in July, when the ice melts, the ships pour in.
The Arctic Ocean will never be ice-free in winter, but summer shipping will last longer and penetrate more deeply. If it really does become ice-free by late summer, it should be briefly possible to sail a ship right over the top of the world.
Not all shipping companies are thrilled about the prospect of this. Take, for example, Northern Transportation Company Limited, northern Canada’s oldest Arctic marine operator. Since 1934 NTCL has been providing cargo transport down the Mackenzie River and all across North America’s western Arctic coast, from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Taloyoak in Nunavut. The bulk of their business is cargo transport to villages, oil and gas operations, mines, and offshore energy exploration. The company’s vice president, John Marshall, was kind enough to show me around their port in Hay River, on the shore of Great Slave Lake.
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I was impressed. There were a hundred barges in operation, acres of other vessels parked, and a Syncrolift to raise huge ships entirely out of the water. Workers were swarming all over the barges to load them up and move them out. The company moves fast to capitalize on their short shipping season—only about four months—before the ice returns in October. But when I bounced the long-term climate model projections for sea ice off my host, I was surprised to learn he hopes to never see their simulations materialize. A longer shipping season on the Mackenzie would be wonderful, but an open Northwest Passage would allow competition in from the east. The sea ice blocking that passage, Marshall told me, was keeping his southern competitors out.363
If the Arctic Ocean becomes ice-free in summer, it will also affect maritime activities in at least one other important way. It spells the disappearance of so-called “multiyear ice,” the more obstructing of two forms of sea ice currently present there. “First-year” ice, as the name implies, is baby ice, less than twelve months old. It is one or two meters thick and relatively soft, owing to inclusions of salty brine and air pockets. While definitely dangerous, it is easily cleared by icebreakers and will not generally gore a properly handled vessel with an ice-strengthened hull. Importantly, first-year