Shipping delays have crippled the economy since the pandemic started.
They came to a head when a ship ran aground in the Suez Canal,
And it is blocking ships
Both ways in one of the world's busiest waterways.
This sparked a conversation.
Was there another way we could ship supplies around the world, maybe over the top?
Arctic sea routes are potentially much more useful for avoiding the kind of bottlenecks that one would
see in either the Panama or Suez Canal or the Malacca Straits.
Melting sea ice in the Arctic has opened the region up to more human activity than ever.
Companies are trying out the route between Asia and Europe.
Shipping, in particular, has increased 25% between 2013 and 2019.
It can be extremely brutally cold in the Arctic, and then you can have a beautiful, sunny day.
By perhaps as early as 2035.
It'll be possible to actually send a ship right over the North Pole in the summer months
That the region can be traveled across in a smooth and relatively
safe fashion. Because there's no ice is very scary.
We don't think that that is an environmentally responsible thing to do, and we frankly want no part
of it.
Others argue it could help emit less carbon by making travel times shorter.
China claims using the Northern Sea route would save almost 20 days off the shipping time now spent
traveling through the Suez Canal.
It's really a question of saving shipping costs, saving time versus that lack of predictability.
So should the Arctic be open for shipping?
To try to exactly figure out where the Arctic begins and ends is very much open to interpretation.
Every country has their own definition of it.
The traditional understanding is anything above the 60 degree mark.
The U.S. is one of eight Arctic states, five of which are coastal.
To travel through the Arctic, sailors need a specialized ship called an icebreaker.
This summer, the U.S.
Coast Guard's largest icebreaker, the U.S.
Healy, traveled through the Arctic via the Northwest Passage.
At the helm was captain Kenneth Boda.
This is, I think, my seventh year on icebreakers.
So it's kind of kind of what I do.
Icebreaking is amazing.
It's it's one of the neatest jobs I think there is to do.
I think this is only the third time that Healy has done a Northwest Passage and we haven't done it in
over 15 years.
The Northwest Passage is basically the passage between the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean,
north of North America.
The Northwest Passage is situated in relatively friendly geopolitical waters, but very unfriendly
topography.
Really, the Northwest Passage consists of a number of passages through here.
It's not just one lane.
There's, I think, 10 different passages that you can work in, and it's only been done by about 300 ships
throughout history.
The timing is very difficult, so you only have a narrow window where there's not a lot of ice to get
through, but you're going to encounter some ice.
And when you encounter that ice, you don't know how long it's going to take you to get through.
We saw some really amazing things in the Northwest Passage.
We saw a mama and baby polar bear on the ice, which was awesome.
We saw the northern lights.
We operated in some areas.
You can only call Iceberg Alleys where there's icebergs all around us.
It's very nerve wracking to do it when you're driving it.
It's very nerve wracking to try and sleep.
When you know that we're driving through an iceberg area like that
For a very long time, you had to have a very specialized vessel in order to get through there.
But year by year, it is becoming much easier to send ships through.
Canada has always claimed that the Northwest Passage lies within Canadian waters territorial waters.
The U.S. does not accept that, but we're not going to get into an argument about it.
There are two other potential ways to cross the Arctic.
The Northern Sea route is the least treacherous physically, but you should have good relations with
Russia.
The Northern Sea route is, of course, the passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific over the Eurasian
continent. You can get a little bit of the way through the Northern Sea route into the
Barents Sea and open water, and then the rest of the way is going to be, you know, really ice clogged
waters.
Now the third route and the one which doesn't exist yet but might exist very soon, is the central Arctic
route. That's the one that will actually take ships right north of the North Pole.
The route that goes directly through the Central Arctic Sea is really not under question right now
because the ice is just candidly not going to be thin enough for ships to allow to go through.
My name is Dalee Sambo Dorough, and I am the International Chair of the Inuit Circumpolar
Council that represents the Inuit or the real people in English we
occupied in terms of our traditional homelands.
Approximately 50% of the Arctic
Sambo Dorough's organization is recognized as a permanent participant at the Arctic Council, which is
the leading intergovernmental forum in the region.
Over the past year, we've seen the Biden government pledged to work more closely with the other Arctic
Council members. Now, this is very interesting because Russia is currently holding the chair of the
Arctic Council. So this is the United States is an interesting position.
So it is a potential problem, but also a potential opportunity.
I don't think that there is an easy answer in terms of whether increased
shipping would be good or bad.
I think that the necessary regime for controlling that
activity needs to be put in place and it needs to be recognized.
China is also very interested in developing the Arctic region for shipping, calling itself a near
Arctic state. It has signaled to Russia a commitment to building infrastructure on the Northern Sea route,
pledging to build a quote "Polar Silk Road" over a five year plan from 2021 to
2025. It also announced plans to launch a satellite to track shipping routes and monitor changes in the
Arctic sea ice.
I would predict that probably by 2035, we might be seeing sea-free ice summers throughout
the Northern Sea route.
Again, probably not in the Northwest Passage, and that comes down to just the differences in
topographies.
Overall, Arctic sea ice has diminished over 750,000 square miles from 1999 to
2019.
It's highly likely that as sea ice continues to diminish, that we can see more
projects in Russia, as well as in the circumpolar Arctic.
Russia and China are the major shippers on the route.
They've collaborated to bring liquefied natural gas from Siberia and Russia to a newly built pipeline to
China.
The Northern Sea Route's already being used to transport around 34 million tons of cargo a year.
Private shipping companies like Maersk traversed the Northern Sea route in 2018, exploring the possibility
of expanding to the region.
However, they decided it wasn't worth it.
MSC decided the same thing.
No matter what the economic cost may be day to day, that environmental cost
potentially just outweighs the rewards of taking a shorter trade route.
The Arctic also has little infrastructure to assist ships in case of emergency, say if a sailor gets sick
or any other unforeseen circumstance.
Navigation is also extremely difficult.
Although a project is underway with the help of the U.S.
Coast Guard to map the Arctic seabed by 2030.
We don't think the Northern Sea routes are appropriate for transit of our ships and commerce in
general.
You know, you get commercial traffic up there and they get stuck in the ice and they get crushed.
You know, if that oil gets in the Arctic, cleaning it up is going to be a huge challenge, trying to
separate the oil from the ice.
It's probably near impossible without really hands on approach techniques that you can use
in open water, like skimming the oil off the surface aren't going to work that well in the Arctic, with
ice chunks floating and things like that.
The native communities in the Arctic, the Alaskan natives and the Canadian First Peoples, they use
the resources. Obviously they fish and hunt, you know, in the water in in the Arctic Ocean.
The idea that by 2035 that the region can be traveled across
in a smooth and relatively safe fashion because there's no ice is very
scary. Sea ice is crucial.
It's integral to our way of life.
And that's why we can characterize climate change as such a crises that it is
front and center, a force that has had a devastating effect
on our communities already, and we haven't seen the end of it.
When you say Arctic shipping, you're not only focusing on sort of transits between Asia and
Europe or something like that.
There are so many different types of shipping and so many reasons that ships are actually navigating in
the Arctic that you have to differentiate between them and in the Arctic, destinational
transport is the most common one, and that, of course, coincides with diminishing sea ice.
Destinational transport means to and from the Arctic, not across it.
This increase has been seen for a couple of main reasons.
Harvesting natural resources and supporting the people in the Arctic.
Shipping from the Arctic has the implication that we're doing oil, gas, critical mineral
mining
Ore and iron are the two main minerals that can be harvested in the Arctic.
So in the EU's 2021 Arctic policy, they recently stated they're going to seek a moratorium on
coal, oil and gas extraction in the Arctic, but importantly, not on critical minerals.
Another main resource in the Arctic: fish.
In 2019, for example, over 40% of ships are fishing vessels.
This is essential to maintaining our traditional economic
activity, which is hunting, fishing and gathering.
Shipping to the Arctic also has interesting implications because in many cases, that can be food
for some of these remote communities that are no longer able to access their traditional food sources.
Our coastal communities across Inuit do not rely upon the barges that
provide goods and services to our communities.
Climate change and increase vessel traffic, they're linked, but
they're compounded by all kinds of other changes.
You have climate change.
You have increased vessel traffic, the potential for pollution, the industrial fishing.
It's just like bam, bam, bam.
And our people are bearing the brunt of it.
Shipping could provide an opportunity for economic growth to help protect the Arctic way of life.
One opportunity certainly is construct deepwater ports
not only for the receipt of goods and services, but also the possible
economic benefit of being the managers and owners of such ports so that
you can ensure that your services for vessels are used and that the community
benefits.
We try and work with them to make sure they understand what we're doing, you know, has has a
positive impact in the environment as we leave.
Certainly one way of helping those communities is to have a private sector company come in and
say, "we would like to use this area of your land and in exchange will help you build up
infrastructure, we'll help you move away from these really dangerous areas." And while that's certainly a
step up from not doing anything, it does present, I think interesting questions for the communities.
In the meantime, Russia and China continued to build up infrastructure along the Northern Sea route,
including a fleet of icebreakers.
The U.S. only has one other icebreaker to the Healy, the very old Polar star, which is currently in
Antarctica. This could mean Russia may be better prepared to lead the Arctic in economic growth.
Will the people who actually live in the Arctic benefit from not only container trade, but also
tourism? fishing?
Will the profits and will the benefits simply go southward?
Or will they actually be shared with the region?
The other problem that is really starting to appear, especially over the past year or so: Many countries,
including the United States and Russia, are starting to look at the Arctic from a more kind of strategic
lens. Countries have said, for example, I could point to Russia, which has started to greatly build
up its military presence along the coast of Siberia and in its part of the Arctic, and this will lead to
greater security problems between Russia and NATO.
And again, we're talking about Arctic populations that are being caught in the middle of this that have
very little say in what could be the militarization of the Arctic as it becomes more well-known as an
economic zone.