Arctic Melt Stirs Economic Ambitions

•  berlin
• Wednesday, September 28, 2011
• Inter Press Service

The possibility of exploiting the hitherto inaccessible natural resources of the Arctic Ocean is becoming increasingly tangible with the thawing of the North Pole, much to the alarm of European scientists.

Recent measurements by the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) confirm that the melting of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean during the Northern hemisphere summer, a phenomenon observed for the last five years, was particularly pronounced this year.

Rising temperatures in the far north have reached the point that both the Northwest Passage along the northern coast of North America and the Northern Sea Route (also known as the Northeast Passage) along the coast of Siberia are free of ice.

'What is unusual about the summer of 2011 is that even the Parry Channel (in the Canadian territory of Nunavut) is open and almost ice-free,' Georg Heygster of the Environmental Physics Institute at the University of Bremen told Tierramérica. The institute has generated maps of the polar ice caps using data from NASA’s Aqua satellite.

'The ice is melting so rapidly around the edges that that sun’s rays are able to warm the water underneath, which speeds up the thawing of more ice floes,' explained Rüdiger Gerdes, a sea ice expert at the AWI, based in the city of Bremerhaven on the northwestern coast of Germany.

'This development does not surprise us, since it fits in with the trend observed since 2007,' he told Tierramérica. 'But it is serious, because not only is the extent of the ice diminishing, but also the thickness,' he added.

'These circumstances create new opportunities for making commercial use of the Arctic,' in areas such as fishing, maritime shipping and the exploitation of natural resources, particularly oil and gas, observed Gerdes. And these economic opportunities are already being pursued. Between July and September, three massive supertankers took advantage of this newly opened shortcut through the Arctic.

The Sanko Odyssey, the largest ship to travel along this route, was carrying 68,000 tons of iron ore. The supertanker Vladimir Tikhonov sailed from the island of Novaya Zemlya to the Bering Strait in seven and a half days, breaking the previous record set weeks earlier by another tanker, the STI Heritage, which traveled the same route in eight days.

According to figures from Russian maritime shipping authorities, around 20 vessels have used this route so far this year. To evaluate the environmental consequences of these activities, Gerdes, Heygster and close to 30 other researchers from nine European countries have joined together for a new project called ACCESS: Arctic Climate Change, Economy and Society, which held its first workshop on Sep. 5 in Bremen.

Divided into five working groups, the researchers want to find answers to three key questions: What will transportation, tourism, fishery and resource exploitation in the Arctic be like in the future? What risks do these developments hold for nature and humanity? By means of which regulations can these risks be minimised?

In addition to the AWI, other partners in the ACCESS project are the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, also based in Germany, the German Aerospace Centre, and Pierre and Marie Curie University (UPMC) in France. Links have also been established with the intergovernmental Arctic Council and the Arctic Centre at the University of Lapland in Finland.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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