Northwest Passage - Effects of Climate Change

Effects of Climate Change

In the summer of 2000, two Canadian ships took advantage of thinning summer ice cover on the Arctic Ocean to make the crossing. It is thought that climate change is likely to open the passage for increasing periods of time, making it attractive as a major shipping route. However the passage through the Arctic Ocean would require significant investment in escort vessels and staging ports. Therefore the Canadian commercial marine transport industry does not anticipate the route as a viable alternative to the Panama Canal even within the next 10 to 20 years.

On 14 September 2007, the European Space Agency stated that ice loss that year had opened up the historically impassable passage, setting a new low of ice cover as seen in satellite measurements which went back to 1978. According to the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, the latter part of the 20th century and the start of the 21st had seen marked shrinkage of ice cover. The extreme loss in 2007 rendered the passage "fully navigable". However, the ESA study was based only on analysis of satellite images and could in practice not confirm anything about the actual navigation of the waters of the passage. The ESA suggested the passage would be navigable "during reduced ice cover by multi-year ice pack" (namely sea ice surviving one or more summers) where previously any traverse of the route had to be undertaken during favourable seasonable climatic conditions or by specialist vessels or expeditions. The agency's report speculated that the conditions prevalent in 2007 had shown the passage may "open" sooner than expected. An expedition in May 2008 reported that the passage was not yet continuously navigable even by an icebreaker and not yet ice-free.

Scientists at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union on December 13, 2007, revealed that NASA satellites observing the western Arctic showed a 16% decrease in cloud coverage during the summer of 2007 compared to 2006. This would have the effect of allowing more sunlight to penetrate Earth's atmosphere and warm the Arctic Ocean waters, thus melting sea ice and contributing to the opening the Northwest Passage.

In recent years at least one scheduled cruise liner (the MS Bremen in 2006) has successfully run the Northwest Passage, helped by satellite images telling where sea ice was. In January 2010, the ongoing reduction in the Arctic Sea ice led telecoms cable specialist Kodiak-Kenai Cable to propose the laying of a fibre-optic cable connecting London and Tokyo, by way of the Northwest Passage, saying the proposed system would nearly cut in half the time it takes to send messages from the United Kingdom to Japan.