Thawing Arctic opens up new shipping routes on the 'roof of the world'

Cold is the new hot in shipping circles as melting sea ice opens up prospects for trade between China and the west to move across the roof of the world.

An increasing amount of seaborne traffic is beginning to move on the so-called Northern Sea Route which traverses the Siberian coast. There are also hopes of opening up more of the North West Passage above Canada.
The attraction of the voyage is that it is one-third of the distance of more traditional routes through the Suez Canal. This means less carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions and less fuel. It also means less pirates.
Attacks on ships off Somalia and in the Gulf of Aden have become so severe that some owners are already using longer sea routes around South Africa to avoid conflict.
Christian Bonfils, the managing director of Nordic Barents operator Nordic Bulk Carriers, claims it will save him $180,000 in fuel costs. New Arctic voyages are starting all the time. Russian oil company, Novatek is currently carrying a trial shipment of 60,000 tonnes of oil products to China via northern Siberia on the vessel, Perseverance.
Norilsk Nickel, the world's largest nickel producer, has just broken new ground by carrying ore from the Arctic port of Dudinka to Rotterdam in Holland. Two tankers owned by Murmansk Shipping, the Varzuga and Indiga, loaded with 27,000 tonnes of petroleum, recently moved through the ice-thinned passage from Murmansk to Chukotka in the Russian far east.
Sovcomflot, Russia's major shipowner, took one of its 70,000-dead weight tonnage tankers from Russia to the far east on this route.
And another state-owned Russian company, Atomflot, says it is handling more inquiries than ever before for east-to-west voyages transiting the north coast of Siberia. Atomflot provides the nuclear-powered icebreakers that are currently required by the Russian government to escort the growing number of cargo vessels braving the journey.
But it is not all plain sailing. Quite a lot of the Arctic routes are not properly mapped and surveyed while there is a serious dispute in Canada over whether the famous North West Passage is international water or sovereign territory.
Meanwhile the Russian authorities are still trying to decide what to do about dumped radioactive materials left along the route. The Tsivolka Inlet on Novaya Zemyla has been used as a burial ground for nuclear reactors such as the one from the first atomic-powered icebreaker, the Lenin.
The gathering interest in the Northern Sea Route is being generated by a political as well as a physical thaw. Global warming is reducing the thickness and immovability of the ice but Moscow is changing too. Russia under Dmitry Medvedev is an increasingly outward-looking country willing to compromise and co-operate.
Last week in Murmansk, the Russian president signed a bilateral agreement with Norway after a 40-year row over sea boundaries. It started with arguments over fish but has become a negotiation largely driven by prospects for oil and gas in the Barents Sea and beyond.
Wider political changes are happening as the Arctic increasingly becomes a hunting ground for minerals rather than the seals of the past.
The shipowners believe that this route could gradually be open for transit up to four months per year as air and sea temperatures increase. But they also foresee a world ahead when vessels can take a direct east-west route right across the north pole.
Viktor Basargin, Russian regional development minister, has said that cargo shipments via the North Sea Route could rise from its current level of 3m tonnes annually to 30m "in the near future."
Canadian and American maritime experts say 2% of global shipping could be diverted to the Arctic by 2030, rising to 5% by 2050.
Already cruise ships are bringing tourists and income to countries such as Greenland. But they are also raising concerns about safety and pollution from oil spills. There is a widespread view that it is only a matter of time before there is a potential emergency: a passenger ship in trouble and potential evacuation into freezing seas.
Even with the best of intentions, the wider shipping industry will have accidents. Collisions are certainly more likely in areas of thick fog and where some navigational equipment might malfunction in extreme cold. Accidents are also more likely where mapping of the seabed is extremely patchy – as it is throughout the polar region. This summer an ice-strengthened cruise ship, the Clipper Adventurer, hit an uncharted "underwater cliff" off Nunavut, northern Canada.
Yet this is an area where an extensive search-and-rescue capability is only just being planned for inside the Arctic Council, where Russia, Canada and other coastal states discuss issues of the day.
The International Maritime Organisation has a set of "guidelines" for cruise ship operators and others about how to proceed in the area but it is only that – advice. A wider polar code is now being developed by the UN organisation but it must be formulated, agreed and then ratified.
That is a process that usually takes many years but even then there will still be issues outside its scope. For instance, risks to indigenous communities in the Arctic must be considered, along with threats to biodiversity in the region? The movement of vessels from one side of the world to another can bring unexpected and unwanted results: sea creatures attach to the bottom of boats or are carried in water needed as ballast to balance a ship. Aggressive, new species arriving from one region can have a devastating impact elsewhere.
The Finnish government warned in a study published this summer into the potential impact of shipping that "combating oil spills in icy water is almost impossible with the current technology". And scientists have warned that emissions from cargo ships using the Arctic will accelerate global warming.
"One of the most potent 'short-lived climate forcers' in diesel emissions is black carbon, or soot," says James Corbett, a marine scientist at the University of Delaware who has worked with Canadian colleagues to look at the impact of shipping in the far north.
"Ships operating in or near the Arctic use advanced diesel engines that release black carbon into one of the most sensitive regions for climate change," he says in a study first published in the journal, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.
The study team's key conclusion, based on the modelling of future emissions in the region, is that "short-lived forcing of about 4.5 gigatons of black carbon from Arctic shipping may increase the global warming potential due to ships' carbon dioxide emissions by some 17 to 78%."
Source: Guardian