Who Owns the Arctic?

You can’t replace real icebreakers

Michael Byers, Globe and Mail, March 27, 2012

A rugged little ship adorns the back of the new $50 bill that the Bank of Canada began circulating Monday. But, in an ironic twist of fate, the red and white CCGS Amundsen no longer sails the Arctic seas.

Lawmakers confronting cold reality for pricey icebreakers

The United States is running short of icebreakers, with its only pair of heavy icebreakers, Polar Sea and Polar Star, sidelined in Seattle, one with broken engines and the other undergoing an overhaul to keep it running a decade past its life span.

Kyung M. Song, Settle Times, October 9, 2011

WASHINGTON — Climate change is melting parts of the ice-locked Northwest Passage. China is building its first modern icebreaker in hopes of staking claims to Arctic waters. Frigid polar regions are opening up to increased shipping traffic, scientific exploration and tourism.

Yet the United States is so short of icebreakers capable of navigating those still-unpredictable waters that since 2007, it has made the annual supply run to McMurdo Station, the American research outpost in Antarctica, with a ship leased from Sweden.

Peaceful competition on Arctic ice

Michael Byers, Toronto Star, 24 August 2011

AMUNDSEN GULF, N.W.T.—Two powerful icebreakers — one Canadian, the other American — have just met up in the Beaufort Sea, setting up the latest play in a circumpolar hockey game.

Together, the CCGS Louis S. St. Laurent and USCGC Healy will map the Alpha Ridge, a 2,000 kilometre-long range of underwater mountains running from the northwest flank of Canada’s Ellesmere Island toward Russia’s Wrangle Island.

Climate Change Poses a Major Challenge for the U.S. Navy in the Arctic

Lauren Morello & Dina Fine Maron, New York Times, March 11, 2011

Climate change will pose major new hurdles for U.S. naval forces, forcing the military to grapple with an emerging Arctic frontier, increasing demand for humanitarian aid and creating rising seas that could threaten low-lying bases, the National Academy of Sciences said yesterday.

As Arctic melts, U.S. ill equipped to tap resources

By Jacquelyn Ryan, Washington Post, January 10, 2011 

KODIAK, ALASKA - Flying over the Arctic Circle, the Coast Guard C130 rumbled as it alternated between 500 and 2,500 feet, its high-tech equipment quietly observing the thickness and stretch of ice along Alaska's northern border.

Cold air rushed through the open cargo door as some musk oxen and the occasional walrus passed below.

Like the rest of the 2.5-million-square-foot area at the top of the world, this chunk of the U.S. Arctic is melting quickly because of accelerated climate change. The prospect of newly thawed sea lanes and a freshly accessible, resource-rich seabed has nations jockeying for position. And government and military officials are concerned the United States is not moving quickly enough to protect American interests in this vulnerable and fast-changing region.

Government to scope out arming icebreakers

Guns on Coast Guard ships sought to protect Arctic sovereignty

Randy Boswell, PostMedia News, October 22, 2010

The Conservative government has revealed that it will consider arming the Canadian Coast Guard's icebreakers as a way to bolster Arctic sovereignty.

The commitment to study the option of placing guns on coast guard ships was the highlight of the government's tabled response this week to recommendations in a report from the Senate fisheries committee about strengthening Canada's presence in the North.

Every Arctic voyage is a potential disaster

Michael Byers, Ottawa Citizen, September 3, 2010

An uncharted rock could have killed 200 people last week, had the weather in the Northwest Passage been poor.

Instead, passengers on the MV Clipper Adventurer, an ice-strengthened cruise ship travelling from Greenland to western Nunavut, were able to enjoy the sunshine on deck while waiting two days for rescuers to arrive. Just a few days earlier, an Arctic storm had grounded Prime Minister Stephen Harper's plane, with winds approaching hurricane strength.

Winds like that -- and the resulting ocean swells -- can tear a grounded ship apart. Just imagine scores of ill-equipped passengers, many of them elderly, being forced to abandon ship in stormy conditions. How long would they last in lifeboats being tossed around in near-freezing water?

And imagine the crew of a Canadian Forces Cormorant search and rescue helicopter at Comox, on Vancouver Island, 2,500 kilometres away. For it is they who would receive the call, being the closest ones with the equipment and training to conduct a maritime rescue in the middle of an Arctic storm.

No spills, injuries after fuel tanker runs aground in Northwest Passage

Canadian Press, September 2, 2010

A fuel tanker carrying nine million litres of fuel has run aground near the Nunavut community of Gjoa Haven in the Northwest Passage.

The Nanny _ a modern, double-hulled tanker _ hit the unmarked shoal in the Simpson Strait southwest of the community on Monday while on a voyage refuelling local communities, reports the Coast Guard.

"She´s just caught up on a sand bar, that´s all," said Dennis White of vessel owner Coastal Shipping of St. John´s, Newfoundland.

Work underway to resolve Beaufort Sea boundary dispute

By Randy Boswell, Postmedia News July 26, 2010

 

Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Louis S. St-Laurent (top) and the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Healy working side-by-side in the summer of 2009 during a seabed survey in the Beaufort Sea.

Photograph by: U.S. Geological Survey, Photo Handout

Canadian and U.S. government experts met quietly in Ottawa last week to begin trying to resolve a long-standing boundary dispute in the Beaufort Sea, a Canadian diplomat revealed Monday.

News of the surprise talks was disclosed during a briefing by Canadian and U.S. officials on a bi-national seabed mapping mission to be conducted next month in the Beaufort region.

This summer's joint Canada-U.S. survey, the third consecutive year in which researchers from the two countries have agreed to collaborate on mapping the Beaufort sea floor, will also include a sonar probe of the contested area itself for the first time.

The Ottawa talks on the Beaufort controversy, held July 22, followed a pledge earlier this year by Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon that Canada intends to actively pursue an agreement with the U.S. over where the maritime boundary should be drawn in an unresolved, Lake Ontario-sized section of the Arctic Ocean north of the Yukon-Alaska border.

Melting Arctic: Think of the Bering Strait as the next Panama Canal

Alice Rogoff, Alaska Dispatch, February 28, 2010

As Arctic sea ice melts at unprecedented rates, opening new shipping routes, it is time for Alaskans to demand a seat at the table for planning coastal infrastructure. It is no longer a question of if but when the increasing marine traffic will affect our lives. But policymakers making decisions today about our coastal future are in Washington, D.C., New York, Beijing, and other commercial capitals of the world, not to mention Siberia, where Russia is developing the competitive western shores of the Bering Strait.

Why are Alaskans not a part of the planning?