Translated material
Second discovery of the Northwest Passage
Global warming has devalued the feat of Roald Amundsen
The last serious news from the field of travel geography ended a hundred years ago. Well, maybe eighty - at the moment when people finally crawled around the entire globe and discovered almost everything that was possible on its surface. Then, of course, there were still notable achievements - like Chkalov’s and Gromov’s flights across the North Pole to America or the submersion of the bathyscaphe to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. But here it is already difficult to say what was more in these exploits - the perseverance of researchers or the talent of engineers.Now that the planet has been explored, maps have been drawn up and, it would seem, the time of discovery is a thing of the past, no, no, but the Earth will throw up something unusual for geographers. Either a mountain collapse will happen and a new lake will appear, then the Aral Sea, thanks to the efforts of cotton growers, will dry up and split into two salty puddles, then a volcanic eruption will demolish the island, as happened, for example, with Krakatoa, then a piece of the ice shelf in Antarctica will come off, and the outlines of the continent will have to change on the globe.
A similar thing happened last week when the European Space Agency reported that the Northwest Passage problem had disappeared. The Envisat satellite, which monitored ice conditions in the Arctic Ocean, transmitted a new batch of images, studying which scientists discovered that the legendary path around North America through the polar seas in early September 2007 was clear. The Norwegian Roald Amundsen, who was the first to make such a journey in 1903-1906, would not have to perform any special feats today. Just over a hundred years later, the Arctic climate has become much milder, and where previously courage and dedication were required from polar explorers, regular flights can now be opened.
Judging by data obtained from Envisat, the Northwest Passage is almost completely free of multi-year ice along its entire length. Nothing will prevent a ship embarking on a passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean from passing through the Baffin Sea, rounding Baffin Island from the north and, through several straits, reaching Banks Island - the westernmost of the entire Arctic archipelago not north of Canada. Here the pack ice extends furthest to the south, but as photographs from space show, McClure Strait, which opens into the open ocean, is more or less clear. It will probably be somewhat difficult to navigate here on a pleasure yacht, but a ship prepared for sailing in polar waters will be able to reach the Arctic Ocean. Further, after the Canadian islands, the sea is completely clear, and the traveler will not encounter any obstacles until the Bering Strait.
With our Northeast Passage (or Northern Sea Route, as we are more accustomed to calling it), the situation is a little worse. The most difficult situation is near Taimyr: the pack ice reaches almost the very north-eastern coast of this peninsula. But both to the east and to the west of it the sea is free. In general, the current situation is such that, with some luck, a traveler could, almost without the support of icebreakers, make a polar circumnavigation, circumnavigating the Arctic Ocean along Siberia, Alaska and Canada. If only there is enough time for the trip: summer is short, and in the most difficult places the ice moves away from the coast for only a few weeks.
The reason for such changes in the Arctic is the same global warming. Envisat has been monitoring the Arctic waters for several years now, so the rate of retreat of the ice sheet to the north is well known to scientists. Previously, 2005 was considered a record year, when in summer the minimum ice area in the Arctic Ocean was only 4 million square kilometers. But then the Northwest Passage still did not open: the straits in northern Canada were filled with ice. But this year there was a record - only 3 million square kilometers of ice-covered ocean were recorded on satellite images in early September. "This is about a million square kilometers less than the previous lows in 2005 and 2006," said Leif Toudal Pedersen of the Danish National Space Center. -- Over the past decade, on average, the ice sheet has lost 100 thousand square meters per year. km, so a decrease of one million in just a year is an extraordinary event.”
Apparently, in the coming years, the ice-freeing of the Northwest Passage will become a regular and common event. Undoubtedly, following the Canadian part of the Arctic, the coast of Siberia will also begin to completely get rid of ice cover. And in the future, the Arctic Ocean will generally begin to freeze only in winter and will probably lose the second part of its name. This could happen in the second half of the 21st century: experts from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are targeting 2070.
Scientists suspect that melting polar ice will raise sea levels and are trying to predict how this will affect continents closer to the equator. Those who are interested in more mundane economic issues see certain advantages in this. True, they are not at all the same as those that interested people in Amundsen’s era. At the time, the Northwest and Northeast Passages were considered potential trade routes. Circling the Old or New World from the north means quickly delivering cargo from Europe to Asia.
They soon learned to break through the ice - with the help of icebreakers. However, this turned out to be not very profitable: firstly, in winter in the Arctic, icebreakers are not always helpful, and it is not a cheap pleasure to navigate ships through the Canadian straits or across the Siberian seas. In addition, the Panama and Suez canals appeared, after which it was no longer necessary to go around Africa or South America. So, when the stubborn Roald Amundsen finally passed from the Baffin Sea to the Beaufort Sea, merchant ships no longer followed him. And the Northern Sea Route was used mainly to supply the northern villages of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, Yakutia, Chukotka... People rarely traveled from the Barents Sea to the Bering Sea along the Chelyuskin route.
However, even now one should not hope that the liberation of the northern passages from multi-year ice will greatly improve the situation. After all, clean water in the same Canadian straits does not last very long. The Arctic summer is already over, the ocean is beginning to freeze, the ice will move south and reach the mainland. And even in this record year, navigation will last several weeks at most. We'll have to wait until 2070 or at least 2050, when the ice will probably not be able to reach the coast even in winter.
This situation will please those who are now developing the Arctic shelf in pursuit of oil and gas. Where the ocean freezes, it is almost impossible to extract hydrocarbons from the seabed: when frozen fields of ice several meters thick are drifting around, it is impossible to install a platform. But for now there are places in the Arctic where you can reach ice-free waters: the same famous Shtokman field is located in the Barents Sea between the Kola Peninsula and Novaya Zemlya, and thanks to the Gulf Stream, pack ice does not reach these places. But further to the east, the warm Atlantic current is also unable to melt the ice. Here we can only rely on the fact that humanity will continue to burn fuel at the same rate so that global warming will make the Northern Ocean “formerly arctic.”
The Arctic has run out of quality ice floes
Russian scientists have not yet been able to find a drifting ice floe in the Arctic suitable for organizing the North Pole-35 polar station. Exploration will continue in the area of the Severnaya Zemlya archipelago, a member of the expedition told RIA Novosti on Monday. According to him, the research vessel Akademik Fedorov, accompanied by the nuclear icebreaker Rossiya, searched for ice for three weeks in the area of the North Pole (the ships approached a distance of about 60 miles to this point) and in the Canadian sector of the Arctic. “The inspection showed that the thickness of the ice floes in these latitudes is about one meter. But in order for the ice floe on which the polar explorers will be to not melt when they get into warm waters, this parameter should be approximately four to five meters,” he said expedition member.
As a backup option for organizing the station, its location on one of the islands of the Severnaya Zemlya archipelago in the area of Cape Baranova is now being considered. But in this case, unique research, which can only be carried out on a drifting ice floe, will be disrupted, said a member of the expedition. Drifting ice floes on which scientific stations are set up must have a certain size and thickness, thanks to which the safe operation of the expedition throughout the year is ensured. But due to abnormally warm weather last winter, according to members of the Russian expedition, suitable ice platforms disappeared in the Arctic.