After the Ice

by Alun Anderson

  I talked to Ståle Sveinungsen, director of the Vessel Traffic Service. His team sits surrounded by computer screens with radar images of the surrounding seas, has access to the automatic ship-identification systems, and is ready to call the three patrolling tugboats, coast guard, emergency services, and the Royal Norwegian Navy as necessary. “If we have an emergency, we run through a set of procedures, it’s like the cockpit in an airplane,” Sveinungsen says.

  Vardø tracks the movement of any ship larger than 5,000 tonnes [around 300 feet or longer] through Norway’s 200-nautical-mile economic zone, as well as ships traveling around the islands of Svalbard, farther to the north. The three tugs ply the zone ready to help and act as the center’s “eyes.” Out at sea, an agreement with the International Maritime Organization (IMO) keeps traffic in two separate lanes and more than thirty nautical miles off the shore (rather than the usual ten nautical miles). “There will be more and more activity in this Russian area and to get there, you have to come along the Norwegian coast.4 We are ready for this traffic. The coast is much safer now,” says Sveinungsen. The first sign of trouble is when a ship comes to a halt. “We see two or three vessels every month drifting, many of them have just a small problem, they are changing filters or something on the main engine and after a few hours they start sailing again,” he says. “We can see them out there and we have time to send a tug, so it’s not a big problem anymore.”

  Around the corner from Vardø, Russia is commissioning innovative ships, including tankers and ore carriers with the “double acting” design that I had seen in Aker Arctic’s giant testing tank in Helsinki. These are the ships with two bows, one that is close to the conventional V-shape and suited for more open water, and one that is a spoon-shaped icebreaker bow.

  They are expensive to build compared to a conventional ship, but they don’t need an icebreaker escort to move through ice up to five feet thick. That saves a lot of money (30 percent of running costs according to Norilsk Nickel, one of the operators) and uncertainty. Russia still has by far the largest icebreaker fleet in the world, including five nuclear-powered icebreakers of tremendous strength.5 But they are growing old. Only one of its atomic breakers has a planned life expectancy beyond 2020; that is the Fifty Years of Victory, the most powerful icebreaker in the world, launched in 2007. Rosneft, the Russian company which looks after the fleet, says it will build more nuclear icebreakers and has a budget for the first of them.

  Already in service among the “icebreaker-independent” fleet with the double-acting design are three tankers built in Korea shuttling between the Varandey oil terminal off the Siberian coast and Murmansk. Two more tankers are being built in the Admiralty Yard outside St. Petersburg (the first will launch in 2009) to serve the giant Prirazlomnoye oil platform.6 And five ore carriers are already running, the last of which arrived in March 2009. Each is quite small (14,500 tonnes deadweight) but the cargo of nickel they carry is very valuable.

  The ore carriers are owned by Norilsk Nickel, the world’s biggest producer of nickel and palladium, and replace an earlier design of icebreaking ore carriers of the Norilsk class.7 At one end of their run is the port of Dudinka, linked by train line to the mines of the legendary city of Norilsk, one of the most polluted places on the planet. More than 16,000 prison laborers died working in the mines and building the city before the Soviet gulag system came to an end. The city is now closed to foreigners, but it is still easy to visit: virtually, that is. Residents have posted videos of the city on the Web, taken from automobiles driving around town summer and winter, and they provide fine views of the city’s legendary smokestacks and Soviet-era plant, all set to rock music. At the other end of the ore carriers’ run—1,343 nautical miles away—are Murmansk and the smelters of the Kola Peninsula.

  Coming to the Russian Arctic fleet in the next decade will be liquefied natural gas (LNG) carriers—the odd-looking ships that are built around a line of spherical gas tanks. Russia plans a liquefaction plant near Murmansk to handle the gas from the pipeline to the Shtokman field and another among the reindeer on the Yamal Peninsula (for once the Arctic offers an advantage; the bitter cold makes it much cheaper to liquefy gas up here than in the heat of the Persian Gulf). Double-acting ships may be built that can break through ice and travel on to deliver their cargo to markets in Europe and America, or icebreaking ships may simply shuttle back and forth within the Barents Sea, transferring their cargoes, in port or at sea, to conventional ships that are cheaper to run in open water.

  Across the other side of the Arctic, Canada’s Arctic shipping specialist, FedNav, has icebreaking ore carriers to serve the mines at Raglan in Northern Quebec and a new ship, the Umiak, built in 2004 in Japan for the Voisey’s Bay nickel mine in Labrador. The Umiak is a conventional ship of great power, capable of ramming and breaking through five feet of ice and carrying 30,000 tonnes of nickel. There will be a shipping boom here only if natural resources are exploited; the enormous Baffinland iron ore project being the biggest among them. And if the Alaskan offshore oil fields take off, the seas there will be busy with seismic survey ships and drill rigs and all the supporting vessels they need, as they will be in Russia as the search for oil moves out east toward the Ob, the Yenisey, and the Lena over the next two decades.

  Oil, gas, and mines are clearly making the Arctic seas a busier place, and could make it busier still, but the big question is whether that is just a fraction of the coming Arctic shipping boom. The prospect that sets the imagination alight is a fast route between the Atlantic and the Pacific, especially one through the Northwest Passage, where so many explorers died looking for the fabled route to Cathay.8 The Northwest Passage is not really one route, as there are five variations that are possible among Canada’s many islands, with the easiest to get through being too shallow for big ships.9 Largely ice-free routes opened briefly in 2007 and 2008, for the first time in history, and a few tourist ships slipped through. It was not until 2008 that the first boat made it through the passage on a commercial voyage. The ice-strengthened 440-foot MV Camilla Desgagnés delivered cargo to Inuit communities in September 2008 during a short period when “there was no ice whatsoever.”10

  A tourist route it may become, but the Northwest Passage is the least-favored trans-Arctic shortcut between the Atlantic and the Pacific, with the Northern Sea Route around Russia and the direct transpolar route offering better opportunities. That, at least, is what I’d heard Douglas Bancroft, head of the Canadian Ice Service, say at a shipping meeting back in early 2007. I called him to ask if the summers of 2007 and 2008 had made him change his forecast. “Not at all. In fact, I am even more convinced. We saw areas of open water fairly close to the North Pole last summer [2008]. The northern sea route we still forecast to open first on a reliable summer basis and then the transpolar route. It is still true now that most of the multiyear ice is packed up to the north of the Arctic archipelago. Because it’s becoming much more fractured and mobile, we have the risk of large chunks of multiyear ice, in or near the Northwest Passage. That’s an impediment for the shipping.” There is nothing worse than chunks of extremely hard, clear old ice, floating at the surface where it is difficult to see, for a ship traveling at speed in seemingly open water or thin ice. A collision may sink the ship. This seems to be what happened to the MS Explorer, the tourist ship that sank in the Antarctic, according to the authorities in Liberia where it was registered.11 The ship was passing through what its crew thought was thin first-year ice, but hit a wall of much harder land ice (from glaciers), holing the hull. The Northwest Passage will be the last place to be free from these dangers, as scattered old ice floes hide in the thinner ice.12

  So we must return to Russia again. The first shortcut across the Arctic will likely be the old route across the top of Siberia.13 The route passes from Murmansk over the Barents Sea, through the narrow “Kara Gate” between Novaya Zemlya and the mainland, across the Kara and Laptev seas inshore of Severnaya Zemlya, and then winds among the New Siberian Islan
ds through the Sannikova Strait before passing inshore of Wrangel Island and arriving at the Bering Strait. A nearly ice-free summer passage could have been made along the route in 2007 and 2008, except for the western Laptev Sea.14 As the ice thins, the route will be able to run farther offshore, cutting out the shallow seas at the Sannikova Strait and eventually heading straight across the ocean on the transpolar route.

  On paper, the route looks wonderful. The distance from Europe’s busiest port of Rotterdam to Yokohama in Japan is 11,250 nautical miles through the Suez Canal and just 7,350 nautical miles via the Northern Sea Route over the top of Russia; to Vancouver on the west coast of Canada it is 8,920 nautical miles through the Panama canal and 6,980 nautical miles over the top of Russia. When the Soviet Union kept a fleet of icebreakers ready to lead ships through it in convoy, the route was passable all summer—331 ships sailed on 1,306 voyages in 1987.15 The western end of the route, to Dudinka, has been kept open every year since the winter of 1978–79.16 Not that there was any international traffic—the Soviet Union wanted its own path around the world and access to strategic minerals in the Arctic. In 1991, Russia opened the route to all, but there has never been more than a trickle of traffic, although several big international research programs have looked at its potential.17

  Now that the ice is thinning, enthusiasm is returning, especially in Iceland where the government has hopes that its ports will be at one end of a new trans-Arctic highway.18 What is still lacking, says the AMSA report, is comprehensive “cost-benefit-risk analyses for all potential routes of trans-Arctic shipping.”19 The Institute of the North in Anchorage, Alaska, is the only organization to try to take a long hard look at its economics.20 Mead Treadwell is a senior fellow of that institute and the chair of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, which advises the president and Congress. Speaking at a naval conference in Washington, D.C., in 2007, he explained that they had looked at “a shuttle that would link the very active North Pacific and transpacific traffic and the very active North Atlantic and transatlantic traffic.” Aker Arctic carried out the study, looking at two ships, one a double-acting ship like those used by Norilsk Nickel but modified to carry 750 standard containers rather than nickel plate, and the other a more powerful big brother, able to carry 5,000 containers and travel farther out to sea where the ice is heavier but the water is deep enough for it to pass.

  The study looked at year-round operation, Treadwell explained, between Iceland and an old military base at Adak, in the Aleutian Islands. The 4,900-nautical-mile voyage could be made twenty times a year by the larger ship, without help from icebreakers. The results were encouraging. The cost of moving a container from Japan to Europe through the Suez Canal runs around $1,500. The larger icebreaking ship could shuttle a container across the Arctic for $354 to $526 depending on the prevailing ice conditions. But on top of that are the “fairway” fees charged by Russia (currently set at the high price of around $1,000 per container), the cost of the hub ports at both ends of the Arctic, and the journey onward to ports in Europe that are harder to predict.

  The Arctic will always be very cold. Although bulk cargoes, including iron ore, coal, and fertilizer, aren’t too much affected by a week below freezing, computers from China, cars from Japan, and the manufactured goods that fill many container ships will not be so happy. The unpredictability of the weather and the ice also make schedule keeping difficult and on-time delivery is critical for many goods.

  So far, the study has stimulated interest but not action. I called Treadwell at his office in the Institute of the North in April 2009. “We have several shipping companies citing the study as something they have used as a benchmark in their planning, but no one has stood up and said we are beginning to build ships for a trans-Arctic mission. On the other hand, the economics appear to improve as the ice conditions change and shipyards gain more experience with icebreaking ships,” he said. Other factors could come into play. Insurance rates could go down if there were better salvage and search-and-rescue facilities in the Arctic, as well as shipping rules and aids to navigation, as the AMSA report points out.

  There is also the question of how a trans-Arctic route would fit into world trade patterns. Currently, giant container ships from Asia carrying manufactured goods travel on regular “port rotations,” that is, runs to a sequence of ports in the United States or Europe, dropping off cargo. The hub ports in Asia that they leave from are in a class of their own. Singapore, Shanghai, and Hong Kong handle more than 20 million containers a year. Europe and America have more, smaller ports; Long Beach in California and Rotterdam in Holland each handle less than half that number. The largest container ships now being built carry 13,500 TEU (a “twenty-foot equivalent unit,” which is the length of a standard container) up from only 4,000 TEU a couple of decades ago. These giant single-screw ships push prices down because they can carry a huge amount of cargo. A ship crossing the Arctic would have to compete with ships carrying at least twice as many boxes, and although the distance is shorter, pushing through ice burns more fuel. When the smaller ship emerges from the Bering Strait, it still has a long way to go to reach one of those hub ports in Singapore or Shanghai. The economics of scale and positioning of giant hub ports make it hard for an Arctic route to compete in a big way. When the planned widening of the Panama Canal is completed, a round-the-world route for giant container ships will raise the bar even higher.

  The Arctic route might be used in the next few decades for small quantities of high-value goods, by warships that need to pass between oceans without delay, or even for transporting nuclear fuel far from the reach of terrorists. Unexpected events could boost the attractiveness of the polar route: a prolonged war in the Middle East that closed the Suez Canal would be one. A big boom is very unlikely.

  The zone within northeast Russia and continuing past Vardø is where the busiest commercial areas are going to be in coming decades. That’s alongside the boom in Arctic tourism and the cruise ships that are heading farther and farther north as the ice retreats.

  If you want to travel to the North Pole on board a Russian nuclear icebreaker, circumnavigate Svalbard or Wrangel Island or run the length of the Northwest Passage on a small expeditionary ship, or travel up and down the coast of Greenland or Alaska in a ship carrying a couple of thousand tourists and a choice of restaurants, you are just one click from a shiny brochure arriving at your door.

  Back at Vardø, they can see what is happening in Svalbard. “Yes, we are very afraid of this area because very large cruise ships are going up there alone,” says Sveinungsen. “Many of the captains know about the Caribbean, but they don’t know this ice area, so that’s not so good. We are following these vessels and try to inform them about the dangerous areas. Many of these charts up there are more than a hundred years old. The ships are large: the biggest of them carry one thousand people there. We have the coast guard patrol vessel Svalbard up there and we have a few helicopters. That’s all. So if there is a grounding or a big fire, it will be a tragedy.”

  There has never been a really large catastrophe or oil spill up among the Arctic ice (the Exxon Valdez catastrophe was farther south), but when I talked to George Edwardson, the Inupiat leader from Barrow, he told me a horror story from his hometown that made the potential consequences clear. “In 1942, we had a U.S. Navy supply boat run aground in a storm, a little over sixty miles east of us in Barrow,” he said. “In order to save that ship, the captain had to dump his bunker oil, it went into our barrier islands, and it killed the whole system right there. Pretty close to fifty years later the same storm that put that ship in trouble came back again. The waves washed up where that bunker oil was deposited and that bunker oil started killing that inlet all over again. Up here it’s too cold for the oil to vaporize and the ground is permafrost. The toxicity does not go with time.” Under threat are the “seals, the whales, the fish, the ducks, and the birds,” says Edwardson.

  That particular spill has not been studied, but the behavior of the
oil that Edwardson describes is familiar. Oil buried in the cold can keep its toxicity for many decades and hit the environment again and again every time it is washed back out into the sea. If there is a spill, tackling it very quickly is essential. There has been little success in dealing with the Arctic spills that have occurred. A 2008 U.S. National Academy of Science’s report looked at twenty years of accidents in the Aleutian Islands, including two big oil spills from wrecks and noted that “almost no oil had been recovered and in many cases, weather and other conditions have prevented any response at all.”21

  One of those wrecks was the 740-foot Malaysian-registered Selendang Ayu, carrying a cargo of soybeans from Seattle to China on the great circle route that crosses the Pacific in an arc, touching the fringes of the Arctic just north of Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands. The tragic story of its loss provides a warning for any ship voyaging into remote northern waters.22 In November 2004, the ship was more than fifty miles from land when its engine failed and its master called for help. A U.S. Coast Guard cutter reached the ship six hours later, followed by one tugboat which got a line aboard but could not turn the ship, drifting broadside in twenty-five-foot waves and sixty-mile-an-hour winds. A second tugboat arrived but had to wait until daylight before trying to put another line aboard. Before then, the first towline broke. The captain dropped an anchor which caught and almost stopped the ship. But fifteen minutes later the anchor slipped and the weather worsened. Most of the crew were evacuated by helicopter, leaving eight on board trying desperately to restart the engine. As darkness approached, the ship hit bottom and a final rescue began. One helicopter lowered a rescue swimmer onto the ship to help the evacuation and began pulling the crew on board. Then a huge rogue wave hit the ship, sending spray up into the helicopter’s engines and bringing it crashing down into the sea where it overturned and sank. A second helicopter pulled the flight crew and one survivor from the sea; six others were lost. The Selendang Ayu broke in half on the rocks, with the ship’s master and the coast guard rescue swimmer still onboard. Two hours later the helicopter was able to take them off. Nearly sixty hours had passed since the engine failure. Six men died, 1.7 million liters of fuel oil leaked from the wreck, and over the next months the oiled bodies of over a thousand sea birds and many sea otters were found.