Climate Change in the Arctic - The Changing Arctic Environment: The Arctic Messenger - page 256

Sea Ice Loss in the Arctic
It is astonishing how rapidly the Arctic is changing due to loss of sea ice. One of the ele-
ments of that seminal speech given by Mikhail Gorbachev in Murmansk in 1987 was his
offer to open up the north-east marine passage from Novaya Zemlya to the Bering Strait
to international shipping. The big attraction was (and still is) the potential fuel savings of
up to 40% in comparison to the conventional southern routes from Western Europe to the
Far East. Between 1991 and 1999, I was involved in the work of the International Northern
Sea Route Programme (INSROP), a collaborative research effort led by the Central Mar-
ine Research and Design Institute (in Russia), the Fridtjof Nansen Institute (in Norway) and
the Ship and Ocean Foundation (in Japan). The INSROP studied technical aspects concern-
ing natural conditions and ice navigation; the environment; trade and commercial shipping;
and political, legal and strategic matters related to this proposal. All the issues were related
directly or indirectly to the problems presented by just one formidable hazard: sea ice. The
overall conclusion of the INSROP was that although it would be feasible to build the ships
and infrastructure needed to safely operate the northern sea route, it would not be economic-
ally viable under the environmental and commercial conditions that prevailed at that time. I
remember one report that estimated the monumental costs of marine insurance for an Arctic
sea route.
In 2007 (a then-record year for ice loss), the northern sea route was still blocked by a
tongue of ice that extended to the coast throughout the summer, but by mid-August in 2012,
the route was open. Even when the first AMAP climate assessment was completed in 1998,
it never occurred to me that only 14 years later (in 2012), the sea ice barrier would be suf-
ficiently weakened for a fully loaded liquid natural gas tanker to sail from Norway to Japan
following the Northeast Passage. In late summer 2013 (which was not a record year for
summer sea ice loss), the ice-strengthened Danish bulk carrier Nordic Orion carried 73,000
tonnes of coal from Vancouver to Finland through the Northwest Passage. The transit took
four days less than the usual route through the Panama Canal and carried 25% more coal be-