Climate Change in the Arctic - The Changing Arctic Environment: The Arctic Messenger - page 257

cause of depth restrictions in the canal. The voyage was reported to save more than
$200,000 in comparison to the canal route. Also in 2013, a small container ship travelled
the Northeast Passage from China to Rotterdam.
International interest in the shipping and resource development opportunities offered
by summer Arctic ice loss is gathering momentum and is not restricted to countries with
claims to Arctic waters. The recent series of conferences and meetings led by the Korea
Maritime Institute (KMI) in cooperation with the East-West Center in Hawaii gives a good
flavouroftheissuesbeingconsidered.Theperspectivesdiscussedarebeingmadeavailable
in a series of publications, such as that edited by Oran Young, Jong Deog Kim and Yoon
Hyung Kim in 2012. At the same time, Russia hosted three International Arctic Forum
events, entitled “The Arctic - Territory of Dialogue”, that heavily focused on the opening
of the seaways and of associated resource development. The first meeting was in Moscow,
the second in Arkhangelsk and the most recent in September 2013 was in Salekhard in the
heart of the Yamal region, which is the location of 90% of Russia's natural gas production.
Of course, ice hazards will be around for a long time because the Arctic will keep pro-
ducing winter seasonal ice under foreseeable climate warming scenarios, and for as long as
there are tidewater glaciers, there will be icebergs. The last days in the life of a thawing ice-
berg are spent as growlers. They are usually sea-green or almost black in colour and meas-
ure less than 15 metres in diameter. They degrade from slightly larger iceberg fragments
called bergy bits . Ships' crew fear growlers much more than they do icebergs. With mod-
ern equipment, only incompetence or instrument failure will result in a collision with an
iceberg, but growlers are close to being invisible to the eye and to radar because they pro-
ject less than 1 metre above the sea surface. That is often well below the prevailing wave
height in most northern offshore seas and oceans, which is why they can be so difficult to
see or detect on radar. What makes them even more of a hazard is that (being the last dying
remnant of a berg), you can come across them when no visible icebergs are in sight. I could
never see them until they were almost alongside the ship - even when crew had pointed
them out beforehand. Over the last 40 years, I can think of at least three ships with fully
ice-strengthened hulls that have been lost after striking a growler: two in sub-Arctic Atlant-