A navigable Artic Ocean?

Terry Winn

Published 02 April 2007

I've just returned from a shoot in Athens and Helsinki. As a freelance, the month of March has been very good with a lot of work, but which has left me with little time to write for Pix-Aid. This last shoot has maybe little to do with development and humanitarian aid, but was interesting nonetheless. It was about building more efficient and more ecological diesel engines. But not small ones... big 20 cylinder engines for tankers and other huge ocean-faring ships.

The warmest March on record in Helsinki... no snow and little ice. Photo: Denis Loktev

The program is "Hercules", a European Union sponsored effort to make ocean transport more efficient. But that wasn't the interesting part of the trip, at least for me. I love to talk with scientists passionate about their work. They can go on for hours about all sorts of things and it is very interesting to listen and learn. Adjacent to the diesel engine research, scientists are trying to improve ship hulls for navigating through ice up to half a meter thick. With global warming, the Arctic ocean may become navigable. Even within 10 to 15 years, the ice may melt during the summer! Now, for forward thinkers, this opens up an iceberg of ideas. Trade between northern Europe and Asia or the west coast of the United States would be much quicker over the North Pole than to pass through the Mediterranean and Red seas or the Panama Canal. They even talk of oil reserves locked under the ice in northern Russia becoming economically exploitable. So for all this traffic, you need more ships and ships better able to safely plow through the ice as it becomes thinner.

Europeans this summer need no convincing of global warming. Helsinki, at around 60 degrees north latitude, was a balmy 17 degrees (62 F), the warmest March in its history. Maybe it is too late to reverse the change of climate and we may just have to figure out ways to live in a different world of warmer temperatures and their consequences.

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