Wallace's blog: Opening up of the Arctic (Aug 11)
Opening up of the Arctic.
Probably the news that caught my attention most this week, apart from the tsunami tragedy in Samoa and Tonga, was a piece about the Arctic trade route known as the Northeast Passage. It's long been the stuff of shipping lore, and many ships have, in the summer melt season have tried to traverse it, with ice breaking bulkheads at the ready. Ships have been stuck in the floating ice, wedged and drifting aimlessly in the massive ice packs. Tales of cannibalism abound amongst starving sailors.
But a couple of weeks back, thanks to the Northeast passage being almost completely ice free for the first time since, well, since, humans have been around to make the most of it - two German owned container ships made the trip to Rotterdam from the Russian far east city of Vladivostok. It took them just a month, whereas usually they'd have to go around through the South China sea, round the bottom of India, pay the tolls for passing through the Suez, up the west coast of Europe and so on.
It's another, and rather dramatic example of the way the climate is changing, and changing worryingly quickly. All that ice usually acts as a massive mirror - bouncing harsh UV rays back out and away from earth. Now all that extra ocean acts as a massive absorbent and just speeds up the process.
The opening of the Arctic trade route has geopolitical ramifications as well, with several countries scrambling to lay claim, not just to shipping routes, but also to the increasingly accessible seabed for the purposes of exploration. Hence, when Russia did a little promo show for the world and planted a Russian flag on the North Pole seabed a couple of years back, Canada went crazy.
But lets hope the world's leaders can put their heads together
and nut out a binding way to place a cap on world emissions in
Copenhagen. Heck knows what type of world we are going to be living
in 50 years from now if they don't.
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