Opening the Arctic Trade Route
VIEWPOINT
by Eldon Griffiths
The world’s largest cargo ship recently docked at the Port of Los Angeles.
She’s China Shipping Co.’s S.S. Asia, one of a new fleet of leviathans as large as aircraft carriers, equipped to carry as many as 4,800 containers across the oceans at speeds (average 20 knots) that were unheard of in merchant ships 10 years ago.
Samsung Heavy Industries Co. is building eight more of these monsters at a cost of more than $1 billion. Scores more are on order.
Each one is a fifth of a mile long, taller than a 15-story building and wider at the beam than 11 freeway lanes.
These new ships will lower costs and speed up delivery times. Their impact on global transport will be greater than the one that hit the airline industry when it switched in the late 1970s from single-aisle planes to wide-bodied 747s.
Together with these new generation freighters, a second trade-transforming breakthrough is looming up in the Arctic.
The northern sea route is expected to open up in the next 25 years between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans along the once impassable north coasts of Russia.
When this happens,and believe me it will,the world’s economic geography will change.
I was briefed on these developments last week,not by the green-eyed ecologists who dine out on climate change, but by hard, tough men from the U.S. Navy’s Oceanographer, the seven-nation Arctic Research Commission, and officers of the Naval ice center, which taps into reports from U.S., British and now Russian nuclear submarines operating under the sea ice.
Their message is that the Northwest Passage that Captain Cook tried and failed to find in the 1760s now is back on the global agenda.
Natural forces, to which man-made exhausts from power stations and cars contribute only marginally, have reduced the extent and thickness of the Arctic sea ice by 40% since these submarines started measuring it.
The ice melt season is lengthening, opening up enough ice-free water to allow navigation along wide stretches of the north Russian coast for three or four months each year.
Russia, whose icebreakers have made 36 trips to the North Pole (compared to three by Sweden and two by the U.S.), has started construction on 11 big ice-capable tankers to carry oil from its northern fields to refineries in Western Europe.
BP and other big oil companies, frustrated by U.S. restrictions on oil exploration in Alaska, have switched their attention to seismic exploration and offshore drilling rigs in the Russian Arctic. Japan and China are pressing for waterborne access to the energy, minerals and forestry products of Siberia.
Even a small reduction in Arctic ice offers new opportunities for large-scale commercial fishing.
Most eager to see the northern sea route opening up are the same guys who are building those super freighters,the world’s great shipping companies.
The distances, times and costs of shipping containers between U.S. and European ports, and future ones in northeast Asia, could be substantially lowered in the next generation as cargo fleets are offered a transpolar alternative to the vastly longer hauls across the middle reaches of the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans, the pinch points of Panama and Suez, and the pirate-infested straits of Southeast Asia.
The northern sea route never will be plain sailing.
The best comparison I can make is with the movement of grain and iron through the Great Lakes by the American ore carrier fleets that once linked Minnesota’s mines and farms with the steel towns of Chicago and Cleveland.
Even the most enthusiastic boosters of the northern sea route accept that the vessels that use it will need to thread their way past calving icebergs and face harsh weather that can cause super structure icing and limit crews’ exposure times.
Military men also forecast friction with the Russians who claim that they alone must control the northern sea route on grounds that nearly all ships that use it must pass through their territorial waters. The U.S. and Britain disagree, insisting that the Arctic belongs to all nations and that the straits that link it to the other oceans are international waters, subject to free right of passage.
Yet the northern sea route is going to happen, just as surely as those new super cargo ships are set to benefit from increasing world trade.
The evidence of Arctic warming no longer is in doubt and no matter what men may do, it’s all set slowly to continue at least for the next 100 years.
The best prediction is that sections of the northern sea route will open up progressively in the next 20 years. Regular passages between April and October along the entire length of Russia’s northern shoreline won’t happen that fast.
But it’s fair bet that through-transit between the Bering Straits that separate Alaska from Pacific Russia and the Barents Sea between Greenland and Norway may be possible by 2050.
No way will I live to see this. My wife and I are freighter freaks. Four times in recent years, we have been the only passengers on container ships sailing from Los Angeles to both coasts of South America and across the Atlantic to Europe. Last spring, we went on a German freighter from Long Beach to Sydney, Australia. Next year we’re booked on an Indian-owned container ship out of Houston, bound for Malta. We’re therefore urging grandkids to reserve a berth if they can on one of the new generation of super cargo liners when services from northeast Asia to northwest Europe start operating by way of the Arctic in 20 or 30 years’ time.
That’s pretty long-range planning. But the world is changing. Global trade is increasing and big ships are one of the best,and, we find, least stressful,ways to watch this happen. So God bless all who sail in the new super cargo liners. And northern sea route, Ahoy.
Griffiths, a resident of Laguna Niguel, is an author, journalist, former member of the House of Commons and undersecretary of state in the U.K. government.
