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Warming Opens Famed Northwest Passage to Navigation

posted by martyb on Wednesday October 21 2015, @11:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the Henry-Hudson-was-ahead-of-his-time dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Beneath the Aurora Borealis an oil tanker glides through the night past the Coast Guard ice breaker Amundsen and vanishes into the maze of shoals and straits of the Northwest Passage, navigating waters that for millennia were frozen over this time of year.

Warming has forced a retreat of the polar ice cap, opening up a sea route through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans for several months of the year.

Commander Alain Lacerte is at the helm as the vessel navigates the Queen Maud Gulf, poring over charts that date from the 1950s and making course corrections with the help of GPS.

[...] Today, taking this route cuts 7,000 kilometers (4,350 miles) off a trip from London to Tokyo, saving time and fuel.

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  • (Score: 1) by shipofgold on Wednesday October 21 2015, @11:11PM

    by shipofgold (4696) on Wednesday October 21 2015, @11:11PM (#252976)

    I agree, the argument made was pretty poor.

    The Northwest Passage was apparently open for three years in the 1940s: This article simply does not say that. There is no mention of the 1940's at all.

    .
    The link referencing 1940 says nothing about it. But the next link states that some icebreaker made a passage in 1940-1942, and then in the other direction in 1944...I would hardly call that open though...a normal ship wouldn't make that passage. I am guessing that icebreaker pushed a lot of ice around.

    there is more arctic ice in 2015 than there was in 2012: The only mention of 2012 is in a graph and it is clearly greater than 2015! So it says the exact opposite of what you claim.

    Which chart were you looking at? The chart at the top of the page for Arctic clearly shows that 2015 has more ice than 2012...but then again 2012 was pretty far down, and 2015 is still below the 1981-2010 range, so I am not sure what, if anything comparing 2 datapoints has to say about trends in global warming.