The Northeast Passage and Climate Change

This page contains links to articles discussing the effect of climate change on the Northeast Passage.

"While existing geologic records from the Arctic contain important hints about this time period, what we are presenting is the most continuous archive of information about past climate change from the entire Arctic borderlands. As if reading a detective novel, we can go back in time and reconstruct how the Arctic evolved with only a few pages missing here and there," says Brigham-Grette.

Arctic sea ice melting, which scientists have linked to global warming, maybe a boon for the shipping industry. As the sea ice continues to melt a shipping passage to Russia’s north is becoming more navigable, and now two German ships are close to completing the first trip from Asia to Europe via the Arctic shortcut. However, walruses that live in the Arctic could care less, since their sea ice habitat is rapidly disappearing.

The Northeast Passage, the sea route along the North coast of Russia, is expected to be free of ice early again this summer. The forecast was made by sea ice physicists of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association based on a series of measurement flights over the Laptev Sea, a marginal sea of the Arctic Ocean. Among experts the shelf sea is known as an "ice factory" of Arctic sea ice. At the end of last winter the researchers discovered large areas of thin ice not being thick enough to withstand the summer melt.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center reports that Arctic ice shrank by 131,000 square miles between August 17 and 21, leaving ice coverage that is well below the 2005 record low of 2.05 million square miles. This has made the Northwest Passage easier to access than was thought possible even five years ago. “We used to say that maybe by the middle of the century the Arctic would be seasonably navigable,” says Sheldon Drobot, an Arctic researcher with the Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research. “Climate change is moving faster than we thought in the Arctic. At the current rate, we could see a seasonal shipping route in the next decade or two.”