The Powers that Be
“She creaked and groaned and, once or twice, actually sobbed as the water oozed through her seams. There is nothing more human than a ship in ice pressure.”
Arctic is not governed from Ottawa or Moscow or Oslo. It is ruled by two major currents called the Beaufort Gyre and Transpolar Drift, and the smaller but perhaps more significant one to us, The Labrador Current. It was the Beaufort Gyre that trapped the Karluk as it spun its great big clockwise circle north of Tuktoyuktuk – slowly compressing its churning ice toward its centre. “She creaked and groaned and, once or twice, actually sobbed as the water oozed through her seams. There is nothing more human than a ship in ice pressure,” wrote Bartlett of feeling his stout vessel squeezed during the three months the gyre carried it away from the Canadian Arctic toward Siberia. “The poor old Karluk began to suffer worse than ever . . . Sometimes I used to walk around on the floes out of sight of her because I couldn’t stand to see the way she went on.” On the Russian side, the Transpolar Drift is in charge. The massive wind-driven current collects ice formed north of Siberia and carries it up over the North Pole at a speed of about 1.5 kilometres a day. About four years later the ice is spit out through the Fram Strait between Greenland and the Norwegian Island of Svalbard. The huge flow of ice has actually opened up the Northeast Passage – a corridor from Europe to Asia via the Russian Arctic – to shipping and oil and gas exploration. “The Arctic contributes nearly 40 per cent to Russia’s gross domestic product,” said Adam Lajeunesse, the Irving Shipbuilding chair in Arctic marine security who is based at St. Francis Xavier University. “The only thing holding oil and gas back right now in the Russian Arctic is sanctions — they need American technologies.” The Russian Arctic is a busy, busy place thanks, in large part, to the Transpolar Drift. Meanwhile in the Canadian Arctic we only get about seven icefree weeks — from Aug. 1 into late September — when ships other than heavy icebreakers can operate in our Arctic. “The Canadian Arctic will be the last to open up,” said Lejeunesse. Then there’s the Labrador Current carrying ice and frigid water south between Baffin Island and Greenland down to skirt around the coast of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. It not only brings us icebergs but its eternal shoving match with the warm Gulf Stream coming from the south feeds the bloom of microscopic life on the Grand Banks and Scotian Shelf that is the source of our fisheries.