Viability of Northwest Passage still decades off, study finds

For years, scientists have obsessively monitored Arctic sea ice: how it expands in the winter months and how much of it shrinks in the summer. Now, a study that zeroed in on a big chunk of the Northwest Passage, says sea ice there remains too thick and treacherous to be a regular commercial shipping route for decades.

A team of researchers measured the sea ice thickness for about 1,000 kilometres between Resolute and Cambridge bays earlier this year and found that it’s up to three metres thick in most regions of the passage.

Ice that originated in the Arctic Ocean showed thickness of over three metres on average.

The paper was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The Northwest Passage is very complicated because it’s one region where there is still a lot of multi-year ice, said Christian Haas, one of the authors of the study and Canada Research Chair for Arctic Sea Ice Geophysics at York University. (Multiyear ice is the thickest and oldest ice.)

Satellite data has shown that the area covered by ice has decreased in the summer even though it is still completely covered in the winter, Haas pointed out. But the summer melt has led to speculation on the feasibility of shipping.

“We were surprised to find this much thick ice in the region in late winter, despite the fact that there is more and more open water in recent years during late summer,” he said.

It would take 30, or even 50 years, before the ice becomes weaker, he said.

After ice coverage and type, sea ice thickness plays the most important role in gauging shipping hazards and predicting ice breakup.

The Northwest Passage connects the Beaufort Sea in the west with Baffin Bay in the east. It is a shorter route to move goods between the Pacific and Atlantic regions than the Panama and Suez Canals.

The study isn’t great news for the shipping industry, but it may also have significance on the climate change front.

The Arctic is one of the places on Earth where scientists say the pace of global warming is most extreme, where the impact is most dramatic.

In principle, it is good news for the Arctic, said Haas. The problem is, “we have very little to compare with.”

He also pointed out that the Arctic is gigantic and “most changes that have been observed have been away from Canada. And Canada is really the last region where we have very thick ice and fewer changes have been observed.”