| http://www.nationalpost.com/commentary/story.html?f=/stories/20020322/415432.html
Exposed in the Arctic National Post A recently declassified U.S. Navy report entitled Naval Operations in an Ice-Free Arctic makes astonishing predictions about the once virtually impenetrable northern ocean: regular commercial shipping could occur in the Northwest Passage by the summer of 2015, and the summer ice cover could disappear entirely from polar waters by 2050. Irrespective of whether this drastic change is a consequence of global warming, as some suppose, or some other cause, the development should be of interest to the federal government. Evidence that the Arctic ice pack is thinning has been available for years. One study, based on ice measurements from U.S. submarine data, calculated that the ice had thinned by 1.3 meters, or 40%, since 1953. From 1970, the ice cover has been shrinking by about 3% per decade. It is such findings that have alerted the U.S. Navy to the need to prepare for a new navigable ocean. Naval Operations in an Ice-Free Arctic was the result of a symposium, hosted last year by the U.S. Navy, which included U.S., Canadian and British Arctic and naval experts. It has produced, among other things, a recognition that even the U.S. navy, the world's most powerful, does not have the ships, training, communications capability or logistics necessary to police an open polar sea properly. U.S. defence officials have stressed that measures need to be taken now to "ensure system, tactical and policy concerns are addressed." If this is the case for the United States, which has sovereignty over an Arctic coastline of only 1,696 kilometres, imagine the scope of the challenge facing the Canadian government, with responsibility for a mainland northern coastline of 25,000 km. Traditionally, Canada has been content, to borrow a line from our history, to "sleep by the frozen sea." The government has relied on harrowing historical accounts of the impenetrable passage, and its severely limited fleet of Arctic-class icebreakers, to enforce sovereignty in its northern waters. With the disappearance of the ice cover, the Arctic will open to surface naval operations by foreign powers, to commercial fishing vessels, as well as to smugglers and, potentially, terrorists. The federal government needs to begin planning for such an eventuality. The Northwest Passage, which eluded explorers for centuries, has proven to be neither chimerical nor theoretical after all. |
