HALIFAX and WASHINGTON — The amount of thick sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk sharply, according to new U.S. surveillance data, adding urgency to Canada's push to exert sovereignty in the North.

But Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon said yesterday it could be decades before the Northwest Passage is open for shipping.

“Some experts predict that the entire Arctic could be ice free by 2013, others say that this will happen by 2050,” Mr. Cannon told the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

“Our own Canadian Ice Service, however, believes the various internal waterways known as the Northwest Passage will not likely be a reliable commercial shipping route for decades owing to extreme ice variability.”


NASA and the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported yesterday that Arctic sea ice more than two years old made up only about 10 per cent of the total this winter. That's a drop from 14 per cent last year and at least 20 per cent two years ago.

There's an increasing presence of thin, new, first-year sea ice, which is more likely to melt during the summer. A decade ago, this type of sea ice, which is also less likely to impede the types of ships several countries are planning to use, made up half of the Arctic total. It now accounts for 70 per cent.

Tom Wagner, cryosphere program manager with the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, acknowledged yesterday that diminishing ice has “very big implications” for northern shipping and resource exploitation.

“[It] opens up issues of who owns the Arctic,” he said in a conference call presenting the new data.

Canada claims sovereignty over the Northwest Passage. The United States regards it as an international strait no different from other vital sea lanes such as the Strait of Hormuz, and thus open to international maritime traffic.

Although nuclear-powered submarines from the U.S., British, French and Russian navies routinely were deployed in the Arctic during the Cold War and continue to make less frequent forays, Canada remains largely in the dark about those operations.

Yesterday, Mr. Cannon suggested that the U.S. Navy – in what would be a departure from previous practice – would notify Canada in future through joint military channels about its submerged patrols.

Although successive governments in Ottawa and Washington have sought to smooth over the dispute, the prospect of an ice-free, and thus commercially viable, summer passage through the strait threading Canada's Arctic archipelago has raised the possibility of a new showdown.

“What the anticipation of an opening Arctic has created is a lot of countries [investing] in technology to help them get through first-year ice,” said Rob Huebert, an associate professor of political science at the University of Calgary and an expert in circumpolar relations. “Even if it gets colder again, we're going to have new traffic and new actors in the Arctic.”

The Canadian military – which three years ago renamed the Northwest Passage “Canadian Internal Waters” – is running a sovereignty exercise in the Far North. Inuit reservists are patrolling on Ellesmere Island and air surveillance and parachute-borne search and rescue exercises are planned there.

But Dr. Huebert warned that exercises on land do little to bolster Canada's claim to control the areas covered by thinning sea ice. He noted that Russia has an active maritime presence promoting its claim to the Northern Sea Route, and that Canada needs to act to protect its interests.

He said Canada should not delay in mounting a major diplomatic campaign promoting its claim and should accelerate the purchase of icebreakers, even if it means buying them from foreign shipyards.

Oh and yet it's all down to Canada is it?

Do some fucking work yourself America!! Canada should have said a firm "no" years ago.


Global warming is meant to happen anyways get over it soon England will have palm trees and Greenlnad will be green again.

Crap, this is bad. Way to go world.