Guest post by Robert Phelan
One of our commenters last week was going on about how the Northwest Passage was opening up and ships were making the passage… there is a website which tracks world wide shipping…. So my question was, “gee, how many ships are using this nifty new passage?”
http://www.sailwx.info/shiptrack/shiplocations.phtml
West of Greenland, there appear to be only three manned vessels, the Russian tanker Volgoneft-131, which has been making it’s way south at about three or four miles per day for the last week ( http://www.sailwx.info/shiptrack/shipposition.phtml?call=UFTA ), the French yacht Vagabond (call sign FLAO http://www.damocles-eu.org/press/Images_from_the_polar_yacht_Vagabond_85.shtml ) which has been anchored in Jones Sound off Ellesmere Island for the last week, and the Royal Arctic Line container ship Irena Artica ( http://www.ral.gl/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=215&Itemid=192&lang=en ) crawling up the west coast of Greenland in Baffin Bay.
The answer seems to be “none”. Only those three north of 70N. WUWT?
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PhilMB says:
July 12, 2012 at 6:10 pm
Apologies for biting your head off!
The site is a good find. I have used sailwx before but was not aware of marinetraffic. So thanks.
Billy Liar – The GPS tracking system becomes less reliable the further you are away from the equator because of the line of sight with the GPS satellites creates more interference with the atmosphere. In order to maintain an accurate position on earth you need to be in contact with at least three GPS satellites (triangulation). In order for the GPS satellites to maintain contact in the extremes of latitude (ie +90 or -90 degrees) they need to achieve a higher altitude to overcome the interference from the atmosphere due to the curvature of the earth. This is not to say that is cannot be done, the Russians created a GPS navigation system using satellites at higher altitudes precisely because of this problem (and the fact that they have a lot more of their country at northern latitudes) – the United States still does not have this capability because they position their satellites at a lower altitude.
As a small aside, this means that cars built in the USA with built in GPS navigation become less reliable north of the 49th parallel (Canada and Alaska).
i don’t want to rain on anybody’s parade here, but the idea that any passage through the Arctic (either the NWP or the NEP/Northern Route) will be used for Commercial Shipping is not based on whether or not there is any ice present, it is based on the economic and political viability of such an enterprise. The Soviets used the Northern Routs (NEP) despite the presence of vast amounts of ice – they used their very powerful ice breakers to continue opening passages through the ice in order to maintain a political presence in northeastern Siberia and to allow transit of their warships from Europe to the Pacific. The present Russian regime is doing the same thing but for economic reasons – they are still providing icebreakers to support transit of Foreign vessels and they are charging for the expense. As long as it is more profitable for the shippers to use this route while paying the Russian charges they will do so. Canada also has the capability of using their ice-breakers to provide year-round transit of the NWP and they have had for decades. The fact that Canada has not done so is because of the higher costs associated with providing safe passage at Western standards. That is to say the costs associated with providing extensive accurate charts of the NWP, as well as the setting up of rescue stations and refueling ports do not justify the expenditure of funds based on the Canadian Government’s expectations. That, coupled with the facts that the Northern Route (NEP) is shorter and maintained means that I doubt very much that significant use of the NWP for passage for commercial traffic will be realized in our lifetime regardless of whether or not the Arctic becomes ice free.
GPS is usable in the Arctic, it does not suffer from low signal strength that the geo-stationary communication satellites do (due to aiming of their antenna pattern to more populous areas), Iridium SATCOM and HFDatalink are alternatives, HF voice if hungry (used by airliners for decades but a pita to use).
I don’t know offhand if the WAAS version of GPS augmentation for greater accuracy is available in the Arctic, it comes from those GEOs, I believe it is not available in NW Alaska which is beyond the rounded corner of the beam pattern.
The St. Roch’s hull was reinforced in some way that I forget, probably sheathed with steel sheet, though it still was a small wooden boat.
My memory of feasibility of resupplying Cambridge Bay is that most years they could count on one month of access.
(Cambridge Bay is the nearest sizeable support airport & seaport to where the cruise ship Clipper Adventurer ran aground on August 27, 2010. (In http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronation_Gulf , which is a channel between the mainland and large Victoria Island, so about halfway across the northern mainland coast of Canada. (Grounding location 67-58.2N/122_40.3W, on an underwater ridge. See
http://www.tsb.gc.ca/eng/rapports-reports/marine/2010/m10h0006/m10h0006.asp.
Causal factors included slackness in acceptance of inoperative equipment (forward-looking sonar – they used an echo-sounder on the ship, but the ridge they hit has a steep side), not using a small boat precede the ship to echo-sound even though crews of that ship had done so previously, operating at full speed even though their schedule required only half of that, in a sparsely mapped area that had high risk of uncharted obstructions.
While a large number of compartments were holed, most were double-bottomed. Fortunately _four_ tugs finally got the ship off the ridge, before the worst winds occurred.
The shoal had been reported in 2007 by a CCG ship, notifications got buried later though databases were available, the chart selling service used by the Clipper Adventurer omitted the NOTSHIP information on that shoal and the crew were not aware of the NOTSHIP database.
As on the open ocean, it may take a few hours for aircraft to reach the location to drop supplies, and at least several hours for other boats to arrive to help. The area is sparsely settled, I would expect the slow Twin Otter aircraft to be in the region such as at Cambridge Bay, but the big fast aircraft that can drop supplies, like C-130s and C-17s, are not stationed in the High Arctic, though they might be in and out of the area (resupplying Eureka weather station, for example.)
Guidelines for the operation of passenger vessels in Canadian Arctic Waters are at http://www.tc.gc.ca/media/documents/marinesafety/tp13670e.pdf.