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2 Nations scramble over Arctic Silk
Road By Alan Boyd
SYDNEY - Russia has sent a chill through
Asian shipping circles by using a robotic hand
attached to a mini-submarine to plant its flag
near a thawing Arctic sea route that could
drastically reduce world trade costs.
The
titanium flag was planted last week 4,261 meters
under the ice covering the Northeast Passage, a
channel winding around the top of Norway and
Russia that may cut weeks off the freight
journey from Europe to Asia.
Moscow has said it wants to extend the
territory it already controls in the Arctic as far
as the North Pole, an area about half the size of
western Europe, lifting the lid on a nest of
unresolved legal and commercial issues.
State-owned daily newspaper Rossiiskaya
Gazeta afterward proclaimed immodestly that the
brazen act would launch an Arctic oil rush and had
heralded "the start of a new redistribution of the
world".
While that might have been an
overstatement, the Asian shipping industry has
already done its arithmetic on the enormous
implications for freight services. A more direct
sea route would cut journey times between the
continent and its chief Western markets by at
least one-third, slashing hundreds of millions of
US dollars off shipment costs.
Container
vessels traveling from London to Tokyo would trim
7,000km off the shipment time via the Panama Canal
and a hefty 17,000km from the distance around the
Cape Horn route.
Global warming could make
the Northeast Passage - and a second Arctic route
above Canada known as the Northwest Passage -
navigable in as little as five to eight years.
Only icebreakers and other ships with strengthened
hulls can now get through: about 50 have done so
since the mid-1980s, mostly in the summer months.
But the centuries-old dream of a maritime
version of the Silk Road may well be sunk by
economic brinkmanship and a dose of
19th-century-style colonialism before it really
gets seaworthy.
Moscow and Ottawa have
both moved to protect their disputed territorial
claims on the Arctic wastelands as the evidence
mounts that the ice cover, thought to be hiding a
quarter of the world's untapped energy reserves
and a treasure trove of other minerals, is melting
at an unprecedented pace.
Temperatures in
the polar region have climbed by 3-4 degrees
Celsius in the past 50 years, enough to reduce the
area covered in ice by one-third, or about 2
million square kilometers. The ice's thickness has
shrunk by a similar amount.
In 2001, the
US Navy predicted that the Northwest Passage,
stretching along the north coast of Alaska through
Canada's Arctic archipelago to the Atlantic Ocean,
would be opened to commercial shipping for at
least one month a year within five years.
That forecast proved to be wildly
optimistic given the unpredictable ocean currents
and formidable technical barriers, including the
lack of ports and other infrastructure. So the
focus shifted back to Russia, where the climatic
conditions are easier to read and the ice is
melting a lot faster.
Russia has been
quietly preparing for the opening of the
northeastern strait for decades, investing in
ice-resistant oil tankers, drawing up plans for
ports, and even deploying a massive floating dry
dock. There is also another important difference:
Moscow, unlike Ottawa, has actively promoted the
passage's commercial potential.
Canada
zealously restricts all access to the 19,000
islands, rocks and reefs composing its Arctic
territory, which were ceded by Britain in 1880.
The 1,450km passageway was declared an internal
waterway in 1973.
Under the International
Law of the Sea, the five Arctic nations - Russia,
Canada, Norway, the United States and Denmark
(through Greenland) are permitted to claim 200
nautical miles of territorial waters.
They
can also file claims for more territory if they
can prove that their continental shelves are
geographically linked to the Arctic seabed. Russia
lodged such a claim in 2001, and Denmark, which
claims Hans Island near Greenland, is expected to
do likewise.
Russia and Canada have
variously argued that their respective passageways
are internal waterways and that ice-covered areas
deserve special protection because they are
environmentally sensitive.
Both claims
will be sorely tested once the ice cover has
vanished and the links with continental shelves
become more tenuous. European countries and the
United States have said they will push for the
routes to be designated as international straits.
There is an extraordinary economic
dividend on offer. Apart from exploration rights,
any country that can secure control of the
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