Arctic Shipping Thaws in 2014 The number of vessels sailing through Arctic waters in 2014 went down more than 50%

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Ship-in-Arctic16x9According to a recent report by the Alaska Public Radio Network, 2014 has proved to be a slow one for Arctic shipping. Just 31 ships sailed between Europe and Asia across the Northern Sea Route, and 22 did part of the route. That’s down from a total of more than 70 in 2013.

Malte Humpert, executive director of the Arctic Institute, was cited saying that 2014 served as a reality check on some of the overheated Arctic predictions of recent years. Humpert says shipping is a good indicator of economic activity on the ground in the Arctic. 2007 and 2012 were low ice years, fuelling excitement about Arctic resource extraction, container shipping, even large-scale tourism. Then this year, the ice rebounded a bit.

Not only did the number of ships drop off, but Humpert says the purpose changed, too. 2013 had a lot of activity from oil carriers and ships carrying other natural resources, like LNG, iron ore, and timber.  While 2014 had a few passenger ships, and heavy lift vessels – indicating there was building equipment, like an oil platform being transported into the Russian Arctic.

Joël Plouffe, managing editor of the journal Arctic Yearbook, shares the same sentiment, saying the opening of the Arctic has been oversold as a major and immediate boom, but it remains a region where access is limited and development expensive.

Still, he does see some exciting developments this year, starting with the Northwest Passage. It sees much less traffic than the Northern Sea Route, but this year, Plouffe says, one transit was a commercial ship travelling without a separate icebreaker. “The shipping company called Fednav was the first shipping company to actually take some minerals out of the Canadian Arctic and take them out to China using the Northwest Passage, and using drones to help them in Arctic waters,” Plouffe said. “So that’s something new and this pattern will continue.”

Both Plouffe and Humpert say climate change is transforming the Arctic, even if the pace of its impact on shipping has been overhyped at times.

Excerpts taken from an http://www.alaskapublic.org/ report by Liz Ruskin. Full article available here.