It’s day two aboard the Coast Guard’s largest icebreaker, and we haven’t seen ice.
In Kugluktuk, on Canada’s Arctic coast, there wasn’t a speck of snow on the tundra, nor any icebergs in the bay. The scientists whom we replaced aboard the Louis had told us at the airstrip that the ship had recently been breaking heavy ice. As we sail northward, we’re still waiting to see some.
Not that we’re disappointed; we need only step out onto the Louis’
outside decks to feel the icy Arctic chill, and we’ve seen snowflakes since last night. We’ll see plenty of ice before we reach Resolute, we’re told, though we likely won’t be breaking it; the thick, multi-year ice through which the Louis was built to sail—and in which the ship spent most of the month of August, with the scientists on board—is many miles to the North and West of our present course.
Even so, there’s far less of it than there once was. On Monday night, we heard from Pierre Leblanc, a retired colonel who was, for five years, the commander of Canada’s forces in the Arctic. On the projector screen in the Louis’ boardroom, Colonel Leblanc showed us image after image of the permanent Arctic ice receding with each passing year. When he turned to his final slide, with an image of today’s polar ice, there was an audible gasp—in terms of sea ice, we are a shadow of our former selves.
Less ice means more shipping. Colonel Leblanc provoked another gasp when he described the rapid growth of maritime traffic through Russia’s Northern Sea Route, a ten-fold increase in the past year alone. As more of the Arctic becomes ice-free during the summer months, central Arctic shipping lanes—which bypass both the Northern Sea Route and Canada’s Northwest Passage—are becoming a very real near-term possibility.
Amid this thaw and transformation are the women and men of Canada’s Coast Guard. Their work is leagues beyond what most Southerners can fathom—done, as it is, in waters that most of us would never even assume are regularly free of ice. Like the Inuit who hunt and trap and fish among the floes and fjords, the Coast Guard’s constant presence is evidence to support Canada’s claim that these straits are internal waters under international law.
Aboard with us this week are Coast Guard oil spill specialists, an ice specialist, search-and-rescue experts, engineers, and mechanics, all of them ready to respond to just about any unforeseen emergency here at the most distant edge of Canada. It is a credit to the Coast Guard that, if a foreign vessel in these waters—our waters—is in distress, Canada will respond.
