Matthew Fisher: Thanks to global warming, China’s ‘Snow Dragon’ and U.S. cruise will meet in Arctic
Matthew Fisher 08.23.2017
The Chinese icebreaker Xue Long photographed from the bridge of the Aurora Australis ship off of Antarctica on Jan. 2, 2014.Jessica Fitzpatrick/AFP/Getty Images
Thanks to global warming, a Chinese icebreaker carrying 96 sailors and scientists and a mammoth Los Angeles-based luxury cruise liner with about 1,700 passengers and crew should pass each other in Canada’s fabled Northwest Passage in early September.
The ships will make two of what the Canadian Coast Guard estimates will be 150 merchant ships, trawlers and private yachts carrying modern day adventurers making the transit across Canada’s environmentally fragile Arctic archipelago this summer.
The Xue Long, or Snow Dragon, will be the first Chinese ship to attempt to transit the Northwest Passage. The Ukrainian-built icebreaker caused a diplomatic flurry when it paid an unannounced visit to Tuktoyaktuk in 1999.
This time the Chinese have gone through formal channels. The Polar Research Institute of China officially alerted Ottawa in January of the icebreaker’s intention to traverse the Northwest Passage from east to west, Fisheries, Oceans and Canadian Coast Guard spokesman Vance Chow said in an email. The Chinese requested and received Ottawa’s consent to conduct collaborative hydrographic research of the sea floor after it agreed “to comply with Canadian marine legislation” and went through “the appropriate approval processes.”
The Snow Dragon is scheduled to reach what the state-run China Global Television Network called “Canada’s exclusive economic zone’’ on August 29 as part of an epic, 83-day, 35,000 kilometre voyage that the broadcaster claims will be the first circumnavigation of the Arctic rim.
Traveling in the opposite direction, the 68,000 ton Crystal Serenity is expected to enter Canadian waters in the Beaufort Sea early Thursday morning. The liner’s passengers have paid between $22,000 and $120,000 each for the privilege of retracing the historic 32-day voyage that the ship made last summer from Anchorage, Alaska to New York City ,with talks by Arctic experts and indigenous people and shore visits along the way in Canadian Inuit communities such as Ulukhaktok, Cambridge Bay and Pond Inlet.
While the Crystal Serenity is a commercial venture offering such extravagances as a Nobu-affiliated sushi bar and a spa, the Snow Dragon is a spartan research vessel purpose-built for operating in polar waters.
The Snow Dragon’s northern voyages were designed to “strengthen its position on the world stage regarding international governance of the Arctic region,” according to a recent article published in the state-run China Daily. Its current journey was being conducted in part to see whether Chinese businesses could profit from using the Northwest Passage as a shorter, faster route to bring cargo from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean, said state broadcaster CGTN.
Not so long ago the masters of the Snow Dragon and Crystal Serenity would have likely not been bold enough to attempt the Northwest Passage because of its dark reputation as an ice-bound coffin for so many of the sailors who took part in early Arctic expeditions. But there is far less ice and far more open water in the passage today than there was even at the end of the 20th century.
“The general trend, as everyone recognizes, is that the Arctic is certainly seeing warmer temperatures,” said Greg Lick, who runs icebreaker operations and maritime safety for the Canadian Coast Guard.
But that does not mean that the Northwest Passage will be easy to navigate this summer.
“What we are seeing across the Arctic this year is that ice conditions are generally a little more severe than last year,” Lick said. Paradoxically, the reason that it may be riskier is that less new ice formed in the passage last winter. Such new ice “would typically prevent more of the heavy, more dangerous multiple year ice from coming down from the higher Arctic,” the Coast Guard’s general-director of operations said, likening the older ice to “concrete.”
Despite potentially trickier ice conditions, Lick said the Coast Guard was “not expecting any significant issues (with) the transit of any of the vessels that we maintain continuous surveillance on. There is nothing that we can’t handle with the icebreakers that we have up there this season.”
However, the 13-storey-high Crystal Serenity requires special attention.
“Obviously with the number of passengers and the size of the vessel, it does present a greater risk for safety purposes,” Lick said. “The Arctic is a very sensitive area. It does not recover as quickly as the south does.”
Canadian icebreakers carry specialized equipment that enable their crews to respond to environmental disasters. The Coast Guard also maintains caches of emergency gear strategically located across the Far North.
To be ready for nightmare scenarios such as an oil spill or the abandonment of a ship on Canada’’s northern margins requires meticulous planning. Aside from the Canadian and U.S. coast guards, nearly a dozen Canadian groups have had input into the Crystal Serenity’s voyage from the Pacific to the Atlantic, including the Canadian Armed Forces, Environment Canada, Canadian Ice Services, the government of Nunavut and Inuit communities along the Serenity’s route.
To be ready for any eventuality the Coast Guard organized four meetings between Crystal Cruises and federal officials earlier this year. The gatherings culminated in a tabletop exercise at CFB Trenton in May that rehearsed how to respond to a disaster in the Arctic.
Like all vessels transiting the Northwest Passage, the Serenity and the Snow Dragon must prepare an emergency response plan and adhere to Canada’s Arctic Ice Regime. one requirement of which is that calculations must be done which consider the construction of the vessel, the ice that it is expected to encounter and to what emergency equipment it has access.
“What that comes up with is a number and that number tells you is whether you can go safely into that ice or not,” Lick said. “Whether it is a “Go or No Go’ decision.”
If the Serenity were to get trapped in ice the Coast Guard can call on as many as six icebreakers now in the High Arctic, Lick said. But he thought it unlikely that the cruise ship would require much help because it was “awfully well prepared” to avoid “a major maritime disaster like, knock on wood, a sinking,” he said.
The Serenity’s trump card is that as did last year it has once again chartered to accompany it the RSS Ernest Shackleton, an icebreaker that spends northern winters in the service of the British Antarctic Survey in the southern hemisphere. It is equipped with two helicopters for real-time ice reconnaissance as well as additional lifeboats, life jackets and emergency gear.
If there were a calamity the Shackleton, which has a retired Canadian Coast Guard commander embarked as an ice navigator, can provide temporary shelter to as many as 600 of the Serenity’s passengers.
The Snow Dragon also has a helicopter and a Canadian ice navigator on board “to assist its passage through ice-infested waters,” said Coast Guard spokesman Chow.
Moreover, “three Canadian scientists — two hydrographers and a technical expert — will be aboard,” as it “crosses the Northwest Passage through Canada’s waters,” he said.
Should the Serenity, the Snow Dragon or any other vessels founder in Canada’s High Arctic, the government would activate a disaster plan that in its first phase would include the immediate dispatch of an RCAF C-130J Hercules transport equipped with tents and cold weather gear.
While he would have enjoyed being on board the Crystal Serenity as it transited the Northwest Passage, Lick joked that “I am not sure I can afford it.”
Still, the Coast Guard’s director-general of operations was hopeful that he might get to see the cruise liner from the bridge of one of Canada’s icebreakers.
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CGTN
