LOS ANGELES: The north-west passage, for centuries a forbidding and deadly challenge to explorers and adventurers, is being so transformed by global warming that it may change the face of international transport.

Scientists predict that it may be free of ice within 50 years, opening it to cruise vessels, tankers and warships. It is already being nicknamed “Panama Canal North”.

US naval officers have circulated a report arguing the case for a new type of ice-strengthened warship to patrol Arctic waters, according to the Los Angeles Times. This summer the Canadian navy sent ships north of the Arctic Circle for the first time since the cold war ended.

While the global temperature has risen 1F (about 0.6C) in the past century, the Arctic temperature has risen 1.7-2.2 degrees C. This has already had a dramatic effect on the landscape and if it continues at the current pace it may have even greater consequences.

“The image of the Arctic was always one of an ice-locked, forbidden spot,” James Delgado, director of the Vancouver Maritime Museum and the author of Across the Top of the World: The Quest for the Northwest Passage, told the Los Angeles Times.

“If we as a species have wrought this change it’s humbling, given its history as such a terror-filled place.” In summer long stretches of the North-west Passage are free of ice, making the voyage relatively simple.

Its attraction is that it would reduce the voyage from Europe to Asia by up to 8,000km and provide an inviting new route for “adventure tours.” Tourists have already begun to appear. A sailing boat from New Zealand recently traversed the route successfully.

“It’s something no one would have dreamed up for our lifetime,” said Lawson Brigham, deputy director of the US Arctic Research Commission and former captain of the US coastguard icebreaker Polar Sea, which made the passage in 1994.

Green lobbyists point to a threat to indigenous peoples. “Climate change upsets the dynamics of marine and coastal ecosystems and native cultures that depend on them,” Greenpeace said in a 1998 report, Answers from the Ice Edge.

“The consequences of global warming are affecting the subsistence way of life of Alaska’s Native people now ... Climate-caused changes in subsistence ways of life may be the greatest threat to the continued existence of indigenous cultures.”

Its study of the effect of climate change on life in the Bering and Chukchi Seas found that native peoples had been warning of the changes for years without being taken seriously.

If the North-west Passage is opened commercially it will have a significant effect on these small communities.

The Canadian Inuit territory Nunavut has just over 25,000 people in 1.9m sq km. A tr transport boom would have an unpredictable effect on them.

“It’s not just about transport, it’s about the whole development of the Arctic frontier,” said Lynn Rosentrater, a climate change officer for the WWF in Norway. “It’s going to happen, so we need to plan for it.”

Development of the passage would lead to maritime problems between the US and Canadian governments.

Other regions are watching their way of life being changed dramatically by the effects of global warming. Alaska is examining the effect on the people on the edge of the Arctic Circle.

They have seen lakes dry up, the treeline move, and subsequent alterations in the pattern of hunting. Scientists in Fairbanks, Alaska, have seen changes in the forest system and the tundra.

The global warming issue was given new urgency when President Bush said after taking office that he would not accept the Kyoto protocol setting out national targets for reducing the 1990 greenhouse gas emissions globally by 5.2 per cent by 2008-12.

The US environmental protection agency accepts that there will be changes.

“Rising global temperatures are expected to raise sea level, and change precipitation and other local climate conditions,” its website says.

“Changing regional climate could alter forests, crop yields, and water supplies. It could also affect human health, animals, and many types of ecosystems.

“Deserts may expand into existing rangelands, and features of some of our national parks may be permanently altered.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.