LONDON: The fabled north-west passage — the shortest sea link between Europe and east Asia, across the Arctic ocean — could be open for business this century. It would cut 11,000 kilometres off the Europe to Asia route through the Panama canal, and 19,000kms off the route supertankers must take around Cape Horn, according to the US journal, ‘Science’.

The thinning Arctic ice could open the way for the exploitation of an estimated 130bn barrels of oil. But the retreat of the ice also poses a threat to polar bears, walruses and the peoples who live within the Arctic circle.

Gradual warming of the permafrost over recent decades already poses a threat to cities in Siberia as the ground softens. According to one Russian scientist, a warming of only 0.075 degrees Celsius a year could by 2030 bring down all the five storey structures built in Yakutsk — a town of 190,000 people — between 1950 and 1990. This is because of their weight, and the unyielding brick and concrete specified in Soviet building programmes.

In 1999, research on measurements taken by nuclear submarines confirmed that Arctic sea ice had thinned by 43 per cent in the previous 40 years. Climate scientists looking ahead to 2050 have projected an Arctic ocean clear of almost all ice in the summer months.

The first ship to sail the north-west passage along the north Canadian coast was a tiny cutter skippered by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen in 1906. The voyage took three years. The first deep draught ship to make the journey did so only in 1954. The north-east passage from Europe to Asia, around Scandinavia and along the Siberian coast, has required help from icebreakers.

But the US Arctic research commission has predicted that within a decade both the north-west passage and a northern sea route skirting the pole itself could be open for at least a month in the summer. A conservative estimate has both routes open in summer by 2050.

Other researchers are more worried about the polar environment. Algae that live on the bottom of the ice, to provide food ultimately for Arctic cod and gray whales, could vanish with the sea ice. Walruses use the ice as a resting place while diving to feed on clams and crabs.

The Arctic’s 22,000 polar bears use the ice to gorge on the blubber of seals. Once stranded on land, they tend to fast. In the 1990s, ice in Hudson bay melted earlier in the spring and formed later each autumn. For every week that the ice broke up earlier, bears came ashore 10kg lighter, according to the Canadian wildlife service.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.