A shortcut through the Arctic?

The increasing use of this hitherto rather neglected route offers numerous opportunities for commercial shipping. Known internationally as the Northern Sea Route, the passage is believed to be the shortest maritime link between the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean. The advantages of the Northeast Passage are obvious: Compared to the Suez Canal route, the distance between China and the major ports of northern Europe is about 40% shorter. It is also as much as 60% shorter than the route around the African Cape Horn, which is now being used regularly since the Houthi attacks on merchant shipping in the Red Sea. It makes an enormous difference whether you have to travel 21,000 km via the now “closed” Suze Canal route to get from Shanghai to Hamburg or take a 15,000 km shortcut through the Arctic. The savings in time, fuel and emissions are huge, which is especially important in these times of fierce competition between shipping companies. As an added bonus, this route allows ships to avoid areas notorious for piracy.

Many advantages, one major disadvantage

The reason why this route is still used by a relatively small number of ships – before the Red Sea crisis, more ships passed through the Suez Canal every day than through the Barents Sea to Bering Strait route in one year – is quite simple: The passage is icebound for more than half of the year and can only be navigated during a short window from early July to late November. Even during this short period of time, the route is complicated. In addition, Russia charges a transit fee and, in difficult ice conditions, icebreakers have to be used to clear a passage. This creates additional costs. Furthermore, following the Russian attack on Ukraine, major shipping lines preferred not to choose routes through Russian national waters.

Even without these concerns, rapid meteorological changes, sudden ice formations, and wandering icebergs can cause significant problems. In addition, the infrastructure of Russia’s northern ports has been in poor condition since the collapse of the Soviet Union, so emergencies can quickly become critical.

Is the icebreaker about to become obsolete?

This short time window during which transit is possible will grow wider in the coming decades due to global warming. Anthropogenic climate change is also more pronounced in the Arctic regions than in other regions of the world. The size and thickness of the Arctic ice cover has decreased substantially in in recent decades. The Northeast Passage and the North American Northwest Passage were simultaneously ice-free for the first time on August 29, 2008. Since then, the ice cover has been steadily receding year by year. A research expedition undertaken by a Chinese icebreaker from the Pacific to the North Atlantic in August 2012, for example, encountered far less ice than expected, so a more direct and thus shorter route closer to the North Pole could be used for the return journey. According to researchers, the Northeast Passage might be completely ice-free during the summer months as early as the 2050s.

Pioneering achievements in hostile environments

From a historical perspective, these climatic changes are highly unexpected, as this part of the world was always viewed as a hostile environment and its development as an outstanding pioneering achievement. As early as the 12th century, the Pomors, Russian settlers, advanced along the coast towards eastern Siberia. Over the course of time, however, this venture was abandoned midway. The 16th and 17th centuries saw a number of attempts by the Dutch, English, Swedes and Danes to find an alternative sea route to Asia – all of them unsuccessful. It was not until 1878/79 that the Swedish explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld managed to break through from the west to the east with a converted sailing ship, the SS Vega. It would not be strictly accurate to call this an actual transit, however, as the Vega was blocked by ice and trapped in the Bering Strait for ten months. The first successful one-season transit was not achieved until 1932, by the Soviet icebreaker Aleksandr Sibirjakow. The passage was finally opened to international shipping during the summer months in 1967 and was subsequently kept clear for shipping by nuclear-powered icebreakers (331 transits were recorded as late as 1987), before the dissolution of the USSR led to a severe decline in shipping traffic along the Northeast Passage.

Global warming opens up the way for commercial use

In September 2018, the Venta Maersk traversed the Northeast Passage in 37 days. It was the first container ship of this size to do so, apart from specially built liquid gas tankers and bulk carriers. As a large feeder ship built to ice class 1A (it can cope with ice of up to one meter thickness), it is specially designed with a reinforced hull for use in cold waters (to minus 25 degrees Celsius). There is, however, not much likelihood of gigantic 40,000 TEU container ships embarking along this route in the near future, as the maiden voyage of the Venta Maersk revealed a major drawback: With a draft of only 11 meters, some sections of the shipping lane are simply too shallow for large container ships. The Venta Maersk normally has a slot capacity of just under 3,500 TEU, but the shallow waters meant that it could only carry 600 reefer containers. Ultra-large container ships are not built to ice-class standards and are hampered by further disadvantages such as length, so the Northeast Passage will never be able to compete with the Suez Route in terms of volume.

Chinese ships take the shortcut to avoid Red Sea

In a new attempt that took place recently, two Chinese container ships set course for the Arctic to reach their destinations in Europe, avoiding the troubled waters in the Gulf of Aden. The Xin Xin Hai 1 left the port of Taicang in July, followed one week later by her sister ship, the Xin Xin Hai 2, which departed from Xingang (both near Shanghai). The two vessels can carry up to 1,220 TEUs and were bound for Arkhangelsk in northern Russia, with St. Petersburg as their final destination. It is unclear how many containers each vessel was carrying.
While parts of the route are already free of sea ice for the summer, the Xin Xin Hai 1 had to tackle more challenging conditions in the East Siberian Sea and had to be escorted by the nuclear icebreaker “Sibir”.

Russia’s attack on Ukraine has had an impact

Although it doesn’t look like it now, the global economy sees many potential benefits from a shorter supply route to its European and Asian production sites and sales markets. The passage through the Arctic Ocean could one day become a decisive factor in a fierce price war between the major shipping companies. So far, the number of passages has dropped to only seven in 2023, following Russia’s war-related isolation. Nonetheless, there are industry rumors that China, with its state-owned shipping company COSCO, still has its sights set on becoming the top dog on this route.

Environmentalists, however, are already sounding the alarm about the dangers of increasing traffic. They fear that it will have a lasting negative impact on the Arctic’s extremely fragile ecosystem. And the more ships there are on this route, the greater the risk of serious accidents in the region, which is rich in natural resources. But who knows, in the best-case scenario, global efforts to combat global warming will put an end to these plans before then.