Revisiting the Open Polar Sea: Once Wishful Thinking Now a Likely Arctic Reality

By Alexander Paladino

At the end of the 19th Century, the U.S. Arctic Expedition set out on the USS Jeanette to test a hypothesis: is there a current that allows for passage through the Arctic? They were hoping to find a route connecting the U.S. and northern Europe/Russia through the theorized “Open Polar Sea” by the North Pole; they did not have satellite data or a full understanding of the geophysical processes at play and thought that it may be possible for ships to avoid ice and cut down on thousands of nautical miles in travel with what would be an unprecedentedly efficient trade and transportation connector. Sadly, the voyage had a rather devastating ending leading to the demise of Jeanette and its crew.  

Debris from the wreckage was found 3000 miles away from its starting point on the coast of Greenland in 1884. In a roundabout way, this allowed for greater understanding of Arctic currents and ice drifts. Using newly gathered data just a few years later, Fridtjof Nansen and his vessel Fram successfully charted the polar region by adapting the hull of the ship to deal with the ice (Beaufort Gyre Exploration Project, n.d.). Nansen's innovation based on the Jeanette crew's failure was monumentally important as it showed that travel through the Arctic is possible. The shape of the hull is used in many ice-breaker vessels today. Even still, the cost and speed of sailing through the unforgiving Arctic ice means this technology has little utility outside of research.

For better or for worse— or I guess it is evidently for worse— human-induced climate change has completely upended the situation of Arctic sea ice.  To understand the implications of these changes, it is important to understand the differences in ice types, at least as discussed scientifically. The first distinction is between sea ice and continental ice. Sea ice is formed by the freezing of open ocean water and therefore does not contribute to changes in the overall water budget or sea level rise. In contrast, continental ice found on Greenland, Antarctica, etc. goes right down to the bedrock and it is this type of ice melting that will impact coastal communities across the globe. Within each category of sea ice in the Arctic there are also distinctions between First Year Ice, Perennial Ice, and Multi-Year/Permanent Ice(Parkinson & Comiso, 2013). These categories describe how long ice remains across annual melt seasons: first year ice melts each spring/summer and then reforms, perennial ice sticks around through one or two winters before melting, and multiyear ice remains as permanent floating fixtures in the Ocean.  

Since 1979, when NOAA and others began tracking these forms of ice, there has been noticeable and dramatic decreases in both perennial and multi-year ice with patterns of -12% and -17% per decade respectively (Stroeve et al., 2014). Declines in these categories will lead to significant changes in the Arctic ecology and landscape. The drastic melting of more permanent bodies of ice, means that eventually, there will only be first year ice in the Arctic. This ice, which only forms and stays in the winter, will create an open, ice-less ocean environment in the summer.  A 2016 research letter published by the AGU analyzed dozens of models predicting the loss of permanent ice cover and concluded that the average estimate for fully ice-free summers in the Arctic was 2060 ∓20 years.(Jahn et al., 2016)

With these open water summers on a deceptively close horizon, it has become a critical exercise for many governments and industries to examine the damage control that needs to be done as a result of major ecological shifts. At the same time, countries also need to consider the potential new resource and transportation opportunities that a warming Arctic will create. The USGS estimates that up to 22% of the world’s oil and gas reserves are locked up in the Arctic.(Osborn, 2017). While extraction of these reserves would likely exacerbate climate change, the geopolitical and business incentives will create intense competition for access to this resource-rich area. This has become a frequent topic of discussion at annual meetings of the Arctic Council—an intergovernmental organization founded in 1996  composed of the eight countries which border the region: Canada, US, Russia, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, and Denmark. Whether we are capitalizing on or curbing increased activity in the Arctic, this will only become more of a prescient issue for the United States and global community at large to deal with—and has already become a research focus of the Departments of Defense and Energy. What nearly 150 years ago was a mythologized theory that had fatal consequences for its fervent dreamers- the Open Polar Sea- is now becoming a very real and consequential problem.