Searching for Leads in the Opening

Arctic
Disappearing ice, Russias newest land
grab, and a new great game at the top of
the world. An FP special report.

BY KEITH JOHNSON- SEPTEMBER 14, 2015

ABOARD THE COAST GUARD CUTTER HEALY, IN THE ARCTIC

When you plow into a 4-foot-thick chunk of sea ice at 3 knots, even in a 16,000-ton state-ofthe-art icebreaker like the U.S. Coast Guard cutterHealy, its hard not to notice. The whole ship
shudders and seems to lurch sideways. Metal cabinets rattle. Californians swear it sounds and
feels just like an earthquake, with deep rumbling booms and tremors. Others say its like hitting
turbulence on a jetliner, the shivering and rattling accompanied by the overdrive whine of
30,000 horsepower. If youre down in the galley, right on the waterline, what you hear is the
nerve-wracking scraping of shattered ice along the side. Five stories up, on top of the bridge,
you feel the bump of the collision over the strain of the engines pushing the ship through a sea

of drifting white, blue, and dirty gray ice.

Thats when there is ice. But thanks to rising global temperatures, especially acute in the Arctic,
theres less of it now than there used to be. And that creates its own problems for a ship that
seeks out the stuff.
I just wish there was more ice. Itd be good training for this crew, said Chief Warrant Officer
Tim Tugboat Tully, the Healys bosun. The 85-person crew could use it. This month, they
attempted something the ship had never done before: smashing through solid ice to the North
Pole itself, unaccompanied by any other vessels. The July trip would have been an ideal time to
get the crew used to plowing through some heavy stuff, but the ice was patchy much of the trip.
We steamed north through the Bering Strait, passed the Diomede Islands, and got near the
northwest tip of Alaska before we spotted our first chunks of ice in mid-July. Ten years ago,
this was heavy going, the bosun said.
The Arctic is melting. Summer sea ice that used to cover the Chukchi Sea and the Bering Strait
isnt there, where it used to be. Summer ice coverage in the Arctic hit a record low in 2012; this
past March, it registered an all-time winter low. As the ice recedes, something new is popping
up in its place: oil rigs and commercial ships. Whatever the debate about climate change looks
like in Washington, its sadly clear up here. At least for part of the year, thanks to rising
temperatures, a once-closed ocean is now open for business.
That doesnt mean its always easy sailing.
Less ice is more ice, the Alaskan natives say: As ice melts, it opens things up just enough to get
you into trouble. Thats as true for native whalers and seal hunters as it is for specialized
drilling rigs that are starting to head north for a few months each year. Polar seas are not like
other oceans. You need a survival suit just to work on deck, even in the summertime. Man
overboard drills in freezing water have a uniquely sickening undertone; the ships pipes
intonation Man has been in water for six minutes becomes a virtual epitaph. Communications
and navigation equipment that works fine at other latitudes doesnt near the pole. And, even if
theres less ice than there used to be, theres still plenty of it bobbing and knocking and
crashing around; what sank the Titanic is constantly looming out of the fog, posing a mortal
danger to ships that arent ice-hardened.
Everybody thinks you can do up here what you can do in the Lower 48, and its just not so.
Its a whole different environment, says Capt. Jason Hamilton, 44, a 22-year Coast Guard
veteran who just took over command of the Healy, one of two operational icebreakers the
United States has. The other, the heavy icebreaker Polar Star, operates in Antarctica.
As the Arctic melts, it is birthing a new global battleground, with huge economic,
environmental, and geopolitical implications for the United States. Oil companies are moving
north, even though cheap crude makes pricey Arctic drilling a tough sell for now. Shipping
companies are eagerly eying a fresh northern route that can trim thousands of miles off voyages
between Asia and Europe. Russia, which has a fleet of six nuclear-powered heavy icebreakers,
with 11 more planned or under construction, is revamping scores of Cold War-era military
bases inside the Arctic Circle. Moscow, eight years after planting a symbolic flag on the seabed

at the North Pole, just handed the United Nations an expansive claim to almost half a million
square miles of Arctic seabed potentially rich in oil, natural gas, and minerals. The United
States would be hard-pressed to make a similar claim, since it has never ratified the Law of the
Sea treaty, which codifies international maritime law. And China, which isnt even an Arctic
nation, is busy dipping its toe into the icy waters launching its very own icebreaker,
currently building a second, and for the first time sending navy ships into Alaskan waters.
As this new Great Game gets underway, the United States has in hand only the Healy, 420 feet
of red and white steel designed in the early 1990s and launched in 1997. In commission with
the Coast Guard for 15 years, the ship shows its wear at times, as bits of rust poke through
peeling white paint. Although its unarmed, a tiny arsenal is secured below decks in the bow,
not far from the always-tilted foosball table. Like on any large ship, life aboard the Healy is a
life spent clambering up and down ladder-like stairwells. Six stories separate the lofty bridge
from the galley, where the whole crew musters three times a day for surprisingly good chow.
Below that, theres a fully functional gym and an industrial-sized laundry, complete with an old
Galaga video game to wait out the big, tumbling dryers. (Captain Hamilton lugs his own meshbagged laundry down there himself; everyone, including the captain, has to sweep the dryers
lint traps after every load or risk a deadly onboard fire.) As the Healy makes clear three times a
summer, theres no operating in the Arctic without icebreakers, even now. But new icebreakers
cost a billion dollars apiece and a decade to make. No replacements are being built in U.S.
shipyards, and the already overhauled Polar Star is overdue for retirement.
Is this next decade or so the worst possible time to be caught short-handed in terms of your
capabilities? I ask Hamilton. Were in his stateroom, watched by the steely canvas glare of the
ships namesake, Hell Roaring Mike Healy, who first prowled these waters more than a
century ago in a wooden-hulled boat. The captain, a lawyer by training, short in stature,
deadpan by disposition, and dedicated to breaking ice, sours his face at the question like he has
bitten something gone bad.
This is a whole-of-government problem, and its time to build one. He pauses. Theres some
exposure, he says, meaning there may not be enough icebreakers to do everything the U.S.
national security community wants or needs to do. At a minimum, government studies say, the
United States needs three heavy icebreakers available to slam their way into Antarctic research
stations every year and three others to carve their way through the frozen north. The country
has one-third of that.
Still, Hamilton maintains that the Coast Guard whose motto is Semper Paratus (Always
Ready) can do the job with what it has at hand. We can meet the minimum essentials with
the vessels we have, he says, because the Arctic summer, when the ice melts and the ocean
opens up to traffic, is the Antarctic winter, when there are no operations, and vice versa. But
that puts us in a precarious situation and our risk is much higher than it should be, because what
happens if one of the vessels goes down when the other is in a prolonged maintenance period?
That has happened to the Healy before. At Christmastime in 2002, while in its home port of
Seattle while being overhauled after its summer cruise in the Arctic, the ship had to hurry up

repairs and crisscross the globe to bail out the now-mothballed Polar Sea, which snapped off a
propeller blade on a piece of ice during its Antarctic mission. Then it had to hurry back north
and make another summer cruise with little time for maintenance. At other times, U.S.
icebreakers in trouble could call on the Russian fleet for help, as the Polar Star did during its
break-in to Antarctica in 2005. But turning to Russia for help these days isnt such an obvious
alternative.
Russia, geopolitically, has potentially changed the landscape, Hamilton acknowledges.

To get on board the Healy requires a cross-country trip, through Seattle, through Anchorage,
and finally into the small town of Nome, Alaska, the biggest city on the Seward Peninsula,
that chunk of land that juts westward off Alaska and forms the narrows of the Bering Strait.
Nome has few comforts and few causes for fame it is the finish line for the 1,000-mile
Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race and boasts Alaskas oldest newspaper but it does have the closest
thing to a port in this part of Alaska. And thats where 50-odd scientists, together lugging gear
for a score of projects, said goodbye to beer and cell-phone coverage, clambered into their
Mustang survival suits, and pulled themselves up a swaying Jacobs ladder on board
the Healy itself.
We sailed straight out of Nome in early July, heading north through the Bering Strait. The goal
was to skirt Shells drilling prospects off the northwest tip of Alaska before rounding the top of
the state for a search-and-rescue exercise off Prudhoe Bay. Then the Healy was hoping to swing
north to the very top of Americas exclusive economic zone, a 200-mile-wide offshore belt that
holds most of whatever resources are up there, before heading back to Alaska in late July to get
ready for the really arduous polar push in September.

These are the kinds of cruises that the Healy does three times or so every summer. Until a few
years ago, the Arctic was the preserve of ice-bound scientists and the kind of people who track
polar bear migrations. These days, with rising temperatures just hammering Arctic ice sheets,
the region is getting a whole lot more visitors. Depending on whom you talk to, the melting
Arctic is sparking angst (walruses are beaching by the thousands as their floes disappear),
brow-furrowing concern (forget the missile gap now theres an icebreaker gap with the
Russians), hand-rubbing opportunity (Shell has dropped $7 billion so far just preparing to look
for oil off the Alaskan coast), or a little bit of everything all at once.
The most recent and certainly highest-profile visitor was U.S. President Barack Obama, who
jetted in for an Arctic conference in Alaska in late August and pledged to bolster Americas
status as an Arctic power. He announced plans to acquire at long last a replacement heavy
icebreaker by 2020, something that Coast Guard leaders have spent years clamoring for. But
the administration hasnt yet found the money needed to design and build a new heavy.
The Healy, Americas newest icebreaker, took exactly a decade from funding to
commissioning. Citing Russias 40-strong icebreaking fleet, Obama also called for the
construction of additional icebreakers to give the United States the physical ability to play in
this new space, as well as all sorts of other goodies, from extensive charting of polar seas to the
construction of a deepwater port in Nome, which will make operating that far north less of a
crapshoot.
Obama called on Congress to find the money for the icebreakers, something that has proved
elusive over the past decade. Even if the funds are available, it will be extremely difficult to
design and build a replacement heavy in five years.
While some Arctic observers chafe at what they see as an obsession with icebreakers,
especially comparing the tiny U.S. fleet with Russias dozens, Americas top Arctic official says
the country needs more and welcomes the presidents announcement.
Our country is bipolar: We have these Arctic responsibilities, and we have to break into
Antarctica to resupply every year, said retired Adm. Robert Papp, the U.S. special envoy for
the Arctic and a former commandant of the Coast Guard.Icebreakers are needed, and theyre a
vital asset for the United States, and how theyre paid for should be a national issue.
The actual opening of the Arctic is due to melting ice. The amount of sea ice covering the
Arctic varies from winter to summer and year to year. Every fall, ice gradually forms until, by
March, thick ice covers the whole northern sea and reaches far down Alaskas western coast.
Then it begins a steady retreat until September, though the ice is still solid north of 80 degrees
latitude even in those warm months. During those six months, the Arctic sheds half its ice
cover. The problem is theres generally less and less of it to shed.
Earlier this year, 2015 was on track to set a new record for summer low ice coverage. Then it
stopped retreating quite so fast; wind, waves, currents, and pressure patterns can change ice
forecasts from one day to another and make what looks like smooth sailing suddenly bumpy.
Even so, June marked the third-worst year of the satellite record. By August, as the Healy was
steaming north toward the pole, the melting accelerated again and the oceans were opening up

at a near-record pace.
Hamilton has been south to Antarctica on the nausea-inducing polar rollers and up to 80
degrees north as an engineering officer, as an executive officer, and now as a commander. In
general Ive seen much more open water not this summer, but the last time I was up here
than anticipated, he said. But this summer too: At the northernmost part of the first summer
cruise, in mid-July, the Healy hoped to find some big expanses of thick, multiyear ice on which
to drop the gangplank and give the crew and the scientists aboard a chance to clamber out. We
couldnt find any. (They couldnt find any on the next cruise either, until they were practically
at the North Pole.)

Early in the Healys cruise, we sailed north by northeast off the Alaskan coast, straight toward
the Burger prospect, where Shells leases are. Hamilton was on the bridge, paper coffee cup in
hand, when he spotted a number of vessels ahead on the navigational computer. He fiddled with
the mouse to check their distance, and an officer on the bridge noted that they were private
vessels. Oil industry, Hamilton said. Theyre the only ones up here.
The U.S. Arctic is finally, after years of official foot-dragging and industry false starts, open for
oil exploration. The Arctic is estimated to hold 90 billion barrels of oil, or about 13 percent of
the worlds total, plus 30 percent of its conventional reserves of natural gas. Shell won final
permission from the Obama administration this year eight years after the Anglo-Dutch
company first sank billions of dollars into offshore leases to drill some exploratory wells in
a promising area about 60 miles off Wainwright, Alaska, in the shallow waters of the Chukchi
Sea.
Unfortunately for Shell, the timing isnt great. Oil prices have plummeted over the past year, to
about $50 a barrel. Thats too cheap to make Arctic exploration a paying prospect anytime
soon; drilling for oil in the Arctic is a lot more expensive than drilling for it in Texas.
So why is Shell even up the Arctic? In part, because there could be a mother lode of oil under

those icy waters, and big oil finds are harder and harder for energy firms to get their hands on.
But Shell is also in Alaska simply because now, for the first time, it can be. As the company
noted in exploration plans filed this year with federal regulators, the central Chukchi Sea,
where its leases are, now has an extra four weeks of ice-free time each year, compared with
three decades ago. An extra month is a make-or-break difference when the drilling season only
lasts from July through October.
The Arctic is going to open, and there will be activity up there, and I think we need to be
better prepared for it than we are today, retired Adm. Gary Roughead, who stepped down as
chief of naval operations for the U.S. Navy in 2011, told me. He was expressing a sentiment
held across the Navy and Coast Guard worlds, and in Alaskan political circles, but that finds
little resonance in the rest of the United States, which struggles to see itself as a truly Arctic
nation.
But what does that increased activity really look like? Its inhospitably cold and inaccessible
much of the year, and even at the height of summer it can be squally with windchills in the
teens. The U.S. Arctic has a screaming dearth of the kinds of everyday infrastructure taken for
granted most everywhere else; there are few power plants, roads, air bases, deepwater ports, or
broadband Internet connections, for instance. Nome has to get its diesel fuel for power and heat
shipped in by sea; indeed, one of the Healysproudest moments was helping to deliver
emergency fuel supplies to a suddenly ice-blocked Nome three years ago.
But though the Arctic may lack roads, rails, and ports, there is oil lots of it. And though
Shell is placing a bet on Alaskan waters, much of those resources are concentrated in the
Russian Arctic. That explains not just the feverish race by companies like Gazprom and
Rosneft to try to tap that mother lode in Russian coastal waters with or without Western help
but also extensive Russian territorial claims laying title to seemingly everything else.
Russian energy firms lack Western expertise and Western environmental standards, but
President Vladimir Putin is determined to turn Arctic riches into his regimes economic engine,
possible environmental consequences be damned.
Its not about political power or international law its a question for humankind. We cant
allow a barbarian country to do things in the Arctic without international control, said
Alexander Temerko, a former deputy chairman of Russian energy firm Yukos and a veteran of
Putins energy-industrial complex.
Theres a reason for that: An oil spill at the top of the world would be potentially catastrophic,
one reason environmentalists are apoplectic at the U.S. administrations decision to let Shell
proceed. Icy water is harder to operate in and less suitable for containment booms used to
corral spills. Squally weather and heavy seas can make oil recovery a lot tougher than in more
placid waters, like the Gulf of Mexico. Any prolonged blowout could seriously threaten the
walruses, seals, whales, and polar bears that feed many of Alaskas native communities and
could devastate Alaskan fisheries as well.
Everyone remembers the catastrophic explosion at the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon offshore

drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, which set off a three-month gusher of flowing oil
and wringing hands. But in the Gulf, where most of the U.S. offshore oil industry is
concentrated, there are airfields and ports and Coast Guard stations and pre-positioned oil-spill
equipment and always-on-call spill-response teams. In the Arctic, theres not. Kodiak, Alaska,
the closest Coast Guard air station, is 1,000 miles from Shells drilling area.
The Coast Guard, federal regulators, and Shell are trying to make sure oil drilling can be done
safely. Shell has to keep a second drilling rig at the ready, after it had a failure a couple of years
ago while drilling with just a single rig. The Healy itself carried out, in mid-July, a search-andrescue exercise off Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, which involved a civilian ScanEagle drone, a Coast
Guard helicopter, and another chopper operated by oil company ConocoPhillips.
The likely increase in oil exploration is one reason that recent Healymissions, which always
support a suite of scientists doing research, have focused on oil-spill responses and related
technologies. This summer, for instance, a team from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks,
tested out a device that can sniff the isotopes in the air for up to 10 miles in front of the ship.
Once the system is operational and placed on a buoy, that kind of technology could help detect
oil spills and fuel leaks long before theyre apparent. Other science projects included testing the
ability of a small, hand-launched drone to fly itself back to the ship and land in a net; that
would save small-boat crews the trouble and risk of having to get into icy waters to recover
drones themselves. And, of course, there were plenty of science projects meant to help detect
ice itself, from wave gliders to huge, lightweight balloons that can give the bridge a birds eye
view of what lies ahead.

Most ships seek to avoid ice. Ships like the Healy steam straight for it. About one-third of the
crew members at any given time are newbies, new to the ship and new to polar missions. Like
the scientists on board, they too clamber to the rails to get a glimpse of their first pack ice. The
veterans seem more concerned with getting a chance to check the satellite Internet for the fate
of their favorite teams, mostly the Mariners and the Seahawks for this Seattle-ported ship.
Captain Hamilton himself managed to find 15 minutes in an insanely crowded day to walk me

through the sabermetric arguments for why the Mariners ace pitcher, Felix Hernandez, is
actually underrated.
It takes a different breed to seek out exactly the kind of floating hazards that can drive a hole
through a steel hull or trap a ship in the vise-like grip of tons of ice, forcing it to spend the
whole, dark winter nipped between floes. Even with all of todays technology, from double
hulls to massive diesel-electric engines to satellite communications, it can still happen.
The Polar Sea got nipped for five days in the Arctic in 1984 and was hunkering down to winter
over when it finally broke free.
The Healy itself got trapped for 93 hours off Barrow, Alaska, in the summer of 2005 and only
got free thanks to high-velocity fire hoses and a lucky shift in the wind. Later that year,
theHealy teamed up with a Swedish icebreaker to make a dash for the North Pole. (This is not
a trip that should be made alone, the mission report concluded, though the ship shrugged off
such concern for this years polar dash.)
Sailors have their own vocabulary; icebreaking sailors are a lexical frontier apart. Words like
polynya, sastrugi, frazil, dark nilas, and ice blink get sprinkled into their
conversations as they peer ahead at ever-shifting chunks of ice, trying to plot a course that
wont get them trapped. And there are different kinds of icebreaking. The huge, heavy Polarclass ships just ride up on top of ice and crush floes with their weight. The Healy, technically a
medium icebreaker, can do that too, but it also has a sharp knife under its bow that it uses to
shear through obstacles. What makes Arctic ice trickier than the thicker stuff in Antarctica, says
Master Chief Matt Lasley, the ice navigator, is the constant drift that can slam massive sheets of
sea ice into each other at huge pressure. And ice that has been around for a couple of years is
harder than steel.
You can hit like a solid wall and be like, Man, were not getting through this; were going to
have to find something else, he says. Lasley has driven through ice north and south, on
both Polar-class ships and one trip on what passes for Britains icebreaker, RRS Ernest
Shackleton. He keeps a copy of the Ten Rules of Icebreaking on the desk in his berth. (Rule
No. 3: Be patient.)
The key is to know how to read the ice, how to see the ice, he says. Thats just what Lasley
tries to teach some of the officers and crew members at an ice-piloting training course one
afternoon in the wardroom, where he stresses the need to find a delicate balance between safety
and risk. At all times, Hamilton keeps one eye on the lesson and one on the flat-screen
television, showing the view from the birds eye aloft con, from where the ship is steered when
going through heavy stuff. Hamilton clambers up to the aloft con himself as often as he can:
Whats the point if you cant grab the stick every once in a while? he asks with a devilish
gleam in his eye.
He interrupts the ice-training course to stress the fundamental lesson hed made to me earlier:
Icebreakers need to find the path of least resistance, but the clock is also always ticking,
whether its on a mission to reach the North Pole or plow a supply channel for U.S. scientists at
McMurdo Station in Antarctica. That constant pressure to break through the ice before winter

closes in puts everyone on the ship under strain.

You have a month-and-a-half, two-month period of time to do that break-in. Otherwise it gets
dark. And you dont want to be down there when its starting to get dark, Hamilton says of his
southern cruises.
The U.S. icebreaking community is small and tightknit, a world within a world. They ride ships
with red hulls and wear red hats and hoodies, signs of their polar initiation. It took Capt. Greg
Stanclik, the Healys executive officer, 10 years to land his first icebreaking gig. Extremely tall
and baldheaded, he towers over everyone else on the ship and seems to be constantly ducking
overhead pipes and mortal-sized doorways. He has never looked back, though his next
assignment, ruefully, is behind a desk: He handed the Healy over to a new executive officer
after that first summer cruise.
Its an amazing experience: You are bashing your ship against things that everyone else tries to
avoid, he says. He has more ice experience than any other officer on the bridge, but the
adventure never gets old. We are on a ship that has the capability to go to the North Pole, and I
am going to brag about that for the rest of my life, he says.
But theres a flip side to that top-of-the-world adventurism, especially for the thin ranks of
American icebreakers. If youre on any other Coast Guard ship and you break down, you look
over your shoulder and theres someone backing you up. You come here youre it, says
Stanclik.
That sense of isolation was brought home in the most mundane possible way during
the Healys cruise. The dishwasher broke a few days out of Nome, no small matter for a galley
that has to serve 500 meals a day. There was a small supply of paper plates and cups, but not
enough to last the rest of the trip. Thats when Ron Adrezin, a professor of mechanical
engineering at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, stepped up. He used a 3-D printer, carried on
board for loftier scientific purposes, to craft a replacement part for the dishwasher. Eventually,
it worked; he was later given a formal letter of appreciation for vital services performed. And
that got him thinking about more than just dishwashers.
What if you had a 3-D printer on every trip and could just bring the files with the blueprints,
rather than trying to carry all the possible spare parts you would need on board? Adrezin
wondered.

Scientists and academics like Adrezin are the reason the Healy exists. There were teams on
board from universities in Alaska, from private drone outfits, and from the National GeospatialIntelligence Agency. For the United States, polar missions are all about research, whether thats
checking the health of the oceans or pulling out ice cores or sniffing whats inside the Arctic air.
And thats true for the year-round stations in Antarctica and for the massive floating lab that is
the Healy.
Yeah, were going to the North Pole but its not just to go to the North Pole. Its to
complete a science mission where we learn about the health of the oceans, says Captain
Hamilton. You cant pick up a newspaper now without somebody talking about climate
change, or typing an email home to my wife whos talking about how its the seventh day in a
row that its 90-something degrees in Seattle in June. Our hope is that were able to help with
understanding, because you have to understand before you can do anything.
But for other nations, notably Russia, the Arctic is about a whole lot more than science projects.
For Russia, whose entire northern coastline is inside the Arctic Circle, the region represents a
potential shield, a flash point for conflict, and a potential treasure trove of oil, gas, and other
riches. Little wonder that since returning to power, Putin has made revitalizing the Arctic one
of his top priorities, throwing billions of dollars into energy projects, reopening some 50
Soviet-era Arctic military bases, and conducting there the largest military exercises since the
Soviet Unions demise. At the end of August, after announcing even more Russian air and naval
forces for the region, Russian generals declared they would have a self-sufficient Arctic
command set up by 2018.
As the Center for Strategic and International Studies just noted in The New Ice Curtain, a
study on Russias Arctic ambitions, Russias deputy prime minister and point man for the
Arctic, Dmitry Rogozin, has led the rhetorical charge. He has spooked foreign observers by
describing the Arctic as Russias Mecca and insisting on Russian presence in the region
regardless of Western sanctions and efforts at isolation. Tanks do not need visas, he has said.

Russia views itself as the Arctic superpower, as the Kremlin is increasingly willing to use the
Arctic to demonstrate Russias return to power on the global stage and in the region, the CSIS
study concluded.
The problem is less due to the military buildup than the buildup of rhetoric, said Papp, the
U.S. Arctic envoy. President Putin and his associates, their rhetoric about how important the
Arctic is to them and their need to defend it is not useful to the type of cooperative efforts we
would like to do within the Arctic.
Russias decision to make the Arctic the fulcrum of its bid to revitalize its economy and armed
forces both especially important now in the wake of Russian isolation after the annexation
of Crimea means that U.S. policymakers must confront a new space for geopolitical
competition (and possibly cooperation) where the United States has seldom operated and where
it has few good tools to do so even today.To paraphrase Leon Trotsky in a different context:
You may not be interested in the Arctic, but the Arctic is interested in you. Economic,
environmental, and geopolitical strains promise to move a once-peripheral region ever closer to
the center of discussion, as difficult as it is for the United States to truly see itself as an Arctic
nation.
The problem comes down to being able to convince leadership, both in the executive branch
and the legislative branch, that we need an investment strategy for how to build the place out,
said Roughead, who as Navy chief started a task force dedicated to climate change and
published the Navys first Arctic road map, plotting out future operations in what amounts to a
whole new ocean.
After years of Coast Guard and Navy officials crying in the wilderness, that calculus may
finally be changing. In Alaska, Obama underscored the need for new ships and ports to realize
Americas Arctic ambitions, though it isnt clear where the money or ships will come from in
the short time frame the president laid out.
Its welcome news but little immediate consolation for the Healy, still smashing its lonely way
home. With ice thinner than expected all the way up, the Healy reached the North Pole on Sept.
5, exactly a week ahead of schedule, making it the first U.S. surface vessel to ever smash its
way up there alone. Now, it has to make it back home. Still charting the course and watching
for ever-shifting leads is Master Chief Lasley, pitting the Healyshardened hull and shearing
blade against seasoned ice that can be as hard as steel. He has read all the stories of icebound
ships, forced to winter over after losing their battle with nature; he did get briefly trapped once
in Antarctica on the Shackleton. Its the one part of the polar experience he doesnt envy.
When a hard object meets a hard object, somethings gotta give, so you gotta have a place for
that ice to break off and get out of your way, he says. You force yourself in there, youre
stuck.
Photo credits: KEITH JOHNSON and U.S. COAST GUARD
Posted by Thavam