Recreational and passenger traffic. The 500 vessel transits through the Bering Strait in the summer of 2015 were a record, but the majority of these transits weren’t large cargo vessels. Many were adventure cruises to Alaska’s Arctic, on vessels departing from Nome Harbor. For the 2016 season, a U.S.-flagged cruise operator plans a transit of the Northwest Passage, from Anchorage to New York, with an 820-foot, 1,000-passenger cruise ship.

 

The Challenges

The thought of 1,000 passengers sailing in Arctic waters is an unsettling one for Zukunft. “I cannot say with absolute conviction,” he said, “that we are a Coast Guard that is Semper Paratus [Always Ready] for a mass rescue in the Arctic domain.”

Despite the fact that the Coast Guard has been leading the way in the U.S. Arctic for a century and a half, it faces several significant obstacles in adapting to the current pace of change. One is simply a lack of domain awareness: Less than 5 percent of the Arctic, Zukunft said, has been charted to 21st century standards.

The Coast Guard’s ice breaking capacity is another shortcoming. Given the unpredictable behavior of polar sea ice, an icebreaker is the only type of cutter that can guarantee access, and the United States is down to two working icebreakers. The Russian Federation has 41 and is actively building more.

Lawson Brigham, Ph.D., a professor of geography and Arctic policy at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, serves on the hydrographic services review panel that offers NOAA advice for improving ocean and coastal navigation information and services. He believes the lack of reliable charts is the “No. 1 missing piece” for making progress in the Arctic, the key to developing infrastructure such as ports and safe shipping lanes. “If you don’t have charts in the marine world,” he said, “you don’t have anything.” Brigham – a retired Coast Guard officer who commanded four cutters, including the icebreaker Polar Sea – said the government needs to step up the charting process, largely undertaken now by icebreaker Healy’s seasonal effort to map the extended continental shelf with its sophisticated multi-beam sonar. “What’s necessary is more of the routine hydrographic work that is done in places like Charleston Harbor [South Carolina], Los Angeles and New York,” he said. “That needs to be applied to the frontier area of Alaska.”

The other significant obstacle is a lack of resources and infrastructure for the Coast Guard’s 17th (Alaska) District, whose area of responsibility doubles in size every summer. There are few roads or piers in the Arctic, no air stations, and no deepwater port. Barrow is a 940-mile flight from the nearest Coast Guard Air Station, on Kodiak Island; a large cutter must travel for a week, through the Bering Strait, from Kodiak to reach the town. When the helicopter aboard the cutter Alex Haley, on patrol in the Chukchi Sea, broke down in August, it was grounded for two weeks while its crew awaited delivery of the necessary part from the East Coast.

The lack of support facilities for basic operations significantly hinders the Coast Guard in the Arctic. In its annual northward surge of people and assets, Operation Arctic Shield, the service uses large cutters – “floating command posts,” Zukunft calls them – as platforms for search and rescue and surveillance operations. These assets are often stretched thin; in August, the National Security Cutter Waesche left its counter-drug patrol in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico to address the safety and environmental concerns posed by Shell’s drilling operation in the Chukchi.

The National Research Council, in a report issued last year, warned: “USCG personnel, equipment, transportation, communication, navigation, and safety resources needed for oil spill response are not adequate for overseeing oil spill response in the Arctic, and the Coast Guard’s efforts to support Arctic oil spill planning and response in the absence of a dedicated and adequate budget are admirable but inadequate.”

The Coast Guard’s ice breaking capacity is another shortcoming. Given the unpredictable behavior of polar sea ice, an icebreaker is the only type of cutter that can guarantee access, and the United States is down to two working icebreakers. The Russian Federation has 41 and is actively building more.

This 2-to-41 deficit to Russia, whose leadership has proven increasingly willing to engage in Soviet-style military exploits in Georgia, Ukraine, and now Syria, has received much attention from American news outlets, along with Russia’s submission to the United Nations, in August 2015, of a claim to 463,000 square miles of the Arctic ocean floor. The move was called a “land grab” by several outlets. Sputnik was invoked, more than once. NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt, introducing a September series on the changing Arctic, called it a “power struggle at the top of the world,” and correspondent Cynthia McFadden, in her reporting, called it “the new Cold War.” One of the experts interviewed for the program, further muddling the analogy, called the Arctic “the Mideast of this century.”