“Most of the stakeholders in the Arctic are not living here, what we need to do is to bring them here to have a robust conversation about what is happening,” said Lawson Brigham, Alaska office director of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission. Those stakeholders are the parent governments of countries in the Arctic, such as the United States, Canada, Russia, Greenland, Iceland, Denmark, Finland and Sweden.

The Arctic Research Commission was established by the Arctic Research and Policy Act of 1984 to support a federal plan for Arctic research.

Brigham made a presentation Jan. 12, called “Climate Change and Marine Transportation,” at the Cold Regions Design and Construction in a Warming World workshop held at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

Brigham explained that if the developing countries such as China and India continue to emit industrial pollution, the Arctic could be completely free of ice by the year 2040. Other models show that the coastal routes around Canada and Russia will open as soon as 2025, according to Brigham.

“Canada is a very broad area with complicated geography. The ice is decreasing in very fast concentrations across here and the whole of the Russian Arctic through the century. The Arctic is now more negotiable,” Brigham said. “The melting of multi-year ice is the big clue that warming is impacting the ice pack.”

Alaska, however, with 43,000 miles of coast line, is currently experiencing heavy ice conditions, according to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecaster.

“We are experiencing heavy ice conditions both in the Chukchi, Beaufort and Bering seas and Cook Inlet,” said Kathleen Cole, a NOAA sea ice forecaster based in Anchorage.

Cole said that last year similar ice conditions were far above average, and that multi-year ice had even pushed its way ashore in Barrow and into the Bering Sea.

“Last year there was only about two weeks of open water in the coastal waters of the North Slope. It was not a good year for shipping in the Beaufort or Bering seas,” Cole said.

According to Cole, several private vessels trying to circumnavigate the Arctic are now stuck in ports where they are over-wintering. One such vessel is stuck in Nome, according to Cole.

Nevertheless, traffic at the North Pole has increased from 2004, when there were 27 cruises, to this past year when there were 150 cruise ships in the Arctic, according to Brigham.

“This needs to be looked at more closely,” Brigham said. “These are cruise ships from the Mediterranean and the Caribbean. What are they doing up there? And what could happen? ... There seems to a security risk here.”

Increased activity in western Siberia is also going to add to the traffic. Mining company Norilsk Nickel has huge ships carrying copper and nickel ore, which are now transiting the Arctic from Norilsk, the Northern most city in Russia, to Murmansk, the largest Russian seaport in the Arctic.

“These ships are green (environmentally safe/multi-hulled), have multiple compartments and are designed to operate stern-first in the ice and use an electrical propulsion system to make way,” Brigham said.

But as the ice pack thins due to global warming, additional dangers such as glacial ice that has broken away from Canadian glaciers may impact shipping routes.

Brigham hinted that the opening of shipping lanes in the Arctic could actually accelerate warming.

“There is also a wildcard in the Arctic,” Brigham said. “With an increase in marine traffic from ocean to ocean, emissions from ships in the form of nitrogen oxide and carbon monoxide could triple ozone levels, making them comparable with industrial regions today.”

Brigham said an assessment by the commission is necessary to study the impacts of warming on indigenous peoples and those living in Arctic coastal communities. Alaska Native populations who hunt could see an impact as the seals and whales they hunt react to changes in the environment.

“These are just some of the issues, there are impacts to hunting by oil exploration and increased traffic by huge ships where once there were none,” Brigham said.

Brigham hopes to bring all parties in the Arctic, as well as the southern stakeholders, together to complete a detailed study called the Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment in 2007.