In response, the Coast Guard is considering a base of operation on the North Slope. Coast Guard officials this month held a 16-day operation, which it called Arctic Domain Awareness,

“This is a test to see if we should consider improving our presence here. This is a very different mission, that will require different equipment,” said Rear Adm. Arthur Brooks, commander of the 17th Coast Guard district.

The operation included two HH-65 Dolphin helicopters - one from Kodiak and another from San Francisco - and two 25-foot response boats from Valdez. Boat and aircrews were in Barrow from July 27 through Aug. 11.

As part of a press tour on Aug.9, Adm. Brooks, North Slope Mayor Edward Itta and other Barrow officials were on hand at a conference staged on the tarmac at the Wiley Post-Will Rogers Memorial airport at Barrow.

“It's a special honor and a pleasure to be working with the Coast Guard,” said Itta. “These are changing times; to the environment and activities that it will bring.”

Coast Guard crews are gathering information from locals on how to operate and what is needed for the Guard to operate in the Arctic.

“We have conducted several roundtable discussions with whaling crews and the North Slope Borough Search and Rescue experts, and I am really impressed with their self-sufficiency,” said Brooks. “We have learned much from their experience.”

Coast Guard Comdr. Michelle Webber, in charge of the Barrow operations, shared one example of local knowledge: “I asked a whaling captain, just what do you do when boating and you are fogged in, have no reference to which direction you should go to return to land and are surrounded by ice,” she said. “His response was that he made sounds like a walrus, listened for their return response, and ventured the opposite direction away from where their sounds came from to find his way back to shore. We would have never thought of that.”

U.S. Coast Guard Loadmaster John Ferrari demonstrates a video platform that allows aircraft to view targets on the ground. Photo/Rob Stapleton/AJOC

“The young people here are very curious about the boats and their equipment,” he said. “This has been a learning experience for all of us, a good one, and a benefit to the economy too.”

Stotts noted that the presence of the 36 Coast Guard crewmembers currently in Barrow has increased business at the restaurants and hotels, as well as with local taxis and at the aviation fuel pumps.

As Coast Guard officials determine how to proceed, local Inupiat have their eyes on the seas, watching ships passing into the Beaufort Sea amid broken pack ice.

“Yes, we are living in a time of change. Now there are ships coming through here with flags from every country you can imagine,” said Richard Glenn with Arctic Slope Regional Corp. and a board member of the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium. “We are impressed with how the Coast Guard has humbled themselves and have asked how we do things here in the Arctic.”

Brooks added that the Coast Guard mission in the North Pacific and Bering seas is different from those in the Arctic, and realize it will require different resources.

Capt. Andy Berghorn, commanding officer of the Kodiak station, agreed.

“My concerns are environmental conditions, distances and the types and numbers of aircraft that need to be used for safe operations,” Berghorn said. “To operate here with our existing equipment will pull resources from other areas that may make it difficult to respond in emergencies to other areas of Alaska. That, and it takes between eight to 10 years to order and receive new aircraft, after the funds have been approved by Congress.”

Surrounded on three sides by water and ice, North Slope residents are wary of Russian and Canadian interests, and welcome a U.S military presence in the Arctic.

“Previously there has been no rush by the U. S. into the Arctic like this,” said Brooks. “I am comparing this to a similar event in the 1957, when the Russian's put Sputnik into orbit around the Earth.”

Boundaries in the seas are not well defined, and to further complicate matters, the U.S. has never recognized a key political agreement between countries in the Arctic, Brooks said.

Russian Polar researcher Artur Chilingarov on Aug. 2, 2007, planted a flag at the North Pole, about 4,300 meters under water and about 1,200 miles north of Point Barrow. The move attracted the attention of Canadian and American officials to the possibilities in the Arctic.

A gathering of reporters listen North Slope Mayor Edward Itta, Rear Adm. Gene Brooks and other Barrow officials at a press conference at the Barrow airport. Photo/Rob Stapleton/AJOC

“If a hundred or a thousand years from now someone goes down to where we were, they will see the Russian flag,” the Itar-Tass news agency quoted him as saying.

But the incident prompted the U.S. Coast Guard, encouraged by Congress, to examine the need for a base in Barrow. The Coast Guard is also making monthly flights between Barrow and the North Pole, Brooks said.

“A complication to the role of the Coast Guard is that the U.S. is not a signatory to the Law of Sea (Treaty),” Brooks said. “We (U.S) are one of the few nations that did not sign the Law of the Sea Treaty. We are not in the game, we are not even in the dugout.”

Under the treaty, if one can show the continental shelf is contiguous and consistent from the landmass outward, that country can claim the bottom resources beyond 200 miles.

“I think the law of the sea will be the mechanism that resolves boundary disputes in the arctic among Arctic nations,” he said.

This could become critical in shipping issues as Alaska's waters are bordered by Canada to the East and Russia on the Chukchi and Bering seas.

Once the ice pack retreats, it opens up the possibility for two traffic routes: the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic, and the Northeast Passage along the coast of northern Russia.

The Arctic is not uncharted water to the U.S Coast Guard. North Slope residents in the late 1800s and early 1900s helped the Coast Guard's Revenue Cutter Bear in mapping the Bering and Chukchi seas, and other areas in the Arctic Ocean.

The ship's captain, Michael Healy, was the first African-American officer in the United States government. Healy, who was commissioned by President Abraham Lincoln, became a legend when he delivered Siberian reindeer he purchased to starving Alaska Natives.

Patrolling the seas for whaling ships, the Revenue Cutter Bear delivered mail, supplies, acted as a hospital and a territorial courthouse to North Slope Alaskans until 1926, when it was decommissioned after 40 years of service in the Arctic.