Arctic Mapping and the Law of the Sea

U.S. State Department unveils website on the Law of the Sea Convention

2011-12-07T14:56:00.001-08:00

The U.S. Department of State recently launched a new website designed to educate readers about the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and promote benefits of accession to the treaty. Partly in anticipation of the treaty's consideration in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (as of yet unscheduled), the State Department's Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs issued several fact sheets in July 2011 that are now available on the website. The overview fact sheet characterizes the Convention as "a key piece of unfinished treaty business for the United States;" the others address business and national security reasons to support accession to the Convention.

The entries at the bottom of this Arctic Mapping blog provide general information about the history of non-accession to the Convention in the United States; those in the upper right hand margin track more recent developments and expressions of support for accession.

Arctic Regional Hydrographic Commission Meeting, 27-29 September 2011

2011-09-27T18:18:00.000-07:00

The Arctic Regional Hydrographic Commission (ARHC) was established a year ago in October 2010, and is currently holding its second meeting in Copenhagen (27-29 September 2011). Documents submitted for this meeting, including national reports from all five coastal states and a status report (ArHC2-11A) on plans for an Arctic Spatial Data Infrastructure (Arctic SDI) are available on the ARHC meeting website. The ARCH held its first meeting in Ottawa (4-6 October 2010). At the first meeting, the report of the US Coastal Hydrographic Commission (USCHC Update)ARHC1-04B indicated that technical experts met in Ottawa on July 22, 2010 in anticipation of a maritime boundary agreement in the Beaufort Sea (see media reports and earlier posts from February 2010 and March 2010 on the progress toward resolution of this maritime boundary dispute). Technical discussions continue in anticipation of resolving this well-managed maritime boundary disagreement between Canada and the United States.

R/V Marcus G. Langseth underway for Chukchi Edges Project

2011-09-13T08:30:00.000-07:00

As is clear from following the links to the right of this blog post, the USCGC Healy has been in the Arctic Ocean for several weeks on its “Law of the Sea Extended Continental Shelf” mapping cruise. This is the fifth year that Healy is working jointly with the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Louis S. St. Laurent, collecting data to inform the eventual submission of reports to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf.

The Research Vessel (R/V) Marcus G. Langseth embarked September 8, 2011, from Dutch Harbor, Alaska, on a different kind of arctic mapping cruise.

As explained on the Langseth Chukchi Edges Project website, “The primary purpose of this cruise is to collect Multi-Channel Seismic Reflection (MCS) data across the transition from the Chukchi Shelf to the Chukchi Borderland.” One purpose the data will serve is to provide imaging of the transition between these two continental blocks, thus helping to narrow down when and over how long a period the two blocks were in relative motion with each other. That information is key to understanding the geological history of the area.

As the project's chief scientist, Dr. Bernard Coakley from University of Alaska-Fairbanks, explains:

“The geological history of the Amerasian Basin is poorly understood, in part due to the lack of identified plate boundaries. These boundaries must exist to explain the basin history. Identification of these structures will make it possible to reconstruct the development of the basin, which will substantially improve our understanding of the surrounding continents.”

R/V Langseth is operated by Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) at Columbia University. The Langseth is not an ice-strengthened vessel and this is the first time it has been used in the Arctic open water season (for more on the expected ice environment for the cruise, see the cruise website. LDEO has an office devoted to Marine Mammal Protection and Dr. Coakley has worked closely with NOAA to obtain the necessary permits for MCS activity. Community Observer Reynold (RJ) Aveoganna is part of the international team working with Coakley, which includes scientists from Korea, Germany, Turkey, the United States and the United Kingdom, representing seven different universities and research organizations.

The Langseth is scheduled to return to Dutch Harbor on October 10, 2011. Coakley will be blogging for the New York Times Scientist at Work feature throughout the cruise, beginning with today's post under Notes from the Field; subsequent posts will be available here.

Guyana files submission with the CLCS

2011-09-08T14:28:00.000-07:00

On 6 September 2011 Guyana filed the 57th submission to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (all 57 submissions are identified on the CLCS website).

The Executive Summary of the submission, available here, indicates that Guyana submits "data and information concerning the outer limits of the continental shelf along the northern part of its continental margin for the consideration of the CLCS without prejudice to any potential boundary delimitations with any other States which may be conducted at a later date."*

Thus, any potential boundary delimitation with Guyana's neighbor to the north, Venezuela, will not be prejudiced by the submission or any eventual Commission recommendation (Venezuela is not a party to the Law of the Sea Convention). Whether or not the neighboring state is a party to the Convention, such provisions are standard in submissions to the CLCS when the submitting state has unresolved boundaries or potential boundary issues with neighboring states. The Law of the Sea Convention (art. 76, para. 10, and Annex II, art. 9) makes clear that the Commission's role is not to address any such boundary issues, but rather only to consider the data regarding the extent of the continental shelf without prejudice to such issues.

From Guyana's Executive Summary, p. 16: "Figure 1. The outer limits of the continental shelf of the Co-operative Republic of Guyana (red line) beyond 200 nautical miles (black line) measured from the baselines from which the breadth of the territorial sea is measured according to paragraph 7 determined by straight lines not exceeding 60 nautical miles in length, connecting fixed points, defined by coordinates of latitude and longitude."

Consideration of Guyana's submission will be part of the Commission's provisional agenda for the 29th session of the CLCS, scheduled to meet in New York in March/April 2012. The last submission to the Commission was by Madagascar in April 2011.

*emphasis not in original

UPDATE October 1, 2011: Guyana and Venezuela sign agreement pledging to "negotiate the delimitation of maritime boundaries between the two States."

The Arctic, Irene and ... Vermont Law School?

2011-08-31T14:54:00.000-07:00

Many readers know that your blogger teaches at Vermont Law School (see blogger profile). Many in the eastern United States also know that Vermont was hard hit by flooding following Hurricane Irene and many have inquired as to how we fared. Thanks for your concern, and for other readers' indulgence in this non-Arctic report.
Vermont Law School, in South Royalton, Vermont, reopened on August 31, but transportation around the state, and to and from campus, changes daily as roads are reopened, or repaired ... or erode further. The school suffered only minor flooding but our neighbors in Royalton, South Royalton, Bethel, and numerous small communities have lost homes, livestock, possessions. For more on the aftermath in Vermont go to vpr.net or onearth.org; and at VLS to irene.vermontlaw.edu or our Facebook or Twitter pages.
We continue our research at the Vermont Institute for Energy and Environment on the PAME Arctic Offshore Oil and Gas Guidelines in Greenland and Russia, and in Canada and the United States (your comments welcome as we update these papers, reply here), on the legal status of sea ice, and on our contribution to the Arctic Ocean Review, among other Arctic-related projects.

Thanks for your concern.

Speaking of Icebreakers ... what about Antarctica? NSF contracts with Russian icebreaker.

2011-08-30T15:17:00.000-07:00

This blog has written of icebreakers on several occasions (e.g. January 2009 and June 2010), but has focused largely on U.S. and Canadian ice breaking needs in the Arctic. In early August, the U.S. National Science Foundation announced that the Swedish government would not be deploying its escort icebreaker Oden south to Antarctica in 2011, as has been the practice in recent years. The Oden, one of seven icebreakers operated by the Swedish Maritime Administration, is thus not available either for joint research with other countries in the Southern Ocean, or for the annual breakout of the channel that allows the resupply of certain research stations in Antarctica (McMurdo Station, South Pole Station and field camps in the interior of the Antarctic continent).

In mid-August, U.S. Senators Maria Cantwell (Washington) and Mark Begich (Alaska) pointed to the practice of contracting with foreign governments for Antarctic ice breaking services when speaking against plans to decommission the Polar Sea, one of the United States' three aging icebreakers. As Senator Cantwell's press release states "Decommissioning Polar Sea would leave the U.S. with only one operational icebreaker, the Healy, which was designed primarily as a scientific research vessel and only has medium icebreaking capability. The second heavy duty icebreaker, Polar Star, is currently in Seattle being refitted after years in ‘caretaker’ status, when the vessel is out of active service but still receives routine upkeep and maintenance. The United States Navy has no icebreaking capability."

On August 25, 2011, the NSF issued a letter announcing that the "NSF has entered into a letter contract for the services of the Vladimir Ignatyuk, a diesel-powered Russian icebreaker owned by the Murmansk Shipping Company. This ship is the sister to Canada's Terry Fox."

The good news is that Antarctic science stations will continue to be resupplied through international cooperation. The bad news, which should make its way to the highest level of policy making in the United States, is that our ice breaking capacity is woefully inadequate: inadequate for scientific research North and South, and inadequate for emergency response to oil spills and other potential problems arising from increased exploitation of petroleum resources in the Arctic and from increased marine traffic in the North generally.

International Maritime Organization MEPC agrees on work plan for Black Carbon impacts in Arctic

2011-08-05T15:07:00.000-07:00

From the July 2011 Current Awareness Bulletin of the IMO:

At the 62nd session of the Marine Environment Protection Committtee, London 11-15 July 2011, the MEPC:

"agreed a work plan on addressing the impact in the Arctic of black carbon emissions from ships and instructed the Sub-Committee on Bulk Liquids and Gases (BLG) to: develop a definition for black carbon emissions from international shipping; consider measurement methods for black carbon and identify the most appropriate method for measuring black carbon emissions from international shipping; investigate appropriate control measures to reduce the impacts of black carbon emissions from international shipping in the Arctic; and submit a final report to MEPC 65 (in 2014).

Black carbon is a strongly light-absorbing carbonaceous aerosol produced by incomplete combustion of fuel oil and is considered a constituent of primary particulate matter, as distinguished from secondary particulate matter pollutants formed in the atmosphere from sulphur dioxide emissions. In addition to harmful human health effects associated with exposure to particulate matter, Black carbon has effects on climate change. When deposited on snow and ice in the Arctic and lower latitudes, it darkens light surfaces and absorbs energy, causing snow and ice to melt."

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov: Law of the Sea Convention, not military involvement, is the basis for activity in the Arctic

2011-07-13T14:31:00.000-07:00

In an exclusive interview with Voice of Russia on July 13, Sergei Lavrov, the Minster of Foreign Affairs for the Russian Federation, reiterated that the law of the sea convention is the basis for maintaining security in the Arctic. He made clear that there is no problem in the Arctic requiring military involvement and emphasized the importance of the law of the sea convention as the foundation for international cooperation in the Arctic.

Lavrov took the opportunity presented by a question on Russia's plans for a new submission to the Commission on the Continental Shelf in 2012 to make his point:

"Interviewer: You know, it`s been mentioned that Moscow will submit a claim next year to the UN to expand its Arctic shelf borders. Other nations including the US have also increased their activities in the region, and it is described by some analysts as a new re-division of the Arctic. How do you see the role of Russia in this process and does it need to increase its military presence there as the US and Canada do? May the future of the Arctic be resolved peacefully?

Lavrov: Well, first of there is no such thing as redesigning of the Arctic landscape and redesigning the legal regime of the Arctic. The five coastal states, the Arctic Five so to say, back in 2008 agreed during their meeting that there is no single problem in the region that cannot be resolved on the basis of existing law, this law being the international Convention of 1982.

Then this position was endorsed by the entire Arctic Council which is composed by eight Arctic states and you now the fact that this is really the case was demonstrated by the signature and entry into force of the Russian-Norwegian agreement on de-limitation in the Barents Sea area.

There is no single issue in the area that would require any military presence of the non-regional actors, be it countries or organizations. The Arctic Five, Russia, the US, Canada, Norway and Denmark are perfectly capable of maintaining the necessary level of security, the freedom of shipping and safety of the shipping and we are open to other countries who want to cooperate but on the basis of the rules of the game established by the Arctic countries.

We met last May in Greenland, in the city of Nuuk, as the Arctic Council ministerial meeting and we adopted the first pan-Arctic legally binding agreement on search and rescue and instructed our experts to draft a Treaty on how you fight oil spills. We also endorsed the rules for observers who want to participate in the work of the Arctic Council which provide for them to be parties to projects like exploration of oil and gas, transportation of oil, gas and other commodities through the Northern Sea route, participation in scientific research and many other activities.

But I would like to emphasize once again that there’s no problem requiring any military involvement in the Arctic. Everything must be and should be on the basis of the international convention of the law of the sea and it’s a common position of the members of the Arctic Council, including Russia and the US." (Emphasis added.)

The Russian research vessel the Akademik Fedorov embarked earlier this month for another summer of mapping related to the the Russian continental shelf submission.

For a digital recording of Voice of Russia's entire interview with Foreign Minister Lavrov, and its full text, see the Voice of Russia report for July 13, 2011.

Charting the US Arctic

2011-07-13T12:39:00.000-07:00

Two years ago, in May 2009, the Arctic Council PAME (Protection of the Arctic Marine Environment) Working Group issued the Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment. AMSA, a wide-ranging study and must-read for anyone interested in the increasing human uses of the Arctic Ocean, also highlights the inadequacy of navigational charts for various parts of the Arctic Ocean.

This week NOAA's Office of Coast Survey embarked on a charting cruise that is part of a broad-scale NOAA effort to update its charts of the Arctic Ocean, some of which date to before the United States' 1867 acquisition of Alaska. For more on the work of the NOAA Ship Fairweather visit the NOAA home page under news. The story contains a link to the "Arctic Nautical Charting Plan - A Plan to Support Sustainable Marine Transportation in Alaska and the Arctic" issued by the NOAA Office of Coast Survey Marine Chart Division on June 1, 2011.

Certainty, not Conflict: The Meeting of the States Parties to the Law of the Sea Convention and the Workload of the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS)

2011-06-18T14:22:00.000-07:00

At the 21st annual Meeting of States Parties to the Law of Sea Convention (SPLOS) this past week in New York, the workload of the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf was on the agenda. Perhaps the most important observation on the work of the CLCS came from the Australian representative, who spoke of the value of "creating legal and jurisdictional certainty, in perpetuity, regarding the limits of a country’s continental shelf" (see full text of the Meetings Coverage here).

Legal and jurisdictional certainty is the expected outcome of every submission to the CLCS, whether the Arctic or any other part of the world. Legal and jurisdictional certainty, not conflict, is another message with which to respond to the misinformed or misleading publicists, scholars and practitioners who continue to raise (incorrectly) the alarum that states in the Arctic are locked in some sort of competition or race for resources as they map their extended continental shelves. They are not. Arctic Ocean coastal states are all, as I've stated before, following the same dry rules and procedures precisely so they can confirm with certainty the extent and limits of the continental shelf and, thus, the areas in which they have sovereign rights to explore and exploit the shelf's natural resources.

The CLCS has received 56 submissions as of April 29, 2011, the last three being from Denmark/Faroes, Bangladesh and Madascar, yet has adopted only 15 recommendations as of March 30, 2011. The Commission has also received preliminary information for 45 different shelf areas, adding to its backlog. The SPLOS meeting in New York allowed representatives to discuss varying scenarios for improving the Commission's ability to handle the large case load. The Acting Chairperson of the CLCS is Harald Brekke of Norway.

BP Macondo/Deepwater Horizon One Year Later - Implications for the Arctic Ocean

2011-04-19T21:21:00.000-07:00

April 20, 2011: The one-year anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is as weighty a reason as any for breaking the hiatus of several months on this site. The DWH disaster not only led to formal reviews of arctic offshore drilling practices in the United States and in Canada (which had already begun such a review process); it also prompted widespread discussion of best offshore practices in other arctic coastal states, and contributed to the convening of an Inuit Leaders Summit on Resource Development.

The final report of the U.S. National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling includes specific reference to implications of the DWH disaster for the Arctic. The Recommendations as well as portions of Chapter Ten in the final report discuss “The Arctic ecosystem, the need for scientific information and informed decision-making, and Alaska native peoples,” “Arctic Spill Response and Containment,” and “International Standards for Arctic Oil and Gas”. On the last point, “the Commission recommends that strong international standards related to Arctic oil and gas activities be established among all the countries of the Arctic.” Recommendations, p. 56. The Commission staff also prepared a background paper on The Challenges of Oil Spill Response in the Arctic.

Moving in the direction of stronger international standards, the US Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, held a Ministerial Forum on Offshore Drilling Containment last week (April 14, 2011) to discuss international standards for well containment. Canada, Norway, The Russian Federation, and the United States -- that is to say: all arctic coastal states save Denmark/Greenland, were there. Angola, Australia, Brazil, Netherlands, New Zealand Mexico, the EU, and the United Kingdom, also attended.

Secretary Salazar will also attend the May ministerial meeting of the Arctic Council with Secretary of State Clinton, where offshore oil and gas development is on the agenda. In 2009 the Arctic Council ministers endorsed “Arctic Offshore Oil and Gas Guidelines” prepared by its PAME (Protection of the Marine Environment) working group. The Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School has prepared studies of how offshore regulations in Canada, Greenland, Russia and the United States measure up to these Guidelines.

More transparency on the way for Russian CLCS submission?

2010-11-14T09:25:00.000-08:00

On November 13, 2010, the Russian news service RIA Novosti ran this report on the end of the 2010 Russian extended continental shelf cruise (July-October), during which new data was acquired for the Russian Federation's supplemental submission to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS).

Daria Vasilevskaya, deputy head of the Geology Department of the Natural Resources Ministry "told RIA Novosti the new research was necessary as details of previous expeditions were labeled secret due to the use of military equipment."

Speaking of earlier cruises on which ECS data was gathered, Vasilevskaya said:

" 'It was not possible to give a full description of the military technical equipment on account of secrecy.' The new research was done on board the ship Akademik Fyodorov from July through October. Only civilian equipment was used, Vasilevskaya said."

The use of civilian equipment does not automatically translate into any information being more readily available to non-participants in the Russian Federation CLCS process. It does, however, potentially signal somewhat greater transparency for the parts of the process that are eventually made public.

Arctic Regional Hydrographic Commission established October 2010

2010-11-04T18:18:00.000-07:00

One month ago, the five arctic coastal states of Canada, Denmark (Greenland), Norway, the Russian Federation and the United States, established the Arctic Regional Hydrographic Commission (ArHC). The International Hydrographic Organization has posted the Statement of the Arctic Regional Hydrographic Commission on the IHO website.

The Arctic Regional Hydrographic Commission, or ArHC, is the 15th such regional commission established since the founding of the IHO in 1921, joining 14 other RhCs and the IHO Hydrographic Committee on Antarctica.

The Statement of the ArHC provides in part:
"Due to climate change the Arctic is undergoing extraordinary transformations facilitating increased natural resource development and marine traffic at a time when little reliable data exists. At present, less than 10% of Arctic waters are charted to modern standards. To meet current and emerging challenges, the Arctic Coastal States represented by their Hydrographic Offices, have recognized the need for enhanced collaboration and coordination of their activities.
By exchanging knowledge and information and by providing quality assured data, the Members of the ARHC aim to facilitate an environmentally responsible exploration of Arctic waters."

The IHO is an intergovernmental and technical organization established in 1921 "to support safety of navigation and the protection of the marine environment."

September 2011 UPDATE: Information on the Second Meeting of ARHC is available here.

Russian Continental Shelf Mapping in the Arctic Ocean

2010-10-10T19:15:00.000-07:00

Russia’s two Arctic expeditions met up last week in the Arctic Ocean. According to a report in the RT on the Lomonosov Ridge expedition, published October 9 and revised October 10, “Members of Russia’s North Pole expedition Shelf-2010 have docked with their colleagues on board the Akademik Fyodorov.” The article provides little more detail, but supplements other statements made about Russian continental shelf mapping at the International Arctic Forum known as the "Territory of Dialogue" held in Moscow September 22-23, 2010.

As also reported on the website of Denmark's The Continental Shelf Project, one presentation at the Territory of Dialogue Forum was by Christian Marcussen, Senior Adviser, Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. Marcussen is the Project manager for the Greenland part of the Continental Shelf Project of the Kingdom of Denmark. His presentation, entitled "Extended continental shelf issues in the Arctic Ocean - an example of cooperation between the Arctic coastal states" is available here, at the Dansk Kontinentalsokkelprojektet (which is a standing link on this weblog's right margin).

The "Territory of Dialogue" website provides information related to the September Moscow forum, including the full program, but also offers a range of information about the Arctic, including a newsfeed covering such stories as the Northern Fleet’s role in Arctic cooperation and Russia’s Antarctic strategy.

A September 2010 article in Hydro-International provides a useful overview of ongoing Russian, Danish, US and Canadian discussions and mapping efforts regarding the Arctic ocean.

Alaska Arctic Update September 2010: Sea Ice Minimum, Vessel Grounding, Gas, Fish, Exxon Valdez-Deepwater Horizon, Coast Survey Mapping, Broadband

2010-09-16T08:04:00.000-07:00

In keeping with this weblog’s two most recent posts, which provide brief updates on recent arctic developments in Canada and the United States, readers are referred to the September 15, 2010, broadcast and transcript of Alaska News Nightly (produced by the Alaska Public Radio Network) for an Alaska (mostly arctic) update. Yesterday’s broadcast is a particularly fine edition of this consistently reliable news program and highlights how Alaska faces in microcosm many of the issues facing the Arctic as a whole.

Reports include excellent interviews, both worth hearing in their entirety, about:

-- the Arctic Sea Ice Minimum for 2010, reached September 10, which is the third lowest since satellite data collection began in 1979 (for details visit the National Snow and Ice Data Center )

-- Tlingit contributions to mapping “Russian America” in the 19th century, providing many of the place names and cartographic features, e.g. from the Lind Canal to Yukon River, that cartographer George Davidson used in his maps for the US Coast Survey. NOAA historian John Cloud was in Klukwan earlier this month to present scanned images of the maps to descendants of the original mappers, the Tlingit leader Kohklux and his wives. The maps are in the public domain, and will soon be posted on this NOAA site; NOAA asks to be credited as the source.

Other stories relate to:
-- Alaska lawyers heading to the Gulf, to bring post-Exxon Valdez experience to litigation resulting from the Deepwater Horizon explosion and spill.
-- a barge running aground about 40 miles west of Prudhoe Bay, although this time equipment failure rather than outdated charts caused the grounding.
-- the proposed All-Alaska Gas Pipeline, as discussed by candidates for governor (see also two different angles on the pipeline here and here).
-- an award-winning commercial seafood processing cooperative plant in Sitka that sends between 50 and 60% of its product overseas.
-- the future of broadband in Alaska, with a focus on public libraries.

Canada Arctic Update August 2010

2010-09-03T14:38:00.000-07:00

August 2010 was an active month for Canadian policy developments in the Arctic. In keeping with this blog’s July 2010 report on numerous U.S.-related arctic news items for that month, here is a short form update on significant Canadian announcements, projects and decisions in August affecting the Canadian Arctic.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper used his five day visit to the Arctic, from August 23-27, and the run-up to that visit, to unveil several Canadian initiatives, including the Canadian national policy on the Arctic.

August 20, Ottawa: Canada releases its Arctic Policy, formally titled “Statement on Canada’s Arctic Foreign Policy,” which elaborates on the international component of Canada’s Northern Strategy announced in 2009.

August 26: Harper announces that his government will establish the Tarium Niryutait Marine Protected Area in the Beaufort Sea, as part of an effort to conserve Beluga whales. For background on the Tarium Niryutait MPA and on the Beaufort Sea Large Ocean Management Area visit the Beaufort Sea Partnership.

PM Harper’s visit also coincided with:

The August 26th completion of a Canadian Coast Guard training exercise on environmental emergency (oil spill) response in Resolute Bay, Nunavut.

The exercise was part of Canada’s larger annual military training exercise in the North, “Operation NANOOK”. Danish and US forces participated in the operation for the first time this year.

Other relevant August 2010 developments for the Canadian Arctic:

August 8; Nunavut judge issues an injunction stopping a science expedition’s seismic operations from the R/V Polarstern in Lancaster Sound.

August 25: Canadian Air Force shadows Russian bombers in international airspace north of Inuvik.

August 29: Parks Canada announces completion of the 2010 Arctic Survey.

August 30: The Bahamanian-flagged Clipper Adventurer cruise ship runs aground on uncharted* rocks in the Northwest Passage; Canadian Coast Guard evacuates passengers to Kugluktuk (Update Sept. 8: *subsequent reports indicate that the hazard was known and that the the Canadian Hydrographic Survey had informed the shipping industry of the rock's location in 2007). Outdated charts appear to have contributed to the August 8 grounding of the fuel resupply vessel the Mokami near Pangnirtung and the September 2 grounding of the fuel tanker Nanny (Canadian flagged) on a sandbar in Simpson Strait; neither vessel suffered any reported loss of its cargo (the latter ship carried 9.5 million liters of diesel fuel).

Thanks to the Institute of the North and its Top of the World Telegraph , and to the U.S. Arctic Research Commission Arctic Update for reporting earlier on many of the sources drawn on here.

U.S. Arctic and Oceans Update July 2010

2010-07-27T14:53:00.000-07:00

July was a busy month in the United States for Arctic and oceans related matters. Herewith, a tweet-like survey of some highlights, from back to front:

July 26: Final preparations are underway for this year’s continuation of US mapping efforts on the Arctic extended continental shelf (ECS). The 2010 ECS Project mapping cruise, for which the US Geological Survey is the science lead, is scheduled from August 2 - September 6, 2010, on the USCGC Healy. The Healy will travel in tandem again this year with the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker the Louis S. St.-Laurent for part of the cruise, as reported in the USGS press release

July 22: US and Canadian officials met quietly in Ottawa to discuss resolving the maritime boundary dispute in the Beaufort Sea. For background and a map, see this earlier post.

July 22: President Obama assigned responsibility for Arctic research to the White House National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), which will coordinate activities assigned to the Interagency Arctic Research and Policy Committee (IARPC). IARPC and the US Arctic Research Commission (USARC) were created by the 1984 Arctic Research and Policy Act and consult on arctic policy and planning. The press release is on the USARC website, where the USARC biennial "Report on Goals and Objectives for Arctic Research is also available.

July 19: President Obama issued an Executive Order establishing a National Policy for the Stewardship of the Ocean, Coasts, and Great Lakes. The Order largely adopts the Final Recommendations of the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force. Among the many steps the order announces, it “provides for the development of coastal and marine spatial plans that build upon and improve existing Federal, State, tribal, local, and regional decisionmaking and planning processes." A related posting is available here.

July 16: Eighty-six days after the April 20, 2010, explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig at the BP Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico, oil flowing from the well was, at last, temporarily halted by a capping stack system. The cap continues to hold while efforts continue to close the well permanently. More information is at the official site of the government oil spill response effort.

July 15: The Interagency and Science Advisory Committees of the Submarine Arctic Science Cruises Program (the SCience ICe EXerices (SCICEX) Program) published a new science plan for the Arctic Ocean, drawing on the potential of the U.S. Navy’s nuclear-powered submarines for data collection. The plan under “Part 1: Technical Guidance for Planning Science Accommodations Missions,” is available under publications at the USARC website.

July 14: The House passed HR 2864, a bill that, if approved by the Senate and signed into law, would require NOAA to increase its mapping efforts in the Arctic. See the NOAA Office of Legislative Affairs. The bill was introduced by Rep. Don Young of Alaska. The Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment approved by the Ministerial meeting of the Arctic Council in 2009 provides a good overview of the need for improved mapping of the Arctic Ocean for navigational and other purposes.

From Eurasian Heartland to Arctic Coastal State: Antrim on the Russian Arctic in the Twenty-first Century

2010-07-09T16:41:00.000-07:00

“The increased accessibility of the Arctic, with its energy and mineral resources, new fisheries, shortened sea routes, and access to rivers flowing north to the Arctic, is pushing Russia to become a maritime state. As it progresses, Russia will no longer be susceptible to geographic isolation or encirclement. At the same time, these changes will require Russia to become more closely integrated into global commercial and financial networks, to welcome international business involvement, and to participate in international bodies that harmonize international shipping, safety, security, and environmental regulations.”
Caitlyn L. Antrim, The Next Geographical Pivot: The Russian Arctic in the Twenty-first Century, Naval War College Review, Summer 2010, Vol. 63, No. 3, p. 15

With these words, Caitlyn Antrim introduces the basic premises of her comprehensive, concise and engaging article in the Summer 2010 volume of the Naval War College Review. She derives the first part of the piece’s title from a 1904 presentation by Halford Mackinder to the Royal Geographic Society in London. A century ago Mackinder identified control of the steppes and plains of the southwest Russian empire, rich in agriculture and raw materials, as the geographical “pivot around which the conflict between the [Eurasian] heartland and the crescent of maritime states revolved.”* Mackinder’s “crescent” referred to the outer edges of the Eurasian continents, traced “from the coasts of China and South Asia westward through the Balkans and up to the English Channel.”

Antrim proceeds to discuss the resultant and enduring European and US geostrategy of the 19th and 20th centuries that attempted to contain Russia as a land power on all sides and depended on the frozen Arctic Ocean to serve as the Fourth Wall of containment. She identifies four factors that were key to maintaining this Fourth Wall - technology, economics, climate, and law - and then lays out how changes to them have led to Russia’s “shift from Eurasian heartland to Arctic coastal state,” a shift she convincingly documents.

Antrim views the political and geophysical changes underway in the Arctic as “turning the Arctic from an afterthought to a central front in the new geopolitical view of the world. In this new geostrategy, Russia assumes a role as one of the maritime powers of the “rimland,” and the Russian Arctic becomes a new geographical pivot among the great powers.”

The article does much more, including cataloguing the challenges facing the Russian Coastal Border Guard, analyzing two Russian statements relevant to Arctic policy - the Foundations of State Policy of the Russian Federation for the Period up to 2020 and Beyond and the Transport Strategy of the Russian Federation to 2030 (available at doc.rzd.ru/) and suggesting elements for a regional adaptation of the Global Maritime Partnership initiative, “extended to include Arctic science, Arctic domain awareness, and ocean resource management.”

Anyone interested in Arctic Mapping and the Law of the Sea will find much to value in Antrim’s article, and in her July 2, 2010, Council on Foreign Relations interview regarding "Law of Sea Implications for Gulf Spill." To her excellent CFR discussion of LOS issues related to the spill should be added the existence of, and renewed interest in, the ARCTIC COUNCIL ARCTIC OFFSHORE OIL AND GAS GUIDELINES, endorsed by the Arctic Council in April 2009.

*All quotations are from Antrim’s article. Caitlyn L. Antrim is the executive director of the Rule of Law Committee for the Ocean s.

Broken Icebreakers

2010-06-25T12:51:00.000-07:00

Andrew Revkin reports in today’s DotEarth that “America’s Heavy Icebreakers are both Broken Down.”

The Polar Sea and the Polar Star are now both out of service, leaving the USCGC Healy as the only functioning U.S. icebreaker. Healy, though not classed as a "heavy icebreaker," is very much in service and currently in the arctic ice (hourly images from above the bridge are accessible here).

Despite calls as recently as February 2010 from Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen, in one of his last major speeches before retiring from the post, indicating the urgent need for new icebreakers, the U.S. has no immediate plans for building new icebreakers and the FY 2011 Budget did not address the issue.

By contrast, Canada is pursuing a $3.1 billion dollar project to build five new ice-class vessels, with delivery of the first vessel anticipated in 2014. Another $4.3 billion is necessary for operation and maintenance over the expected 25-year life span. These and other details appear in a December 2009 Report of the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans of the Canadian Senate, “Controlling Canada’s Arctic Waters: Role of the Canadian Coast Guard.” Among the Report’s recommendations is “that Canada develop a long-term plan and provide the funding necessary for the acquisition of a suitable number of new multi-purpose polar icebreakers capable of operating year-round it its Arctic Archipelago and on the continental shelf.” The SCFO Report details these plans, and the role of existing Canadian icebreakers in maritime awareness, at pp. 25 ff.

Admiral Allen is of course now heading up the federal response to the fatal BP Gulf Horizon explosion and ongoing spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It bears mention that the next recommendation in the same Canadian Report is "that the Canadian Coast Guard identify areas in the Arctic at high risk of a major cargo or oil spill, assess current response capabilities, and communicate the results of the assessment to Canada's northern communities. The Government of Canada should provide funding to train northern residents in the use of oil spill containment equipment for oil spills close to shore."

For a 2008 story on the National Science Foundation assessment that the U.S. needs three polar icebreakers, see the April 2008 posting at Arctic Economics.

Notice of Public Review and Comment Period for NOAA’s Arctic Vision and Strategy EXTENDED to JUNE 25, 2010

2010-05-11T18:59:00.000-07:00

Extended comment submission deadline: Friday, 25 June 2010

Download the document at:
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/docs/arctic_strat_2010.pdf

For further information, please go to:
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/

. . . . . . .

NOAA, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, requests comments on its "Arctic Vision and Strategy", which was published in April 2010 and is available here. The full notice of this public review and comment period is available in the Federal Register and sets June 10, 2010 deadline for submission of comments.

The NOAA Arctic Vision and Strategy document (AVS) envisions an Arctic where:
“• Conservation, management, and use are based on sound science and support healthy, productive, and resilient communities and ecosystems; and
• The global implications of Arctic change are better understood and predicted.” (AVS, p. 5) NOAA has identified six priority goals as “needed to realize this vision”:

1) Forecast Sea Ice
2) Strengthen Foundational Science to Understand and Detect Arctic Climate and Ecosystem Changes
3) Improve Weather and Water Forecasts and Warning
4) Enhance International and National Partnerships
5) Improve Stewardship and Management of Ocean and Coastal Resources in the Arctic
6) Advance Resilient and Healthy Arctic Communities and Economies.

The document draws connections to the U.S. extended continental shelf mapping efforts (NOAA is a co-vice chair of the ECS Task Force). Acknowledging it to be beyond the scope of ECS efforts, the document nonetheless refers to "collecting the baseline ecosystem-level data [which] would enhance the existing information and provide the U.S. with a better understanding of the nature, extent, and economic value of [ECS] resources, as well as insights into issues such as climate variability; marine ecosystems; and undiscovered or unconventional energy, biological, and mineral resources." (AVS, p. 17)

The Arctic Vision document identifies Guiding Principles for NOAA Arctic activities in the next five years, as well as Goals and Strategies. The Principles section opens with the notable phrase “the U.S. and its partners,” continuing on to say that they “will greatly benefit from enhanced and better coordinated NOAA efforts in the Arctic region.” The phrase “international partners” appears five times in this short document, which is replete with references to international implications of actions in the Arctic and the need for coordinated activity to address changes there (as detailed in the document’s discussion of fourth priority area identified above).

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Tracy Rouleau, Office of Program Planning and Integration, at strategic.planning@noaa.gov or (301) 713–1622 x187.

US and Canada scheduled to map the Arctic Continental Shelf together again in 2010; Canada also maps with AUVs

2010-05-10T20:14:00.000-07:00

The icebreakers USCGC Healy and CCGS Louis S. Saint-Laurent are scheduled to sail together again this summer, continuing the bilateral Canadian-US cooperation in mapping the extended continental shelf (ECS) in the Arctic Ocean. This summer’s joint efforts will focus on the Canada Basin.

The Healy ECS mapping cruise is scheduled from August 2-September 2, 2010, so as to coincide with the Louis’ schedule.The Healy’s proposed cruise track and proposed cruise plan are both posted on icefloe.net which provides science planning information for the U.S. icebreaker fleet. The U.S. Chief Scientist for HLY 1002 is Brian Edwards of the U.S. Geological Survey, Western Coastal & Marine Geology Program.

General information on the Canadian ECS effort is available from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT). As reported by both DFAIT and in the media, this spring Canadian scientists have also been gathering data for Canada's ECS submission from their base at the Borden Island Ice Camp, in Canada’s western Arctic archipelago. In April they first deployed a Canadian-made autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), the Arctic Explorer, designed and built by International Submarine Engineering Ltd (ISE) of Port Coquitiam, B.C. Media reports tell of the AUV obtaining detailed multi-beam images of the Sever Spur on a three-day deployment. The Arctic Explorer is one of two such AUVs that Canada acquired in September 2009 to map its Arctic seabed and is equipped with a 200 kHz multi-beam sonar.

Canada is expected to make its submission to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf in December 2013, so as to meet its deadline under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. The United States has not yet acceded to the Convention.

International Governance and Regulation of the Marine Arctic - WWF Report proposes treaty framework

2010-05-01T13:18:00.000-07:00

In the same week that Russia and Norway announced their agreement on a longstanding maritime boundary dispute in the Barents Sea and the Arctic Ocean, WWF released a new iteration of its ongoing study International Governance and Regulation of the Marine Arctic [PDF].

The document released this week builds on the initial 2009 Gap Analysis and now combines three elements: I. Overview and Gap Analysis, II. Options for Addressing Identified Gaps and III. A Proposal for a Legally Binding Instrument. The proposed instrument seeks to move beyond the position that the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and existing political and legal framework are adequate to address the rapidly changing situation in the Arctic.

The Report (III.§3.2) identifies eight basic features the framework instrument would exhibit, the first three of which are:
"• It would be a regional, legally binding framework instrument that complements and is compatible with the LOS Convention;
• The Arctic Council would become the primary body or forum of this instrument, with a mandate focused on providing strategic guidance rather than on regulation;
• The spatial mandate of the Arctic Council would be limited to the marine environment of the Arctic within (a) the area north of 60° North, (b) left undefined, or (c) the Arctic Ocean, as defined."

Part III of the Report also identifies which components of the Antarctic Treaty System the authors deem suitable for modification in an arctic agreement (e.g. use for peaceful purposes only) and which they do not (e.g. an indefinite ban on mineral resource activities).

The exhaustively researched Report analyzes numerous existing agreements that have the potential to serve as models, in part, for an Arctic marine environment framework instrument.

The Report was commissioned by the WWF International Arctic Program and authored by Timo Koivurova and Erik Molenaar.

Norway and Russia agree on the bilateral maritime delimitation in the Barents Sea and the Arctic Ocean

2010-04-27T08:33:00.000-07:00

UPDATE 7 JUNE 2011 - TREATY RATIFIED, WILL ENTER INTO FORCE 7 JULY 2011:

Russia and Norway have now both ratified their treaty "concerning Maritime Delimitation and Cooperation in the Barents Sea and the Arctic Ocean, which will enter into force on July 7, 2011. See Norway, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Press release, June 7, 2011, "Norway and Russia ratify treaty on maritime delimitation."

UPDATE 15 SEPTEMBER 2010, MURMANSK:

Norway and Russia sign the "Treaty between the Kingdom of Norway and the Russian Federation concerning Maritime Delimitation and Cooperation in the Barents Sea and the Arctic Ocean." The press release from the Office of the Prime Minister of Norway also links to the Norwegian (Overenskomst mellom Kongeriket Norge og Den Russiske Føderasjon om maritim avgrensning og samarbeid i Barentshavet og Polhavet) and Russian (Читайте текст Договора на русском языке) language originals of the agreement, as well as an English language translation and a map of the agreed delimitation.

The following press release is courtesy of the IBRU int-boundaries discussion list. Other reports appear in Prime-TASS, the New York Times and the Associated Press.

http://www.norwaypost.no/news/stoltenberg-a-historic-day.html

BEGIN QUOTE
Stoltenberg: - A historic day!

Tuesday, 27 April 2010 12:03

An agreement has been reached between the Norwegian and the Russian negotiating delegations on the bilateral maritime delimitation in the Barents Sea and the Arctic Ocean.

This was annouced by Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg at a joint press conference with Russian President Dimitrij Medvedev on Tuesday.

“This is a historic day. We have reached a breakthrough in the most important outstanding issue between Norway and the Russian Federation,” said Prime Minister Stoltenberg.

The agreement was officially announced later Tuesday in a joint statement by the Foreign Ministers of Norway and the Russian Federation. It is based on the joint statement, which Prime Minister Stoltenberg and President Medvedev will sign later in the day.

According to the joint statement, the two negotiating delegations have reached agreement on the maritime delimitation between Norway and the Russian Federation in the Barents Sea and the Arctic Ocean, which has been the object of extensive negotiations over the last 40 years. The negotiations have now been completed, but some technical control work remains before the final treaty is ready for signature. After that it will be put before the two countries’ national assemblies.*

“The agreement is the result of meticulous efforts on the basis of international law, and is an expression of the great importance attached to international law by Norway and the Russian Federation as coastal states. The negotiated solution appears to be well balanced and will
benefit both our countries,” said Prime Minister Stoltenberg.

The recommended solution involves a maritime delimitation line that divides the overall disputed area of about 175 000 square kilometres in two parts of approximately the same size. In addition to a maritime delimitation line, the two delegations recommend the adoption of treaty provisions that would maintain and enhance cooperation with regard to fisheries and management of hydrocarbon resources In the field of hydrocarbon cooperation, the two delegations recommend the adoption of detailed rules and procedures ensuring efficient and responsible management of their hydrocarbon resources in cases where any single oil or gas deposits should extend across
the delimitation line.

“Agreement on the maritime delimitation line opens up new prospects for cooperation in the north on resources, trade and industry, employment opportunities and people-to-people cooperation across our common border. This is a historic day, especially for our populations in the north. I want to extend my thanks to our two Foreign Ministers and the negotiators for their extensive efforts, which have now proved successful,” said Mr Stoltenberg.
END QUOTE (*emphasis added)

Thanks to Ilan Kelman for posting to the IBRU int-boundaries discussion list.

Further Beaufort Sea boundary developments

2010-03-09T14:02:00.000-08:00

Update: See the September 27, 2011 post for information on technical discussions anticipating resolution of Beaufort Sea maritime boundary.

May 12, 2010 update: Canada's Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon, speaking at the 40th Annual Washington Conference on the Americas, publicly invited the United States to begin negotiations to resolve the Beaufort Sea boundary, as reported in the Montreal Gazette.

As originally posted in March 2010:

"Our Government will also work with other northern countries to settle boundary disagreements."

     Her Excellency the Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean, Canada's Governor General, March 3, 2010 Federal Speech from the Throne.

The Speech from the Throne makes no mention of specific boundary disputes but adds weight to comments from the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade in late February that movement toward resolution of the Beaufort Sea dispute is desirable.

A workshop held in Anchorage on March 6, 2010, provided a venue for U.S. and Canadian international law experts and others to discuss possible paths toward resolution of the Beaufort Sea boundary. Media reports of the workshop offer graphics (see "Photo 2" and below) illustrating how the positions Canada and the U.S. have traditionally espoused with respect to the disputed boundary landward of the 200 nautical mile EEZ limit may in fact be to their detriment seaward of that line with respect to the extended continental shelf.  Historically Canada has taken the position that the 141st land meridian should extend into the Beaufort Sea landward of the 200 nautical mile EEZ, while the U.S. has argued for an equidistance line that runs to the east of that meridian.**  The workshop was organized by Professor Michael Byers, University of British Columbia, with the assistance of the Institute of the North in Anchorage.

In keeping with the well-managed character of the Beaufort Sea boundary disagreement, Canada and the United States cooperated on joint scientific cruises to map the Arctic continental shelf in 2008 and 2009, and will do so again this summer. Bathymetric and other data gathered on joint and individual cruises have begun to make more evident the potential for both countries to extend their continental shelf seaward of their respective EEZs. However, more data is needed before any conclusions can be drawn as to the extent of their respective shelves or of any overlap.

For possible approaches to the dispute see "Filling an Arctic Gap: Legal and Regulatory Possibilities for Canadian-U.S. Cooperation in the Beaufort Sea".

**NOTE: Neither Canada nor the U.S. has stated any official position nor made any "claim" regarding the boundary seaward of 200 nautical miles.

Image Credit: Sovereign Geographic.
Click image to enlarge.
Coalter@sovereigngeographic.com 202.905.5820

Canada favors resolution of Canada-US Beaufort Sea joint maritime boundary

2010-02-21T17:11:00.000-08:00

Canada and the United States have long agreed to disagree about the location of their shared maritime boundary in the Arctic’s Beaufort Sea. The disputed area involves some 6,250 square nautical miles (21,436-square kilometres) north of the Alaska/Yukon border. Diplomats from both countries consistently describe the disagreement as “well-managed.”

On February 17, 2010, Catherine Loubier, a spokeswoman for Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, told Canwest News Service that "Canada favours a resolution of the dispute. The issue has been well-managed by Canada and the U.S. and will be resolved on its own merits when both parties are ready to do so." Speaking of the joint Canadian-U.S. continental shelf mapping cruises in summers 2008 and 2009* she observed: "The information collected so far suggests there may be a potential overlap of the Canadian and U.S. extended continental shelves in this area” and that the "extent of the overlap is not yet known. It may make sense to resolve the maritime boundary and any extended continental shelf overlaps at the same time."

For one map of the disputed area, see David H. Gray, Canada’s Unresolved Maritime Boundaries, IBRU Boundary and Security Bulletin Autumn 1997, p. 63.

For the full news report see Beaufort Sea Breakthrough.

For possible approaches to the dispute see "Filling an Arctic Gap: Legal and Regulatory Possibilities for Canadian-U.S. Cooperation in the Beaufort Sea".

For articles discussing other legal and political aspects of Canada's Arctic seabed, see volume 34, Vermont Law Review (2009).

*The joint Canadian-US mapping cruises are detailed throughout this blog (see links in the right hand margin), at the US ECS Project website, and at the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping-Joint Hydrographic Center at University of New Hampshire/NOAA website.

The Arctic in the proposed "Interim Framework for Effective Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning" of the U.S. Ocean Policy Task Force

2009-12-15T11:19:00.000-08:00

On December 14, 2009, the U.S. Interagency Ocean Policy Task Forc e released a proposed "Interim Framework for Effective Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning" (dated December 9, 2009). The Framework is now open for a 60-day public comment period, through Friday, February 12, 2010.* As discussed in an earlier entry, the Task Force issued an Interim Report in September 2009, as part of its mandate to work towards a national Ocean Policy.

Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning, or CMSP, is one of the nine priority areas identified in the September 2009 Interim Report (so are "Changing Conditions in the Arctic - see p. 6 of that Report). Of CMSP, the proposed Interim Framework states: "CMSP is a comprehensive, adaptive, integrated, ecosystem-based, and transparent spatial planning process, based on sound science, for analyzing current and anticipated uses of ocean, coastal, and Great Lakes areas."

The proposed Interim Framework contains at least two points relevant to the Arctic:

1. ALASKAN LMEs. The proposed Framework adopts Large Marine Ecosystems (LMEs) as the basic planning unit for CMSP. Alaska is assigned five - almost half - of the eleven LMEs that the Framework identifies in U.S. ocean and coastal waters. The five Alaskan LMEs are the West Bering Sea, East Bering Sea, Chukchi Sea, Beaufort Sea, and the Gulf of Alaska. As the Framework states in footnote 3: "Given the geographic breadth and multiple LME’s encompassed by the Alaska/Arctic Region, there would be flexibility to develop sub-regional CMS Plans (e.g., Arctic CMS Plan and Gulf of Alaska CMS Plan)."

2. SCIENCE-BASED INFORMATION and TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE. The Task Force says of the proposed Framework that "Scientific data, information and knowledge, as well as relevant traditional knowledge, will be the underpinning of the regionally developed plans."

* To make a comment on the proposed Interim Framework, visit the Task Force website comment submission page, which may take a few seconds to load.

SCAR releases "Antarctic Climate Change and the Environment"

2009-12-01T11:51:00.000-08:00

Those working on issues relating to the Arctic know of the tremendous influence the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) has had far beyond the Arctic since its release in 2004 by the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) and the Arctic Council. A southern hemisphere equivalent has now been published.

In a December 1, 2009, press release the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) publicizes one of its major contributions to the International Polar Year 2007-2008: Antarctic Climate Change and the Environment (ACCE). Although the report was printed in October in order to be delivered to heads of delegation in advance of the 15th Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Conference on Climate Change, and parts have been published as scientific papers (in Reviews of Geophysics, January 2009), the electronic version is now being publicized broadly.

Antarctic Climate Change and the Environment was edited by Turner, J., Bindschadler, R.A., Convey, P., Di Prisco, G., Fahrbach, E., Gutt, J., Hodgson, D.A., Mayewski, P.A., and Summerhayes, C.P.

As publicity materials indicate, "the report is available from the ACCE page of the SCAR website at http://www.scar.org/publications/occasionals/acce.html, along with copies of the press release, and a document detailing the main 10 points from the report."

US Navy issues "Arctic Road Map"

2009-11-30T06:30:00.000-08:00

Announced earlier this year, the U.S. Navy has now published its "Arctic Road Map."

The Oceanographer of the Navy, Rear Admiral David Titley, discussed plans for the Roadmap at the Naval Academy last June, as part of the 3rd Symposium on the Impacts of an Ice-Diminishing Arctic on Naval and Maritime Operations (his presentation is available at the symposium website). The road map was produced by the Navy's "Task Force Climate Change," (highlighted on National Public Radio in July 2009) which collaborates with the US Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Arctic Council Working Groups and NOAA issue annual Arctic Report Card for 2009

2009-10-27T16:45:00.000-07:00

An international group of scientists contributed to the peer-reviewed annual Arctic Report Card, issued this month under the auspices of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and working groups within the Arctic Council -- the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP), Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna (CAFF), and Circumpolar Biodiversity Monitoring Program (CBMP). The Report Card summary notes the following key points for 2009:

"Atmosphere
Large scale wind patterns impacted by loss of summer sea ice

Sea Ice
Multi-year sea ice is being replaced by first year sea ice

Ocean
Upper ocean remains warm and less salty

Land
Increased runoff in Siberia, less snow in North America

Greenland
Ice sheet loss continues

Biology
High Arctic species impacted by loss of sea ice"

The Report Card contains sections on Atmosphere, Sea Ice Cover, Ocean, Land, Permafrost, Terrestrial Snow, Glaciers outside Greenland, Greenland, Biology, The State of Wild Reindeer Herds, Marine Mammals, Murres, Fisheries in the Bering Sea, The State of the Barents Sea Ecosystem, The State of Char in the Arctic, and Goose Populations. Peer review is conducted by topical experts of the Climate Experts Group (AMAP) of the Arctic Council.

The full report, Richter-Menge, J., and J.E. Overland, Eds., 2009: Arctic Report Card 2009, http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard, can be downloaded in PDF form.

The Arctic and the proposed U.S. National Ocean Policy

2009-10-02T14:20:00.000-07:00

The September 2009 Interim Report* of the U.S. Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force proposes a National Ocean Policy (pp. 13-17), and identifies “Changing Conditions in the Arctic” (pp. 7, 26, 37) as one of nine priority areas for which strategic action plans should be developed (p. 28). The proposed Policy incorporates the “precautionary approach” and “best available science” among its principles. The Interim Report is open for a 30-day public review and comment period, which ends October 16, 2009.

*NOTE: If the URL for the Interim Report is not responsive, NOAA summarizes some of the report's highlights here.

In the case of the Arctic, the Interim Report calls for the strategic action plan to address “Improvement of the scientific understanding of the Arctic system and how it is changing in response to climate-induced and other changes.” (p. 37).

The Interim Report’s focus on the Arctic is notable and welcome, given the relative dearth of references in other documents leading up to the proposed National Ocean Policy. The slow process leading to an integrated, ecosystem-based national ocean policy traces most recently to two documents: the independent Pew Oceans Commission report in 2003, America’s Living Oceans: Charting a Course for Sea Change, and the 2004 report of the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, titled Ocean Blueprint for the 21^st Century (whose arctic focus was on fossil-based fuel sources and contaminants concentration). The U.S. Commission was established under the Oceans Act of 2000, PL 106-256, with the mandate to “make recommendations for [a] coordinated and comprehensive national ocean policy.” The Act also required the President to prepare a formal response to those recommendations, which reply took the form of the 2004 U.S. Ocean Action Plan (containing one general reference to the Arctic Ocean). President George W. Bush established the U.S. Committee on Ocean Policy (not to be confused with the Commission on Ocean Policy, above) as part of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) by Executive Order EO 13366, effective December 21, 2004.

The Interim Report of September 2009 is a work product of the temporary Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force established by President Obama in a June 12, 2009 memorandum on National Policy for the Oceans, Our Coasts and the Great Lakes. The Task force members comprise senior officials from departments, agencies and offices represented on the Committee on Ocean Policy. CEQ Chair Nancy Sutley toured the U.S. Arctic in August 2009 with NOAA Administrator Dr. Jane Lubchenco, U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Thad Allen, and others.

A New Seamount

2009-09-01T13:14:00.003-07:00

On the midnight watch we passed again by the seamount discovered last week:

Polar stereographic image (75deg N), 6X vertical exaggeration, measured in meters. For other images visit LDEO

To chart our course we combine information from a variety of maps and data sources. Very little of the historical information we rely on was produced with GPS or the kind of multibeam echosounder equipment we are mapping with on HEALY, which provides very detailed images of the areas being mapped. Thus, last week we had only a previous contour line to indicate that a small rise might protrude from the seafloor in that spot. The earlier maps gave no indication that the feature would rise more than 1,000 meters or .6 miles from the seafloor, which is required for a seamount. Christine Hedge, the NOAA Teacher at Sea (from Carmel Middle School, Indiana), was standing watch when she noticed a feature emerging somewhat starboard of the planned ship track, and contacted the scientists in charge who redirected the ship so we could map the feature more completely.

While the seamount rises almost 1,100 meters from the seafloor, its peak is still over one and a half miles below the surface of the ocean (rising from 3710 meters to 2622 meters; the 3791 mark shown in the image above refers to the surrounding seafloor, not to the base of the seamount itself). It is located at 81 degrees 31.57N 134 degrees 28.80W, is approximately 14 nautical miles long, 4 nautical miles wide, and oriented N-S. Other images of the seamount may be found at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.

Larry A. Mayer and Andy Armstrong, of the UNH Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping/NOAA Joint Hydrographic Center, co-chief scientists for HLY0905, were also leading a mapping cruise on board USCG HEALY in 2003 when the feature now named Healy Seamount (after the vessel and its namesake, Captain Michael Healy) was discovered at 78º40’N, 158º 00’W.

Of the new seamount, Mayer says, in Andrew Revkin's DotEarth report:

"The new seamount is small but unusual in its isolation (at least we think it’s isolated — remember we didn’t know it was there - and I suspect there are many others that we don’t know about) — but this one is sitting in the middle of nowhere in the abyssal plain and will only add to the mysteries of the origin of this part of the Arctic."

Source: NYT DotEarth, September 10, 2009

Operating in Tandem

2009-08-31T14:34:00.000-07:00

A year ago, on the HLY0805 leg of Arctic Summer West, after three weeks we had completed our mapping for the summer and were preparing to pack up and disembark. This year, as we enter our fourth week on board HEALY for 0905, we still have the luxury of two and half weeks to continue our work with the Canadian LOUIS S. ST-LAURENT. I continue to marvel at how different one day is from the next, even as we keep a routine watch and regimented daily schedule. And even as the weather has been an almost unbroken string of fog-filled days and nights. Visibility waxes and wanes, but a number of you following the photos on the Aloft Con camera (see link upper right) have commented on the, well, “consistency” of our weather.

Left: The Louis S. St-Laurent seen through the fog

The weather is in stark contrast to the brilliantly clear, light-infused days of HLY0805 and is revealing a different – and evidently more typical – picture of August weather in this part of the Arctic Ocean: fog and more fog, snow, some rain, sleet and, more rare, hoar frost. Tookaq Neakok, the community observer from the North Slope Borough who also traveled with us last year, says his family back on shore is reporting rain in Barrow. Ice conditions have been generally acceptable for mapping (you can see our tracks using the upper right links) both near the Chukchi Cap and across the Canada Basin, northward to our northernmost point on 2009-08-28 (roughly 122º70’044 W 84º22’211 N). Nonetheless it has been especially useful on the northern portion of our joint track to have the ability to break ice for one another. Helo transfers of Coast Guard and scientific crew between ships have also been fruitful.

How Geoscientists Think - and Lawyers

2009-08-14T12:49:00.000-07:00

The Louis S. St. Laurent and the Healy are now underway together, having rendezvoused on August 10th. Three members of the Healy science crew are blogging on day-to-day science operations on board: Barbara Moore, for the Extended Continental Shelf Interagency Task Force, Christine Hedges, a NOAA Teacher at Sea, and Jon Pazol for the Armada Project.

Being surrounded again by marine geophysicists is a good reminder of the ways in which our different disciplines see the world. An excellent piece in the August 4, 2009 EoS, How Geoscientists Think and Learn (and the Supplementary Material published online) is especially illuminating with respect to how their spatial and temporal perceptions differ from the general population, emphasizing perceptions of geological time, spatial thinking and understanding of complex systems. The piece is one result of the Synthesis of Research on Thinking & Learning in the Geosciences Project, Kim Kastens, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Cathy Manduca, SERC, Carleton College, PIs.

Lawyers and legal academics are also building on developments in cognitive science, but more to investigate its implications for legal and social policy than to understand how lawyers themselves think (perhaps even this difference in how the two disciplines use cognitive science says something about our view of the world and our roles in it?). The Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center is self-described as a resource for those “with an interest in understanding the implications of social psychology, social cognition, and other related mind sciences for law, policymaking, and legal theory.” Also of note is Law, Mind and the Brain, by Michael Freeman and Oliver Goodenough, a Law and Mind Project contributor and a Vermont Law School colleague, who investigates how cognitive science is changing Anglo-American approaches to responsibility.

In Barrow: One Year Anniversary; Forest Fires in Fairbanks; Recent Developments in Law, Science, Policy

2009-08-07T11:59:00.001-07:00

Dear Readers,

Greetings from Barrow (more specifically from BASC and the Ilisagvik cafeteria), where we are preparing to transfer to HEALY today, for its 09-05 cruise. Many operations in and around Barrow have been delayed by forest fires near Fairbanks and the ensuing transport-domino effect up and down Alaska’s airways.

First, thank you for your enthusiastic support over the last year. You have visited from many places around the U.S. and the globe. Because my postings will become less regular once we are on board, and through mid-September when we are scheduled to disembark, I wanted to take time now to thank you for reading along since I began this weblog one year ago, as we embarked on Healy 08-05.

Over the next few weeks my focus will be more on science operations on board and less on the policy and news I have tried to emphasize over the past 12 months. However, I wanted to send one last short listing of links about important developments in the last week.

LAW

U.S. and Canada: As many of you know, Alaska’s Senator Mark Begich introduced seven arctic-related bills this week. As Institute of the North points out in its Top of the World Telegraph, the bills are called “the Inuvikput legislation after the Inupiaq expression meaning “the place where we live.” In Canada, “Bill C-3, an Act to amend the Arctic Waters Pollution Prevention Act, came into force on August 1, 2009, effectively doubling the area of Canada’s jurisdiction to enforce certain environmental and shipping regulations, from 100 to 200 nautical miles.

SCIENCE

With the late summer /early fall arctic research season in high gear, more stories about potential effects of global change are making their way into the media. As always one needs to sort carefully through the range of reporting available online. I offer just one example, highlighted by the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, which dubs itself as offering “peer review within science journalism.” The Tracker questions aspects of report this week in the New Scientist feed that the Beaufort Gyre could contribute to exponentially increased pollution of the Arctic Ocean as temperatures warm and ship traffic increases. Not surprisingly, the blogosphere picks up the dramatic headlines without always questioning the conclusions.

POLICY

For readers not yet acquainted with the Federation of American Scientist project on Government Secrecy, I recommend its Secrecy News blog as an excellent source of information about data and declassification policies within the U.S. government. Recent posts include reference to the Department of Interior press release that “some 700 classified images of Arctic sea ice have been declassified and released.”

With thanks one last time from shore, I look forward to updating you from time to time between now and September 16 about life and work on HEALY 09-05. Barbara Moore of the US ECS Task Force as well as two teachers, Christine Hedge and Jon Pazol, will also be blogging from HEALY.

Canada and the United States announce details of joint Louis-Healy mission

2009-07-29T08:20:00.000-07:00

The Canadian Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Natural Resources and Fisheries and the U.S. Department of State, Office of Ocean and Polar Affairs, have released the details of the joint icebreaker mission to map portions of the Arctic Ocean continental shelf (reported on in last week’s entry). See the State Department announcement and reports of the Canadian statement.

Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Lawrence Cannon, Minister of Natural Resources Lisa Raitt and Fisheries Minister Gail Shea all emphasized the exceptional partnership between the two countries, Shea also touching on the millions of dollars each country saves by working together on mapping the Arctic Ocean.

Readers who also subscribe to Caitlyn Antrim’s Ocean Law Daily will already know of the new Canadian Northern Strategy report and supporting website, launched this month.

Press reactions are already flowing in on both the joint mapping details and the Northern Strategy. Not suprisingly, the Canadian press is devoting much more attention than its U.S. counterparts to these developments. The New York Times report ties the mapping story to the Obama administration’s desire to ratify the Law of the Sea Convention.

Arctic Shipping: Also in the NYT (DotEarth blog) this week are reactions to Andrew Revkin's story about Trans-Arctic shipping. Traffic is increasing, as documented formally by the Arctic Council's AMSA (Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment 2009) as well as anecdotally. According to an audio report from Alaska Public Radio Network, as transmitted by the Top of the World Telegraph, the waters off of Barrow, which has no deepwater port, are crowded this week: "At least one icebreaker and three sailboats attempting to navigate the Northwest Passage have been anchored off of the northern city while crews stock up on supplies." The Telegraph is prepared by the Anchorage-based Institute of the North, which was also integrally involved in AMSA.

Canadian and U.S. Icebreakers Poised for Joint UNCLOS Mapping of Arctic Ocean

2009-07-18T10:51:00.000-07:00

The Canadian Coast Guard Cutter Louis S. St-Laurent is scheduled to embark Halifax, Nova Scotia, on Monday, July 20, en route to an early August rendezvous with the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy (WAGB-20) in the Arctic Ocean. There the two vessels will begin their second joint Canadian-United States mission to map the Arctic Ocean under the process established by Article 76 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The Healy left its home port of Seattle earlier this month and is currently (July 18) transiting from the Gulf of Alaska along the Aleutian Peninsula to the Bering Sea.

Both ships can be tracked online, the Louis here and the Healy here.

Accounts of the 2008 joint cruise are available from the U.S. Geological Survey (Jon Childs and Deborah Hutchinson) and the U.S. Coast Guard (Captain F.J. Sommer), and in academic publications (e.g. Eos, D. Hutchinson /H.Ruth Jackson et al). A complete Cruise Report (Larry A. Mayer and Andy Armstrong) from the Healy 0805 solo cruise just prior to meeting the Louis in 2008 is available from the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping/Joint Hydrographic Center at University of New Hampshire (CCOM/JHC), as is data from all CCOM/JHC Law of the Sea cruises. The two countries work together on mapping while abiding by their different approaches to how much of the data can be made public; some have called for Canada to return to greater transparency with respect to its seafloor data.

The 2009 Cruise Plan for the Healy component (0905) of this year’s joint cruise is available from Icefloe.net, as is the Joint Healy-Louis Science plan for last year’s cruise. Natural Resources Canada provides an excellent overview of the Canadian UNCLOS Bathymetric Mapping Program prepared by J. Richard MacDougall, Wendell Sanford and Jacob Verhoef for the Canadian Hydrographic Conference and National Surveyors Conference 2008. Finally, an e-brochure recently published by the U.S. Minerals Management Service discusses the basics of the U.S. effort to map its extended continental shelf (a term of convenience, it should be recalled, that does not appear in the Law of the Sea Convention).

The Louis S. St-Laurent is named after Louis Stephen St. Laurent (1882-1973), who served as Canada’s Minister of Justice 1941-46 and Secretary of State for External Affairs 1946-48 before becoming Prime Minister of Canada in 1948, a post which he held until 1957.

The Healy is named after Michael Augustine Healy (1939-1904) the U.S. Coast Guard’s first African-American captain, who commanded several vessels that patrolled the vast waters off of the new Alaskan territory after its purchase from the Russian Empire in 1867.

Lavrov and Clinton to coordinate joint Russian-US Presidential Commission

2009-07-07T17:25:00.001-07:00

The Barents Observer reported July 6, 2009, on the joint commission created by Presidents Medvedev and Obama as part of the latter’s visit this week to the Russian Federation. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will serve as Commission Coordinators, overseeing its 13 working groups. While the Arctic was not named specifically in either the Kremlin or White House Fact Sheets about the Commission, at least two working groups have the potential to address issues relevant to arctic mapping and scientific cooperation. The Energy and Environment Working Group will be headed by Sergei I. Shmatko, Minister of Energy, and Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy, and the Science and Technologies Working Group by Andrei A. Fursenko, Minister of Education and Science, and John Holdren, Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy. Mention of the Arctic was also notably absent from yesterday’s joint Medvedev-Obama Press Conference.

Given both countries’ emphases on the importance of scientific cooperation and/or continental shelf mapping in recent statements relevant to their respective interests in the Arctic (the United States Arctic Region Policy of January 2009, "The fundamentals of Russian state policy in the Arctic up to 2020 and beyond", and the Russian Maritime Strategy, anticipated this summer), it is to be hoped that the Lavrov-Clinton Commission will also lead to new opportunities for scientists from both countries working together in the Arctic.

Update July 8: In keeping with last week's entry, the Center for American Progress has pointed out that, contrary to misguided "land grab" perceptions, Russia is following agreed legal procedures in pursuing its continental shelf claims. The Center also integrates bilateral cooperation in the Arctic into its proposed new agenda and strategy for United States relations with the Russian Federation.

Also of note this week:

Also this week, USCGC HEALY embarked Seattle for the Arctic Ocean. You can follow the ship’s missions for the rest of Summer 2009 as it supports such research as deployment of oceanographic moorings and whale hydrophones (0904), and continental shelf mapping with the Canadian Coast Guard’s Louis St. Laurent (0905). As part of its Arctic West Summer cruise, the HEALY has already completed 2009 projects on the Bering Ecosystem.

On an (admittedly) unrelated but timely note about scientists in the Arctic, your blogger begs her readers’ indulgence in pointing them to a recent arctic tribute from researchers at Toolik Lake Field Station to a cultural icon, as well as information about GIS and other projects at this University of Alaska-Fairbanks research station.

Refuting Arctic Misconceptions and Misinformation

2009-06-23T14:09:00.000-07:00

On 22 June 2009, the London-based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) published a noteworthy article by Alastair Cameron, “The Arctic Uncovered: Refuting the Last Colonial Grab Theory.” The article (summarized here) appears in the institute’s monthly Newsbrief and is available for purchase at the RUSI website.

The article makes a short but useful contribution to correcting the rampant misconceptions in the media and elsewhere that the circumpolar Arctic states are heading for conflict or engaged in some form of land grab. Cameron disagrees that an “energy free-for-all” is underway in the Arctic, pointing to the fact that many of the major petroleum fields identified by the USGS in recent studies are believed to be within Russia’s EEZ. He lays out the orderly legal process by which states are gathering data under the Law of the Sea Convention for submission to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf; and speaks of “spirit of international co-operation which has so far been fostered through the Arctic Council and the Ilulissat Declaration.” He counters perceptions of a military buildup by speaking of the special challenges in the Arctic, observing that these are “best tackled in partnership” yet also speaks of the special and difficult relationship between NATO and Russia, querying what role the alliance should have in the High North. The complete article expands cogently but significantly on each of these points.

Camreron is Head, European Security Programme, of RUSI, which is self-described as an “independent think tank engaged in cutting edge defence and security research.” RUSI is based in London, with offices in Doha, Qatar and Washington, D.C.

Rep. Young introduces Bill HR 2865 in US House proposing increased icebreaker capacity

2009-06-16T08:13:00.000-07:00

On June 12, 2009, US Representative Don Young ( R ) Alaska introduced the HR 2865 Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment Implementation Act of 2009 in the US House of Representatives.

The Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment (AMSA)is a negotiated document of the Arctic Council approved by its Ministers at Tromsø, Norway, on April 29, 2009. AMSA is a comprehensively researched and detailed and usefully presented study of the multiple issues arising from melting ice and increasing shipping in the Arctic Ocean. AMSA lays out specific recommendations in three broad areas: Enhancing Arctic Marine Safety, Protecting Arctic People and the Environment, and Building the Arctic Marine Infrastructure.

Among the “Findings” in the Bill, HR 2865, are that:

“(7) The United States has continuing research, security, environmental, and commercial interests in the Arctic region that rely on the availability of icebreaker platforms of the Coast Guard. The Polar Class icebreakers commissioned in the 1970s are in need of replacement.”

and, that

“(9) Building new icebreakers, mustering international plans for aids to navigation and other facilities, and establishing coordinated shipping regulations and oil spill prevention and response capability through international cooperation, including the approval of the International Maritime Organization, requires long lead times. Beginning those efforts now, with the completion of an Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment by the eight-nation Arctic Council, is essential to protect United States interests given the extensive current use of the Arctic Ocean and adjacent seas by vessels of many nations.”

Importantly, the Bill places these icebreaking capacity questions in the international framework provided by the International Maritime Organization and emphasizes the need for circumpolar agreements to coordinate activities amongst the Arctic coastal and other seafaring states:

“SEC. 3. INTERNATIONAL MARITIME ORGANIZATION AGREEMENTS.

To carry out the purpose of this Act, the Secretary of the department in which the Coast Guard is operating shall work through the International Maritime Organization to establish agreements to promote coordinated action among the United States, Russia, Canada, Iceland, Norway, and Denmark and other seafaring and Arctic nations to ensure, in the Arctic—

(1) placement and maintenance of aids to navigation;

(2) appropriate icebreaking escort, tug, and salvage capabilities;

(3) oil spill prevention and response capability;

(4) maritime domain awareness, including long-range vessel tracking; and

(5) search and rescue.”

See also this unofficial Coast Guard blog entry on the proposed bill.

Alaska and Law of the Sea Convention: Senators Begich and Murkowski, Governor Palin, and the Alaskan Legislature all call for ratification of UNCLOS

2009-06-10T07:23:00.000-07:00

At the opening day of the 3rd Symposium on the Impacts of an Ice-Diminishing Arctic on Naval and Maritime Operations, sponsored by the National Ice Center and the US Arctic Research Commission, Senator Mark Begich (D-Alaska) called for ratification of the Law of the Sea Convention in his speech to the conference, as did Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) in a letter read on her behalf. Senator Begich proposed four additional policy recommendations, including U.S. ratification of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, designation of a US “Arctic Ambassador”, more investment in arctic science and, finally, strengthening arctic infrastructure, including “replacement of America’s aging ice-breakers, ensur[ing] that new Virginia class submarines are fully Arctic capable and new Coast Guard facilities from which to base aerial surveillance and emergency response capabilities” (from the related press release).

Over the past few months, Alaska’s governor and Legislature have also made separate calls for the U.S. Senate to ratify the Law of the Sea Convention. Governor Sarah Palin (R), spoke recently in a radio talk show of “having to do some educating there in conservative circles” about the importance of the treaty and reiterated that the U.S. has “got to be a player” by joining the Convention. In May, the Alaska Legislature passed Joint Resolution JJR 222, which details Alaska’s particular interest in US ratification of the treaty. Caitlyn Antrim, of OceanLaw.Org, has reported on both developments more extensively in her daily email service, saying of the Joint Resolution that it “was introduced on March 2nd, 2009, passed the House on April 8th, the Senate on April 16, was enrolled and transmitted to the Governor on May 27th. Hearings were held, out of state witnesses testified and the issue was debated in both houses, all in a period of less than three months. ”

The NIC/USARC conference at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis continues for two more days (June 9-11). For more information now, visit the conference website. Of special note is that of the speakers at the Symposium's opening day who mentioned the Law of the Sea Convention, every one of them called for U.S. ratification. These included the Hon. Dr. Jane Lubchenco, Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Administrator, and Admiral Thad W. Allen, Commandant, U.S. Coast Guard (USCG).

Cooperation, not conflict, in the Arctic: Postcript to COLP Conference in Seward; Conference Presentations posted

2009-05-29T16:20:00.000-07:00

As a postscript to the previous entry regarding Changes in the Arctic Environment and the Law of the Sea, the 33rd annual conference of The Center for Oceans Law and Policy (COLP), it is important to broadcast at least one message emphasized repeatedly by conference participants. That message is that there is great cooperation in the Arctic Ocean by littoral states, especially regarding submissions to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf and in managing existing disagreements regarding maritime boundaries.

John Norton Moore, Director of COLP, in an interview for Alaska Public Radio, emphasized “very substantial cooperation at an operational level, for example Coast Guard to Coast Guard and that governments are working closely together to try to resolve the remaining issues of boundary problems, for example." Moore emphasized that the eight arctic nations are “working on cooperative solutions.” This message was reiterated by Rear Admiral Arthur E Brooks, Commander, 17^th USCG District, in his description of cooperation between the U.S. and Canadian Coast Guards and by the many diplomatic representatives in attendance. For a related story from the Canadian perspective see the Petroleum News coverage of a Commonwealth North forum in Anchorage last week (discussing Canada's joint Arctic Ocean surveying with the U.S. and a separate memorandum of understanding with Denmark for joint surveying, as well as Canada's exchange of scientific data about Arctic Ocean ridges with Russia).

Powerpoint presentations from the Seward meeting are already posted on the COLP conference website; the papers will appear in the ongoing series of COLP conference reports published by Brill. The conference website also provides conference notes prepared by student rapporteur Lisa Campion of Vermont Law School, who is interning this summer at Trustees for Alaska and is a member of the VLS Institute for Energy and the Environment research team. Note: the book referenced in her notes on Ted McDorman’s talk is Transit Management in the Northwest Passage: Problems and Prospects, Cynthia Lamson and David L. VanderZwaag (eds), Cambridge University Press 1988 (ISBN 978-0-521-09337-8)

Of particular note for continental shelf mapping is the presentation by Brian Van Pay, Maritime Geographer with the U.S. Department of State Office of Ocean and Polar Affairs. His talk provided a comprehensive overview of the status of each arctic state’s preparations for and submissions to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (sketched in much less detail here). The presentations from the session dedicated to Continental Shelf Limits and Jurisdiction (offering a Canadian, United States, Danish and Russian perspective) are also available at the COLP conference web site.

Changes in the Arctic Environment - 33rd Annual Conference of the Center for Oceans Law and Policy (UVa), Seward, Alaska

2009-05-28T00:18:00.000-07:00

Changes in the Arctic Environment and the Law of the Sea, the 33rd annual conference of The Center for Oceans Law and Policy of the University of Virginia School of Law, concluded this past week (May 20-22, 2009) in Seward, Alaska, having drawn some 150 attendees from North America, Asia and Europe. A remarkable array of experts, many from the diplomatic corps and governmental agencies of Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Russia and the United States, addressed topics ranging from continental shelf limits in the Arctic Ocean to arctic offshore oil and gas, the Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment, and arctic living resources and marine biodiversity.

Of the many valuable contributions by the U.S. Department of State, Oceans and Fisheries Directorate, two are especially noteworthy:

David Balton, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Oceans and Fisheries, offered a clear articulation of the precautionary approach as embodied in the effective ban on commercial fishing in U.S. federal arctic waters contained in the Fishery Management Plan for Fishery Resources of the Arctic (under Secretarial review). The plan was adopted by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council in February 2009. NOAA recently opened the public comment period on the policy, which closes July 27, 2009. Balton framed the discussion as acknowledging that relatively little is known about arctic fisheries, and as thinking now about fisheries management later, a message similar to his remarks to the FAO radio agency in Rome earlier this year.

Margaret F. Hayes, Director, Office of Ocean and Polar Affairs, spoke of the evolving approach of the United States to extended continental shelf issues. In discussing the United States response to Russia’s 2001 submission to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf she observed that, in hindsight, the response reflected an inadequate appreciation of the complexities and subtleties of arctic geology.

The formal program included representatives of most arctic stakeholders, with the notable exception of the native Alaskan communities. Earl Kingik, member of the Native Village of Point Hope, Alaska and Inupiat subsistence hunter and whaler, graciously accepted an 11th-hour invitation to join the panel on Arctic Marine Environment and Biodiversity, a gesture all the more remarkable given that Point Hope was in the midst of whaling season.

One of the gems of the conference was the very last session on the Svalbard treaty area. Even under severe time limitations, Robin Churchill, University of Dundee and Geir Ulfstein, University of Norway, gave masterful overviews of the potential complexities of competing claims in Svalbard offshore areas and the status of maritime zones around Svalbard.

Canada was especially well represented amongst panelists and moderators (see the program for their individual topics): Nigel Bankes, Aldo Chircop, Rob Huebert, Suzanne Lalonde, Ron Macnab, Ted McDorman, Lori Ridgeway (Fisheries and Oceans Canada, in absentia) and David VanderZwaag. Those interested in Canadian - United States relations regarding ocean affairs are encouraged to consult McDorman's very recent and topical book, Salt Water Neighbors.

Notable for observers concerned about translating science for policy-makers was the common reaction from many in the audience to Stephen Macko’s sobering presentation on changes in the arctic marine environment. His emphasis on acidification of the oceans built on information known to most audience members in connection with coral reefs but emphasized the less often realized potential for that acidification to weaken the shells and protective layers of crustaceans and other forms of marine life.

This year the Law of the Sea Institute at Berkeley Law joined COLP as a sponsor of the annual conference.

Deadline Day at the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf

2009-05-20T19:09:00.000-07:00

May 13, 2009 was the deadline for all States Party who joined the LOS Convention prior to May 13, 1999, to file a submission with the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf. The Commission has now received fifty full submissions from 44 states, and another 42 filings of “Preliminary Information indicative of the Outer Limits of the Continental Shelf.”** The CLCS home page lists both the full submissions and the Preliminary Information filings.

Russia was the first Arctic Ocean coastal state to file a full submission relating to the Arctic Ocean, followed by Norway. (The Comission issued its Recommendations regarding the Norwegian submission in March 2009.) Denmark made a submission with respect to the area north of the Faroe Islands in April 2009 but was not subject to the May 2009 deadline, having joined the Convention in 2004. Neither Canada, which joined the Convention in 2003, nor the United States, which is not yet party, was subject to the May 2009 deadline.

Given the expense and difficulty of mapping the Arctic Ocean, joint mapping activities by various combinations of arctic states continue to take place. Whether any of this cooperation in mapping will lead to eventual joint submissions remains to be seen. At least one source, Canada’s Foreign Affairs spokesman Alain Cacchione, reports Russian interest in a joint submission by Canada, Denmark and Russia.

**The States Party to the Convention created the category of “Preliminary Information” in June 2008 (SPLOS/183) as it became clear that many states, especially those that lack access to the necessary technical support, would have difficulty meeting the May 2009 deadline. As mentioned here last month in the context of Somalia’s preliminary filing with the Commission, that decision was reached at the 18th Meeting of the States Party and specified that States could meet the ten-year filing deadline set out in Annex II to the Convention, article 4, by filing such Preliminary Information.

Martin Pratt, Director of Research, International Boundaries Research Unit, Department of Geography,

Durham University, first posted the following comments on the int-boundaries list

(http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/int-boundaries.html):

"The Bahamas provided preliminary information on the outer limit of the continental shelf on 12 May. So it may be that all coastal states with continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles and which became parties to UNCLOS before 13 May 1999 have fulfilled their obligations under Article 4 of Annex II of the Convention and subsequent agreements by States Parties."

This builds on Martin's earlier comments:

" By my count there are five States which (i) became parties to UNCLOS before 13 May 1999, (ii) are not zone-locked, and (iii) have not provided at least preliminary information to the CLCS, namely: Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Guatemala, the Marshall Islands and Nauru.

My sense is that of these five States only The Bahamas might have a physical continental shelf extending beyond 200 nautical miles, but I am open to correction on that point. Equatorial Guinea submitted preliminary information to the CLCS on 14 May, technically missing its ten-year deadline by a day. I don't suppose that it will be penalised when its full submission is eventually considered by the Commission! There are ten States Parties which are not zone-locked whose 10-year clock is still ticking: Nicaragua (deadline = May 2010), Maldives (November 2010), Bangladesh (July 2011), Madagascar (August 2011), Tuvalu (December 2012), Kiribati (February 2013), Canada (November 2013), Denmark (November 2014), Morocco (May 2017) and Liberia (September 2018). Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Peru and the USA are non-zone-locked which have yet to become parties
to UNCLOS."

Canadian Senate Committee calls for Canadian Leadership on Shelf Issues

2009-05-05T11:38:00.000-07:00

The Canadian Senate Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans has published a comprehensive report on maritime issues in the Canadian Arctic: "Rising to the Arctic Challenge: Report on the Canadian Coast Guard". While focusing on the Canadian Coast Guard, the 73-page report provides a thorough overview of issues ranging from continental shelf mapping to shipping, NORDREG registration, Resource Canada's Polar Continental Shelf Project and its support of international arctic research, search and rescue, continuous Inuit use and occupation of the Canadian Arctic, and environmental response in the Arctic.

The Report's discussion of Canadian and other continental shelf submissions in the Arctic Ocean emphasizes the need for international cooperation in mapping and later phases of determining the extent and division of the extended continental shelf (ECS). Just two excerpts indicate the scope and measured tone of the Report on ECS issues:

Excerpt I:

"Recommendation 5: The Committee recommends that Canada assume a leadership role in promoting international cooperation on: (a) issues relating to continental shelf claims; and (b) the development of a mandatory common code relating to the construction, manning and equipment of all vessels operating in the Arctic Ocean equal to Canada’s domestic standards. (See pages 43 and 44.)"

Excerpt II:

In discussing the mapping process, the Report states:

"Alan Kessel, Legal Adviser to [Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade], noted in his presentation to the Committee that Canada had been collaborating with other countries on mapping. This, he said, not only makes good economic and scientific sense, but will also help avoid the potential overlapping of national claims and reduce the need for future arbitration. Mr. Kessel also emphasized that the Article 76 process had been incorrectly portrayed in the media as an adversarial scramble for natural resources."

Notwithstanding this measured tone, the very first paragraphs of the Report mention potential challenges to Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic, including possible disagreements with neighbors over continental shelf submissions:

"Canada faces a number of actual and potential challenges to its sovereignty and sovereign rights in the Arctic. Canada and Denmark both claim ownership of Hans Island in the eastern Arctic. Canada also has longstanding maritime border delimitation problems with its circumpolar

neighbours. As for the continental shelf beyond the 200-nautical-mile Exclusive Economic Zone, the extent to which other Arctic coastal countries will lay national claims to the seabed will be a matter to be determined in accordance with specific rules laid down in the 1982

UN Law of the Sea Convention. However, disputes concerning overlapping claims could arise."

This April 2009 report follows on the Committee's excellent Interim Report from June 2008, available here and mentioned in an earlier post. The Committee's press release on the latest report provides useful background information on the latest report and links to its fourteen Recommendations.

Commission Acts on Norway's Arctic Ocean Extended Continental Shelf Submission, Accepts Somalia's Preliminary Information

2009-04-29T06:17:00.000-07:00

On April 15, 2009, Norway announced the favorable review of its submission regarding the Arctic Ocean extended continental shelf by the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS). The CLCS has issued its final recommendations on the Norwegian submission under Article 76 of the Law of the Sea Convention, but these are not yet available on the CLCS website list of recommendations. The CLCS recommendations cover Norway's submission with respect to the Barents Sea, the Arctic Ocean and the Norwegian Sea.

Russia was the first arctic state to make a submission to the CLCS regarding the [Central] Arctic Ocean, in 1997. However, in 2002 the CLCS "recommended that the Russian Federation make a revised submission in respect of its extended continental shelf in that area based on the findings contained in the recommendations." A/57/57/Add.1, Oceans and Law of the Sea, Report of the Secretary General, 2002, para. 41.

Norway also played a key role in supporting Somalia's April 8, 2009, submission of Preliminary Information indicative of the Outer Limits of its Continental Shelf to the CLCS. With Norway's technical assistance, Somalia became one of the first African countries to take advantage of the "preliminary information" filing option, adopted in June 2008, to help numerous developing countries meet their May 2009 filing deadline with the Commission. As noted in the Norwegian Goverment's press release, the submission was prepared in consultation with the Secretary General's Special Representative for Somalia acting on behalf of the Transitional Federal Government of the Somali Republic and with "the assistance of international law experts in the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, experts in the geosciences in the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate and experts from the UNEP Shelf Programme, represented by GRID-Arendal."

Somalia's two decades of civil war have engendered great suffering for its population and now allows piracy to thrive off its shores. It has continental Africa's longest coastline, at 3,025 kilometres (1,879.64 miles).

Ministerial Meeting of Arctic Council in Tromsø

2009-04-29T05:37:00.001-07:00

In conjunction with the Ministerial Meeting of Arctic Council, convened today, April 29, 2009, in Tromsø, Norway, Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg has laid out avenues for cooperation between the United States and other Arctic Council member states. Making special reference to the differing U.S. and Canadian positions on the Northwest Passage he indicated that the two countries could "work through" their differences. He also highlighted the opportunity for new forms of cooperation with Russia. The agenda and related documents for the Ministerial meeting can be accessed here.

Although the EU is seeking permanent observer status at the Arctic Council, the EU Commission decided not to send Commissioners in any official capacity to this year's Ministerial meeting. Canada is opposing EU observer status in part because of a ban on imported seal products expected to be passed by the European Parliament next week. The Commission's Communication on the EU and the Arctic Region, COM(2008) 763 final, published in November 2008, generated criticism from some arctic states, one unattributed source querying how Europeans would react were, say, Canada to issue a policy statement on the Mediterranean.

Other voices have recognized Europe's interest in the Arctic not only by virtue of the fact, as the Communication states, that "three EU member states Denmark (Greenland), Finland and Sweden — have territories in the Arctic [and t]wo other Arctic states — Iceland and Norway — are members of the European Economic Area." One such voice is Jessica Shadian who, writing in Canada's Policy Options, and elsewhere, acknowledges Europe's interests in the Arctic yet concludes that the "ultimate authorities" over the future course of the Arctic must be "the Arctic nations and the Arctic’s indigenous peoples."

POSTSCRIPT:

Actions taken at the Tromsø meeting included adoption of the long-awaited Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment.

Healy, Mayer and CCOM in May 2009 National Geographic piece on Arctic Mapping

2009-04-18T08:00:00.000-07:00

The summer 2007 mapping cruise of the USCGC Healy, and the meticulous and stunning work of Larry Mayer and the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping/UNH-NOAA Joint Hydrographic Center are featured in the May 2009 National Geographic article "Arctic Landgrab", by McKenzie Funk. Of particular note is Mayer's vivid and elegant image of multibeam sonar tracks gathered on Healy mapping cruises from 2003-2008. Mayer was also one of five consultants for the issue’s remarkable pull-out map of the Arctic Ocean, together with Kelley Brumley (University of Alaska Fairbanks/Stanford), Elizabeth Miller (Stanford University), Martin Pratt (University of Durham International Boundaries Research Unit) and Peter Vogt (UC Santa Barbara). The map is available with the May issue at newsstands but not yet online. Detailed study of just this one map reveals much about the relatively little that is known about the geomorphology and bathymetry of the Arctic Ocean. A comparison to earlier maps provides an even clearer sense of how rapidly knowledge of the Arctic Ocean is changing, see, e.g. the 2008 International Bathymetric Chart of the Arctic Ocean and the 1975 Bruce Heezen/Marie Tharp map of the Arctic Ocean Floor. National Geographic makes an earlier geophysical map of the Arctic Ocean, from its 2002 atlas, available online here.

The Mare Glaciale region, some 440 years ago:

Map of the North Atlantic region, Sigurdur Stephansson (1570), published in The Geology of North America, Vol. L, The Arctic Ocean region, The Geological Society of America, 1990, p. 7.

For one history of Arctic Ocean bathymetry through 1983 see J.R. Weber, Maps of the Arctic Basin Sea Floor: A History of Bathymetry and its Interpretation, in: Arctic, vol. 36, no. 2 (June 1983), pp. 121-142.

The Arctic in the U.S. House of Representatives: “Science-based precautionary management” in the Arctic?

2009-03-24T10:17:00.000-07:00

MARCH 25 UPDATE and corrigendum to this entry: On March 24 a joint oversight hearing took place on "Energy Development on the Outer Continental Shelf and the Future of our Oceans" before The House Natural Resources Committee, Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources, led by Jim Costa (D-CA), and Subcommittee on Insular Affairs, Oceans and Wildlife, led by Del. Madeleine Z. Bordallo (D-GU). Read Scientific American's interview with Oceana's Jeffrey Short about his March 24 testimony here. Witnesses from a range of industry, environmental, government and academic institutions testified and are listed on the committee's website. The letter mentioned below relates directly to the March 24 hearing.

In advance of tomorrow’s hearing on "Climate Change and the Arctic: New Frontiers of National Security," before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs, 67 Democratic members of the House have written to President Obama urging creation of an inter-agency task force to develop a conservation and energy plan for the Arctic. The letter calls for application of “science-based precautionary management” in the region, identifying the federal portions of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and National Petroleum Reserve Alaska, as areas of particular concern.

The three witnesses scheduled for the March 25, 2009, hearing are Scott Borgerson, Council on Foreign Relations; Robert Corell, The Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment; and Mead Treadwell, Institute of the North. The hearings can be viewed via webcast here. Texts of each of their prepared statements are available here, under 3/25, 9:31 a.m..

Readers may recall that the Arctic Fishery Management Plan (AFMP) adopted in February 2009 by NOAA’s North Pacific Fishery Management Council relied on the precautionary approach in calling for a ban on commercial fishing in the Arctic Ocean. The AFMP (draft) defines the precautionary approach as follows:

“The Council’s policy is to proactively apply judicious and responsible fisheries management practices, based on sound scientific research and analysis, to ensure the sustainability of fishery resources, to prevent unregulated fishing, and to protect associated ecosystems for the benefit of current users and future generations. For the past 30 years, the Council’s management policy for Alaska fisheries has incorporated forward-looking conservation measures that address differing levels of uncertainty.”

The NPFMC is one of eight NOAA regional fisheries councils established under the Magnuson Fishery and Conservation Act of 1976. The Council oversees the 900,000 square miles of the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone off of Alaska.

Thanks to two D.C. based sources for highlighting these activities of the U.S. House of Representatives and its members: Caitlyn Antrim in her Ocean Law Daily and Diane Derby, Communications Director of Georgetown Law’s State-Federal Climate Resource Center.

Two Coast Guards, Two Reports: Canada-U.S. Cooperation in the Arctic

2009-03-22T15:09:00.000-07:00

“Our Canadian partnership has strengthened to the point that we are full partners in our Arctic initiatives.”
Commander, USCG District 17, Juneau, AK - 19 February 2009

The joint mapping of the Arctic Ocean extended continental shelf by U.S. and Canadian Coast Guard icebreakers in 2008, and planned for 2009 as mentioned in my last entry, is an important but by no means the only way in which the two Coast Guards cooperate. Another is in improving our understanding of maritime activity in the Arctic.

Last month the Commander for the USCG 17th District in Juneau, reporting on Operation Salliq 2008, the USCG Arctic Initiative, characterized the two countries’ Coast Guards as “full partners in our Arctic initiatives.” Writing in the context of efforts to improve USCG Arctic Domain Awareness (ADA), the Commander reported that one of five such initiatives – biweekly flights of C-130s out of the USCG Air Station Kodiak during summer shipping season to observe maritime activity – were supplemented by cooperation with Canada: “Through engagement with the Canadian Coast Guard and Canada's Joint Task Force North in Yellowknife, we began intelligence sharing with Canada, enhancing the awareness of both countries.”

The four other prongs of Operation Salliq 2008 were i) employing the USCGC Polar Sea in homeland security, search and rescue and other missions in the Arctic, ii) resurrecting the long USCG tradition of deploying buoy tenders to remote native villages in Northern Alaska, focusing in 2008 on needed navigational aids, iii) inserting a “tailored force package” into Barrow, the idea being to “forward deploy helicopters and small boats to the North Slope and to use them as we would use them in Southern Alaska,” and v) a conceptual security exercise in Prudhoe Bay. Just one conclusion policy makers would do well to heed: “The existing infrastructure in the U.S. Arctic is insufficient to support prolonged or seasonal Coast Guard operations.” Specifics as to U.S. icebreaking capacity have been discussed elsewhere. More information on each of the five prongs of Operation Salliq is available in the District 17 Public Affairs online report, which emphasizes the centrality of engagement with Native Alaskan communities to the success of USCG Arctic Domain Awareness.

On the Canadian side, an Interim Report of the Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries and Oceans from June 2008 offers a comprehensive overview of “The Coast Guard in Canada's Arctic.” The Canadian report serves a much different purpose than the Operation Salliq report, and neither focuses primarily on cooperation between the two countries’ coast guards. Nonetheless, the existence of such cooperation is evident in both reports. For example, of commitments undertaken for last summer by the Canadian Coast Guard fleet in the Arctic and highlighted in the Canadian Senate report, at least three have distinct international components:

“• icebreaker participation in an Arctic environmental response exercise in Ilulissat (Greenland) with the United States and Denmark, the host country of the 2008 North Atlantic Coast Guard Forum;

• continued icebreaking support to the US Military Sealift Command off Greenland; and

• continued and significant activity related to IPY research and mapping of the Canadian continental shelf.”

In further contrast to the USCG report on Operation Salliq, the Canadian Senate report on the Canadian Coast Guard in the Canadian Arctic offers formal recommendations to policy makers for reinforcing Canadian sovereignty and presence in its Arctic, worth perusal in their original context, at pages 39 ff., as are the recommendations, at page 44, of a February 2008 Canada–U.S. Model Negotiation on Northern Waters. Speaking only to icebreaking capacity and not overall Canadian Coast Guard infrastructure in the Arctic, the report's observation that "(a)t present, the Coast Guard has a limited capacity to navigate in Canada’s Arctic," still provides an interesting complement to USCG conclusions about inadequate U.S. infrastructure capacity in the Arctic. Finally, the Canadian report recalls the existence of the 1988 Arctic Cooperation Agreement between Canada and the United States (also mentioned in a Parliamentary Arctic Chronology), which treaty serves as an important foundation for bilateral engagement in the region.

The USCGC HEALY is underway for Arctic West Summer 2009 and in the ICE!

2009-03-15T13:49:00.000-07:00

From the USCGC HEALY this past week:

"CO COMMENTS: CROSSED 60N, ENTERED THE ICE,

AND STARTED SCIENCE--A PERFECT DAY FOR WAGB SAILORS!"

While I need not say more, I will, lest we take for granted the things the Healy crew -- Coast Guard and Scientists -- undertake on behalf of national, and international, interests. It's useful to recall conditions that mariners and scientists around the globe endure for the sake of learning more about the oceans.

The Healy embarked Seattle on March 4, 2009 for its Arctic West Summer 2009 (AWS 09) deployment. Before reaching the "perfect day" recorded above, the Healy crew endured some pretty punishing gales and accompanying rolls (up to some 28 degrees) crossing from Dixon Entrance to Chatham Strait, en route to Kodiak a few days back.

The Healy is underway for AWS 09 in support of the Bering Ecosystem Study (BEST), "a multi-year project sponsored by the National Science Foundation that studies the ecological processes of sea ice as it retreats through the Bering Sea.” BEST program scientists at sea and at several locations around the US are studying connections between "external forcing mechanisms and hydrographic structure and physical processes", between "physical aspects of the marine environment and the response of the biota of the eastern Bering Sea" and developing tools with "the goal of forecasting how the ecosystem might be expected to behave under different climate scenarios." Data gathered for BEST includes Benthic, Biology, Hydrography, Ice, Local Traditional Knowledge, Meteorology, Microbiology, Optics, Plankton, Productivity and Water Chemistry.

Views from the Healy the Healy aloft con are updated hourly at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The Healy's trackline is available at Icefloe. Note that a new beta track using Google Map is available at Icefloe as well, and provides ship information at each marker plotted there.

The Healy will return to Seattle in May following this three month deployment. When it embarks again, the Healy will head for the Arctic Ocean for the rest of the arctic summer. As occurred in 2008, the Healy will spend part of its 2009 deployment in joint mapping of the Arctic Extended Continental Shelf with the Canadian Icebreaker, the Louis St Laurent.

Thanks to LDEO for the photo (with Steve Roberts) and trackline (with Tom Cook).

WWF January 2009 Report on Gaps in International Governance of the Marine Arctic

2009-01-20T13:17:00.000-08:00

The WWF International Arctic Programme has released its January 2009 report on International Governance and Regulation of the Marine Arctic: Overview and Gap Analysis by Timo Koivurova, University of Lapland, and Erik Molenaar, Universities of Utrecht and Tromsø. The report was highlighted at the Age of the Arctic conference now in progress in Tromsø as part of Norway's contribution to the the International Polar Year. A press release regarding the report emphasizes that the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea cannot close all of the governance gaps in the arctic. The World Wildlife Fund plans to issue a follow-up report later this year suggesting ways to address the governance gaps identified in its overview and gap analysis.

A separate article on "Building the Science behind Arctic Conservation," released last year as part of WWF's 2008 Annual Report, highlights WWF's climate-related science in the Arctic.

Law, Science and International Cooperation in the U.S. Arctic Region Policy

2009-01-17T20:44:00.000-08:00

The United States Arctic Region Policy (NSPD 66/HSPD 25), which President Bush signed last week revamping a 1994 policy, generated considerable media attention, but often for the wrong reasons. The policy’s laudable invocation of law, science and international cooperation was largely ignored (sometimes willfully, it seemed) except from expected sources such as the U.S.Arctic Research Commission. For voices toning down the rhetoric from north of the U.S. border, including an uncharacteristic reassurance from Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, see Arctic Economics (please note my comment there correcting any impression I may have created that the new policy completely ignores icebreaking capability). In Arctic Economics, Ben Muse culls a representative sampling of the U.S. and Canadian newswires and blogosphere; the reference to Russia’s anticipated arctic policy highlights the need to gather an even wider range of responses from other arctic nations.

The 2009 U.S. Arctic Region Policy (ARP) undergirds the fact that science and law – working together – are essential foundations to effective, considered, and visible U.S. participation in the arctic arena. Here it is worth recalling an obvious but occasionally overlooked fact: that the arctic arena implicates Alaskan, national, regional and international interests. The ARP grasps and conveys that fact clearly. Other arctic countries should welcome the policy’s dedication of a substantial segment to “Promoting International Scientific Cooperation” (Part III. E.) as well as the ARP’s multiple references to international and multinational cooperation, explored below.
Five of the twenty-four addressees of the ARP have key responsibilities within the U.S. government for the legal or scientific foundations of national policies generally:

The Secretary of State
The Attorney General
Counsel to the President
Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy
Director, National Science Foundation.

The vast majority of the remaining addressees head up agencies or departments whose operations depend upon the availability of solid scientific studies to inform policies and operations, and to draft and enforce regulations, and many of whom are involved in the Interagency Arctic Research Policy Committee (IARPC): The Secretaries of Defense, Interior, Transportation, Health and Human Services, and Energy; The Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency; and the Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality, to name just the most obviously science-dependent candidates. All addressees rely on the constitutional and administrative legal structure that supports the functioning, however laboriously, of the U.S. government.

The very first paragraph of the ARP highlights the legal foundations of the policy and the president’s intent to follow national and international law: “This directive shall be implemented in a manner consistent with the Constitution and laws of the United States, with the obligations of the United States under the treaties and other international agreements to which the United States is a party, and with customary international law as recognized by the United States, including with respect to the law of the sea.” Because the U.S. is not yet a party, specific references to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and the need for U.S. accession appear later in the document.

As set out in Section II, Background, the ARP takes into account several developments, including “The effects of climate change and increasing human activity in the Arctic region” and “A growing awareness that the Arctic region is both fragile and rich in resources.” Neither development would have been apprehended without scientific and legal framing of related issues.

Section III, Policy, is the core of the ARP. Phrases implicating law (for a regulatory or cooperative framework) and science (to populate and enforce those frameworks) abound in Section III, which says it is U.S. policy to “Protect the Arctic environment and conserve its biological resources; Ensure that natural resource management and economic development in the region are environmentally sustainable” and “Enhance scientific monitoring and research into local, regional, and global environmental issues.”

The policy vows, in Part III.B. relating to National and Homeland Security, continuation of existing maritime policies and authorities “including those relating to law enforcement.” It also states, not surprisingly, that “The United States exercises authority in accordance with lawful claims of United States sovereignty, sovereign rights, and jurisdiction in the Arctic region.” By “Encourag[ing] the peaceful resolution of disputes in the Arctic region,” the policy adopts an eminently lawful position.

The policy emphasizes in Part III.C. on International Governance that U.S. participation in international and regional entities promotes U.S. interests in the arctic. The “Arctic Council, the International Maritime Organization (IMO), wildlife conservation and management agreements” are among the entities mentioned. Space allows noting only that the ARP repeats the well-known U.S. position that “the Arctic Council should remain a high-level forum,” not become a formal international organization, and possibly be updated structurally to improve operations. Also not surprising is the ARP’s confirmation of the U.S. position made known in such documents as the May 2008 Ilulissat Declaration “that an "Arctic Treaty" of broad scope -- along the lines of the Antarctic Treaty -- is not appropriate or necessary.” Importantly, the ARP ties U.S. accession to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea to national interests in the Arctic, including Extended Continental Shelf and Boundary issues (to which Part III.D. is dedicated).

Research Platform USCGC Healy

Promoting International Scientific Cooperation (Part III.E.) is worth reading in its entirety for elaboration of its basic premises, that "Scientific research is vital for the promotion of United States interests in the Arctic region. Successful conduct of U.S. research in the Arctic region requires access [read: “law”] throughout the Arctic Ocean and to terrestrial sites, as well as viable international mechanisms

for sharing access to research platforms and timely exchange of samples, data, and analyses”. Section E is replete with terms such as “collaborative research,” i.e. with the “Nordic Council and the European Polar Consortium, as well as with individual nations.”

It is in part E that the ARP comes closest to drawing a direct line between arctic science and arctic policy (perhaps because the connection is so obvious?). Referring to the need for accurate prediction of environmental and climate change and regional observing networks [see, e.g. regarding the US and the Arctic Observing Network] especially for environmental data, the ARP says: “The United States promotes active involvement of all Arctic nations in these efforts in order to advance scientific understanding that could provide the basis for assessing future impacts and proposed response strategies.” Finally, it draws the policy-science link directly by directing the appropriate authorities to “Work with the Interagency Arctic Research Policy Committee (IARPC) to promote research that is strategically linked to U.S. policies articulated in this directive, with input from the Arctic Research Commission.”

Arguably, one of the most important sentences for the purposes of linking science and law is the ARP’s statement in Part H., on the Arctic Environment, that “Despite a growing body of research, the Arctic environment remains poorly understood.” Without increased scientific knowledge, laws, regulations and non-binding mechanisms to address environmental and related governance problems will be impossible or ineffective. Solid science is the basis of effective enforcement.

- - - - - - - - - -

Selected References to International Cooperation

in Part III of the U.S. Arctic Region Policy

A. Policy

“Strengthen institutions for cooperation among the eight Arctic nations”; “effective search and rescue in the Arctic will require local, State, Federal, tribal, commercial, volunteer, scientific, and multinational cooperation.”

B. National Security and Homeland Security Interests in the Arctic
“The United States has broad and fundamental national security interests in the Arctic region and is prepared to operate either independently or in conjunction with other states to safeguard these interests.”

C. International Governance
“Continue to cooperate with other countries on Arctic issues through the United Nations (U.N.) and its specialized agencies, as well as through treaties such as the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, the Convention on Long Range Transboundary Air Pollution and its protocols, and the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.” See also references to the Arctic Council, above.

E. Promoting International Scientific Cooperation (a sampling)
“U.S. research-capable platforms … should work with those of other nations through the establishment of an Arctic circumpolar observing network. All Arctic nations are members of the Group on Earth Observations partnership, which provides a framework for organizing an international approach to environmental observations in the region.”
“Actively promote full and appropriate access by scientists to Arctic research sites through bilateral and multilateral measures and by other means.”

USCGC Healy

F. Maritime Transportation in the Arctic Region
“Develop additional measures, in cooperation with other nations, to address issues that are likely to arise from expected increases in shipping into, out of, and through the Arctic region” and cooperative agreements for search and rescue."

G. Economics issues, including Energy
Curiously, the section on Energy contains possibly the largest number of references to international cooperation: calling for responsible management of energy resources “by continuing to work closely with other Arctic nations”, recognizing the value of existing forums such as the “Arctic Council, the International Regulators Forum, and the International Standards Organization.”

“Work with other Arctic nations,” “Consult with other Arctic nations to discuss issues related to exploration, production, environmental and socioeconomic impacts, including drilling conduct, facility sharing, the sharing of environmental data, impact assessments, compatible monitoring programs, and reservoir management in areas with potentially shared resources; “Identify opportunities for international cooperation on methane hydrate issues, North Slope hydrology, and other matters”; “shared support activities, including infrastructure projects”; and “Continue to emphasize cooperative mechanisms with nations operating in the region to address shared concerns, recognizing that most known Arctic oil and gas resources are located outside of United States jurisdiction.”

H. Environment
Supports principles of international fisheries management; calls for the U.S. to “In cooperation with other nations, respond effectively to increased pollutants and other environmental challenges”; and “Seek to develop ways to address changing and expanding commercial fisheries in the Arctic, including through consideration of international agreements or organizations to govern future Arctic fisheries.”

U.S. Coast Guard Statement on new Arctic Region Policy: Icebreakers, anyone?

2009-01-13T19:13:00.000-08:00

Adm. Thad Allen, Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, issued a brief statement today on the "Arctic Region Policy" signed by President Bush on January 9, 2009, and released to the media by the White House on January 12, 2009, as a dual Presidential Directive (on National Security - NSPD-66, and on Homeland Security, HSPD - 25). Curiously, neither the statement nor the directive(s) specifically mention icebreakers beyond the latter's general reference to "icebreaking capabilities" in emergency response scenarios. The Arctic Region Policy does refer to projecting "sea power throughout the region" and indicates that the appropriate Secretaries, agencies and departments shall "Develop greater capabilities and capacity, as necessary, to protect United States air, land, and sea borders in the Arctic region."

Given the environmental, research and security priorities in the Arctic Region Policy, it bears remembering that the U.S. Coast Guard currently has only three icebreakers, one of which - the Polar Star - is out of service. One need not adopt entirely Scott Borgerson's colorful characterization of the three as "a geriatric bunch desperately in need of revitalization and/or replacement" in his analysis today of the new policy, to see that the U.S. needs more and improved icebreaker capacity.

According to the Coast Guard, The Polar Sea and Polar Star, both 399-foot polar class icebreakers, were "built in the 1970s and the newest and most technologically advanced icebreaker, the Cutter HEALY was added to the fleet in November 1999." The Healy, a 420-foot icebreaker, supports scientific research as one of its primary missions, including the mapping of the U.S. extended continental shelf discussed in much more detail elsewhere in this blog. This summer the National Academy of Sciences and the Pentagon's Pacific, Northern and Transportation commands were among those supporting calls to increase United States icebreaker capacity.

U.S. Presidential Directive on Arctic Region Policy released January 12, 2009

2009-01-12T12:40:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Caitlyn Antrim, of LOS News/Ocean Law Daily, and others for providing a copy of the Presidential Directive regarding "Arctic Region Policy" signed by President Bush on Friday, January 9, and released to the media today.

The document bears the additional headings

NATIONAL SECURITY PRESIDENTIAL DIRECTIVE/NSPD -- 66
HOMELAND SECURITY PRESIDENTIAL DIRECTIVE/HSPD -- 25

Today, once again, I simply post the document, available here, this time with one comment to draw your attention to Part D. Extended Continental Shelf and Boundary Issues, which highlights the United States' reliance on the ECS processes set out in the Law of the Sea Convention.

President Bush signs United States Arctic Policy

2009-01-10T05:42:00.000-08:00

For now, I simply post a press release from the US Arctic Research Commission to put the word out that President Bush signed the long-anticipated United States Arctic Policy on January 9, with only days remaining in his administration. Because the policy itself has not yet been released to the media, the signing was picked up primarily by Alaskan regional news providers and, anticipating the move, the Wall Street Journal. Senator Lisa Murkowski's office expects the policy itself to be released on Monday.

"President Bush signs Arctic policy [USARC press release]

President Bush signs Arctic policy that emphasizes scientific research and international cooperation

ANCHORAGE, AK, January 9, 2009 - The new Arctic Policy signed by the President today "reminds the world that the Arctic matters to the United States," said Mead Treadwell, Chair of the U.S Arctic Research Commission (USARC). "Our opportunities and responsibilities in the Arctic are increasing with climate change. The Arctic Ocean is becoming more accessible to the world, and this policy responds to these new realities."

The U.S. Arctic Research Commission proposed a review of U.S. Arctic Policy in a goals and objectives report sent to the President two years ago. The last time Arctic Policy of the United States was reviewed and revised by the National Security Council was 1994, and much change in the Arctic has occurred since, both in the environment and in international relations.

"The Commission commends the National Security Council and the Department of State for their leadership of this policy review, and looks forward to working with the next Administration, the Congress, the State of Alaska, and the international research community to see the research goals in the policy realized," Treadwell said.

"The policy should give a boost to Arctic research on climate, environment, economic opportunities, and the requirements of Arctic peoples. The policy reflects the need for increased international collaboration on scientific research and monitoring, and for ensuring better access for scientists in the Arctic Ocean."

On the Law of the Sea Convention, the policy promotes Arctic exploration and research as a means to expand our nation's offshore Arctic territory consistent with the United Nations process. The policy also gives strength to efforts now pending in Congress to provide the U.S. with icebreaker capacity to operate year-round in Arctic waters. Icebreakers will serve many missions in the Arctic, including their current role as a primary platform for U.S. Arctic Ocean research.

To follow up, the Commission continues to support the eight-nation Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment, associated with the Arctic Council, to be published this spring. "That document will give nations the background to ensure that Arctic shipping will be safe, secure, and reliable," Treadwell said.

Because the U.S. has many important and strategic interests in the Arctic, the USARC has called for research efforts in five broad categories: (1) environmental change of the Arctic Ocean and Bering Sea; (2) Arctic human health; (3) civil infrastructure; (4) natural resource assessment and earth science; and (5) indigenous languages, identities, and cultures.

Details on these research goals will be released shortly in the Commission's report to the incoming administration and to Congress, "Summary Report on Goals and Objectives for Arctic Research 2009 for the U.S. Arctic Research Program." The report also calls for greater interagency efforts to coordinate and collaborate on Arctic research programs, greater federal financial support of scientific research conducted by academia and non-profits, and means to capitalize and support the ongoing costs of infrastructure (e.g., icebreakers, laboratories, satellites, observatories, networks, sensors, and autonomous vehicles), necessary to conduct Arctic research.

The Arctic Research and Policy Act of 1984 established USARC. This federal agency's principal duties are to develop and recommend an integrated national Arctic research policy and to assist in establishing a national Arctic research program plan to implement the policy. Commissioners also facilitate cooperation between the federal government, state and local governments, and other nations with respect to Arctic research, both basic and applied. The U.S. conducts approximately $400 million in Arctic research annually."

CONTACT:
Mead Treadwell, US Arctic Research Commission
907-223-8128 (cell)
meadwell@alaska.net
www.arctic.gov

2009 Anniversaries: Alaska, and Samuel Johnson

2009-01-05T18:47:00.000-08:00

If you heard only a fraction of the New Year's programming over the last week, you know that 2009 marks both the 50th anniversary of Alaska joining the United States and the 300th anniversary of Samuel Johnson’s birth. Are there any plausible connections between the two, or any connections to arctic law, science, and policy?

Johnson is believed to have had at hand the missionary Hans Egede’s Description of Greenland (1745) as he wrote his two fictive Rambler essays "Anningait and Ajutt; a Greenland tale" (Rambler Nr. 186, and its conclusion in Nr. 187) in the early 1750s.* Verlyn Klinkenborg’s apt comparison of Johnson’s dictionary research to arctic exploration notwithstanding, the Rambler essays predated and were not directly connected with Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. William C. Horne, in his 2001 essay "Samuel Johnson Discovers the Arctic,"* presents Johnson as “one major Enlightenment figure who possessed a deep interest in the natural environment and human inhabitants of the Arctic” and who offered “implicit criticisms of materialism and imperialism;” or so, at least, argue Horne’s editors in their introduction to his essay (Armbruster & Wallace, 11).

One prosaic lesson from Johnson’s arctic connection is that science, whether social or natural, depends on access to research and reporting that has gone before in order to have some basis, and baseline, for future work. Without Egede’s book, Johnson would likely not have written his Greenland tale. As tenuous as the suggested link might be, policy makers need to query: what research will not be available in the future because they have decided not to fund it? Is the work they are funding worthy and capable of supporting future scientific inquiry?

It also bears noting that, without access to Egede’s work, Johnson would not have been able to reject one of Egede’s basic conclusions. Horne argues that Johnson rejected Egede’s romantic assertion of Inuit contentment in face of want in order to imply that Inuit and European alike suffered under “the vanity of human wishes” – a favorite theme of Johnson’s (Horne, 82-83). On the other hand, Johnson hewed closely to Egede’s observations of the natural world; evidence he appears to have considered more reliable than Egede’s romantic conclusions as to the nature of the Greenlandic soul (Horne, id.).
The accuracy, and biases – known or unconscious – of those whose work we build on must also be tested and challenged, a habit in which natural scientists may be more practiced than social scientists, lawyers, or policy makers. How others use that work must also be tested and challenged in turn for its faithfulness to the original sources, its own historical biases and blind spots.

Sheer chronology makes it difficult to claim any connection between Johnson and Alaska. I will, however, in future entries, highlight notable Alaskan efforts to promote solid links between science, law and policy making.

*See, e.g., Horne, William C. “Samuel Johnson Discovers the Arctic: A Reading of a "Greenland Tale" as Arctic Literature,” in: Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Ed. Karla Armbuster and Kathleen R Wallace. Charlottesville and London: UP of Virginia (2001), and S arah Moss, Romanticism on Ice: Coleridge, Hogg and the Eighteenth-Century Missions to Greenland, in: Romanticism on the Net : Numéro 45, February 2007.

“Progress and Challenges in Bridging the Gap Between Science and Decision Making” …

2008-12-21T17:23:00.000-08:00

… was the title of one of the dozens of sessions at the week-long annual meeting of The American Geophysical Union (AGU), just ended. The conference drew some 15,000 geophysicists to San Francisco December 15 -19, 2008. While the programs were all designed as peer-to-peer presentations, several investigated how scientists are working to make their research better understood not only by policy- and lawmakers but also by the general public.

The "Bridging the Gap" topic drew so much interest from conference presenters that dual sessions were arranged (Session I and Session II). Representative topics from Session II:

-On the use of Empirical Data to Downscale Non-scientific Scepticism About Results From Complex Physical Based Models

-The Role and Responsibility of the Non-Governmental Organization in Bridging Science and Policy

-Mapping for Advocacy - Using Marine Geophysical Data to Establish the Limits of Extended Continental Shelves under the Convention on the Law of the Sea (yes, my poster, with geophysicist Bernie Coakley from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks).

Both Session I and Session II were organized under the rubric of Global Environmental Change. This category is a particularly important driver in improving the science-policy interface in the context of the Arctic. If members of the public in non-arctic regions do not understand how changes in the Arctic affect them, they will not see the need to support arctic research generally.

Another relevant program to science and policy making communication was the “Frontiers of Geophysics Lecture” featured Google's Michael Jones, who examined “the relationship among mechanisms of knowledge sharing, the pace of scientific advancement, and the degree of public understanding of new results.”

For their part, international lawyers are also giving increased attention to the science-policy interface. During last week’s AGU meeting, an announcement crossed my e-desk from the European and American societies of international law announcing a “Research Forum: Changing Futures? Science and International Law”, to be held in Helsinki next October. A representative sampling of suggested topics include Data Protection and International Law, Climate Change and Global Environmental Protection, Global Health Issues, Intellectual Property Rights, and Developments in the Law of the Sea, including Maritime Delimitation.

Almost all of these topics are regulated at least in part by one or more international treaties (as is, of course, the case with mapping the Extended Continental Shelf). If my time on the Healy taught me anything, it is that existing treaties will be more effectively enforced and new treaties will be better crafted when lawyers better understand the underlying science. Science in effect drives the compliance and enforcement mechanisms that our treaties (and domestic laws) establish.

A closing note: Communication between science and decision-makers is a long-standing interest of President-Elect Obama’s choice to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Jane Lubchenco. Ten years ago Lubchenco founded the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program, whose purpose is to advance “environmental decision-making by providing academic scientists with the skills and connections needed to be effective leaders and communicators.”

Canada's Academic Commitment to the Arctic

2008-12-15T11:38:00.000-08:00

Canadian-US relations in the Arctic are strong, their diverging views regarding the Northwest Passage and Beaufort Sea boundary issues are well-managed, and academic exchanges on arctic topics are thriving. Indeed, the health of those international exchanges contributes significantly to the fact that the first two assertions can be made so confidently. A remarkable conference on Arctic Change in Quebec City from December 9-12, 2008, attracted some 900 scientists, policy makers, students and community members to share their latest research and undertakings. Attendees were predominantly from Canada, but many other countries were well represented. The primary organizer was ArcticNet, self described as "a Network of Centres of Excellence that brings together scientists and managers in the natural, human health and social sciences with their partners in Inuit organizations, northern communities, federal and provincial agencies and the private sector to study the impacts of climate change in the coastal Canadian Arctic." (continued below)

The animated substantive discussions and collegial respect so evident in Quebec City confirm one basic tenet: Any commitment that arctic governments make to fostering academic exchange at this level will be repaid many times over in ideas and concrete steps to address the unprecedented change now facing the region. Initiatives such as University of the Arctic offer additional, multinational models for multiplying the effect of trans-boundary research collaboration.

The Arctic is much more a part of national identity in Canada than in the United States. Nonetheless, multiple efforts within the United States promote arctic research, including the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States, a non-governmental organization whose work complements the activities of The U.S. Arctic Research Commission; the Study of Environmental Arctic Change (a partner of the Quebec City conference), the Interagency Arctic Research Policy Committee and the NSF Office of Polar Programs and the National Academies' Polar Research Board.

Arctic Mapping at the Arctic Change Conference
The Arctic Change program is available on the conference website where the presentations will also soon be accessible. With respect to Arctic mapping and sovereignty issues, three Arctic Change events were of particular note: Larry Mayer's Plenary Address "Mapping the High Arctic: The Challenges and the Joys" and two panels, details of which are available on the Conference Program page:

T34. Seafloor Mapping of the Arctic Ocean, Continental Shelves and Margins - Moderator Steve Blasco

T12. The Law and Politics of Canadian Jurisdiction on the Arctic Ocean Seabed - Moderator Suzanne Lalonde

Welcome VPR Listeners

2008-09-22T00:00:00.000-07:00

Thank you for your interest, and thanks to Vermont Public Radio and Mitch Wertlieb for linking you to my arctic blog. Although my time on the USCG icebreaker Healy is past, I will continue to post items relevant to ongoing policy and environmental developments in the Arctic;

but today I simply want to share some images from the trip. You may have heard me describe being in a "constant state of awe" on board. I hope that including some of my photographs in this entry will help to convey some of the splendor of the Arctic Ocean in summer.

For the three weeks we were at sea, it was almost constantly light as the sun never dipped fully below the horizon at most of the latitudes we were traveling through (getting well north of the 83rd parallel, though still short of the North Pole).

Imagine that you are not only always surrounded in light: you

are also floating some 3,000

meters - almost two miles! - above the ocean

floor, suspended over the inky indigo darkest blue of frigid arctic waters.

Imagine, too, that the ship is moving at a slow, steady speed (5 to 7 knots, or m.p.h.) through an ever-changing ice scape: sometimes tightly compacted with tall pressure ridges, other times with broad "leads" of open water:

Sometimes the ice itself or the melt pools on top of it assume a stunning azure, because much of the salt has leached out of this older ice:

Arctic ice infuses the concept of "white" with an entirely new meaning, given its endless shades of frost, grey, snow, and shadow; in mist and in fog and in brilliant sun; in not-quite-twilight, not-quite-dawn shades of rose, pewter, lilac... words eventually fail and you are left to simply soak in the vastness and beauty of the place.

Thanks once again for your interest. I hope you will stay tuned, read a few of my earlier entries to learn more about the mapping trip (see above, right) and that you will send me your questions and comments, either by posting below or by writing to me at bbaker@vermontlaw.edu.

#19 Conflict in the Arctic? The Tenacity of Media Spin

2008-09-14T19:47:00.000-07:00

Just hours after I returned, a week ago, from my trip to the Arctic Ocean, I was dismayed to open the New York Times and find on its editorial page hyperbole verging on that which other

media sources use to perpetuate the myth of "fierce disputes over territory and natural resources" in the Arctic. ("Arctic in Retreat", September 8, 2008). As the sea-ice retreats, states are turning not to arms but to existing legal structures and a tradition of scientific and

and

diplomatic cooperation to address common problems as well as dis- agreements.

A helicopter from the Canadian icebreaker, the Louis Saint Laurent, on a friendly visit

to the USCGC Healy

Immediately after transporting our mapping crew to shore last week, The Healy turned right around and began breaking ice for a Canadian icebreaker, the Louis Saint Laurent. This month-long joint mission to map parts of the Arctic Ocean floor is scientific and diplomatic cooperation at its international best. Like the Russian mapping the NYT mentions in its editorial, the US and Canada are gathering data in preparation not for conflict but for submission in a staid and stable legal process designed to provide certainty for all states involved. The Law of the Sea Convention establishes this orderly mechanism of rigorous scientific vetting for states seeking to extend their authority over larger portions of the continental shelf. The United States is the only Arctic state not party to the Convention but is nonetheless mapping for its potential shelf extension in keeping with procedures agreed by the international community.

The territorial disputes referenced in the NYT editorial are also resolved not by conflict
but by diplomacy. In June 1990 Russia (then still the Soviet Union) and the United States signed a brilliantly conceived single maritime boundary treaty that precludes the need to renegotiate the boundary once the extended continental shelf limits are determined. Canada’s recent announcement that it plans to extend enforcement jurisdiction from 100 to 200 miles beyond its shores should raise concern. But it must also be viewed within the context of the long-standing friendship and shared interests of the United States and Canada on such matters as environmental protection, trade (ca. $1.5 billion daily) and common security. Their disagreement over the Northwest Passage has never flared out of control and continues to be the subject of diplomatic attention.

Other existing legal and diplomatic structures provide an imperfect but solid basis for Arctic states to resolve potential disagreements. The Arctic Council is a cooperative forum for states and the Inuit Circumpolar Conference to address a range of environmental and economic problems in the region. The Ilulissat (Greenland) Declaration, signed in May 2008, confirms the will of the five coastal Arctic states – Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the United States – to strengthen existing cooperation based on mutual trust and transparency. Treaties in force in the Arctic cover issues ranging from polar bear protection to pollution by dumping from vessels to biological diversity. Activists and diplomats alike should be concerned and asking hard questions about whether these agreements will be sufficient, or sufficiently enforced,to protect the Arctic, but to pretend that it is a lawless region up for grabs ignores the facts.

Above: The USCG Cutter Healy and the Canadian icebreaker Louis St. Laurent
underway together in the Arctic Ocean earlier this week.

To be sure, the Arctic now faces enormous environmental and governmental challenges. Non-Arctic states are also legitimately concerned as to whether the Arctic countries will be good stewards of the Arctic’s immense resources. Having just spent three weeks surrounded by the unearthly beauty and light-filled vastness of the Arctic Ocean, I more than endorse the New York Times’ call for cooperation in face of the potential for expanded resource exploitation, environmental degradation and security risks as the ice melts. But to characterize the Arctic as a “scene of commercial and territorial conflict” overstates the case. Perversely, it also contributes rhetorically to escalating tensions rather than under-girding the very cooperation that the paper advocates.

#18 September in Barrow - Return to Land

2008-09-11T17:06:00.001-07:00

The LOS mapping crew disembarked USCG Healy on 5 September after three weeks at sea, escaping the worst of quite a storm that was brewing to our north off of the Russian coastline. Just as at the start of the trip, we were transferred by helicopter between ship and shore to the North Slope Borough Search and Rescue hangar in Barrow, the northernmost town in the US.

Barrow, AK is home to over 4,000 people and to the BASC - the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium. With funding from the National Science Foundation's Office of Polar Programs, BASC encourages and provides logistical support for Arctic research. Its research and education initiatives pertain to Alaska's North Slope, the Arctic Ocean off of the North Slope, and Chukotka, Russia. BASC is the successor in a line of institutions that began with the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory founded by the Navy in 1947, although the US research presence in Barrow traces sporadically back to the late 19th century.

Above: accommodations the last night in Barrow: luxury quonset hut on the BASC campus

BASC shares it main building a few short miles out of town on one of Barrow's dirt roads, with the local community college, Sivunmun Ilisagvik Arctic College, and the Mayor's Workforce Development Programs. Ilisagvik is a two year tribal college "dedicated to perpetuating and strengthening Inupiat (Eskimo) culture, language, values and traditions.

The Arctic Summer was nearing its end as we returned to Barrow. The tundra was turning to shades of reds and heather, a fall foliage beautiful in its own spare way.

#17 Dredging

2008-09-08T04:35:00.000-07:00

Dredging!

September 3, 2008

An ocean mapping cruise is mostly about forward motion, trying to map as much territory, around the clock, as time allows. But other projects on board require us to stop from time to time (see, e.g. my entry #12 about the on-ice deployment of a NOAA/National Ice Center buoy). We have spent the last few days of the trip dredging at various sites to get a sense of what kinds of rocks are in different parts of the ocean. Getting the rocks is really only the beginning. From here they will be taken back to various campuses for analysis under the careful eye of a few geologists. Their analyses will contribute to the larger picture of what the Arctic Ocean floor is made of and how the ocean basin was formed.

Kelley Brumley (in pink hard-hat), our fantastic on-board tectonic geology scholar, led the rock end of the dredging effort with the help of Healy's Marine Science Technicians (see entry #9), Dale Chayes of Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Alex Andronikov (blue hard-hat) a volcanics expert from the University of Michigan Department of Geology. The actual dredging requires much planning and logistical coordination:
- Identifying the right dredge sites based on sparse mapping of the region,
- Finding the actual site and hoping there is not too much ice over it,
- Breaking any ice that is there,
- Conducting a drift test which helps with the next step,
- Keeping the boat stationary over the site for the two to three hours it can take to run a dredge two to three thousand meters down and haul it back up,
- Properly preparing and securing the dredge, which weighs 700 pounds empty! (it is not uncommon to lose them if they snag on some unseen formation hundreds or thousands of meters below).
- Briefing all participants, and ensuring their safety (keeping non-essential personnel clear of the fantail for the hour or two that the dredge needs to pulls up its load under very high tension).
- Once the dredge is hauled back up, weigh the contents, which can be over a thousand pounds! Lots of mud involved ---
- Hope for more rocks than mud,
- Once the crane empties the dredge onto the fantail, start hosing down the pile and sorting the rocks. This involves lots of water in cold temperatures, bending, kneeling, lifting bucket after bucket of rocks, drying them and transporting them into the lab for cataloging…

The picture below shows the safety attire (and proves that I am earning my keep – that’s me under the yellow hard hat, happy as a geologist in mud).

#16 Polar Bear II

2008-09-08T04:28:00.000-07:00

Bear Number Two, photos by Adriane Colburn

September 2, 2008

Number of Polar Bears seen on the Healy cruise in August 2007 = 21
Number of Polar Bears seen on the Healy cruise in August 2008 = 4

This comparison is nothing more than an anecdote, an observation, but still sits somewhat uncomfortably. [If you’d like more on polar bears, please see my earlier entry # 8 on the topic.] We also saw very few seals this year. Think food chain: where there are seals -- and ice -- there are bears. Fewer seals, fewer bears.

Three of the bears spotted this cruise were seen in the wee hours, one of those for only a fleeting moment; the fourth, spotted on September 2, was seen at a time when most of the crew was awake. The bear also remained in sight for quite a while.

It was fascinating to watch the bear sniffing for prey, poking its nose into the water, testing different routes between the ice islands and open water it encountered. I’ll be bringing back a short film of the bear produced by the NOAA videographer traveling with us, David Sillicorn. For now, here are two still shots of this gorgeous animal. The picture in my mind's eye is all of us standing on the bow in collective awe, really, watching the bear wend its way across the ice scape.

#15 Congestion in the Arctic?

2008-09-08T04:22:00.000-07:00

Members of the Healy science crew watch the Louis St.-Laurent's helicopter, which travels with the Louis,

do a fly-by, far, far from land

September 1, 2008

Apologies for the delays in posting, due to technical difficulties on this end.

What are all these ships doing here? or "Three’s a real crowd"

My last entry was Xinhua’s coverage of the Xuelong, or Snow Dragon, a Chinese research vessel. We saw her both on radar and with the naked eye (she was about 15 miles away). Folks who have sailed the Arctic Ocean many times said how exceptionally rare it is to see another vessel up here. Larry Mayer, our chief scientist, said he has never seen another vessel, other than for a pre-planned rendezvous. Many others echoed the same experience; that it felt very, very strange to see another ship in the Arctic.

So you can imagine the dismay on board at seeing two more vessels (on radar) in two more days. The first was the Louis Saint Laurent, the Canadian icebreaker that will join the Healy for the next leg of its journey. That was less of a surprise, although this was not a planned meeting. The Healy will break ice for the Louis, a smaller Canadian icebreaker, which will tow seismic mapping equipment. The picture shows their ship’s helicopter coming to check us out --- a little show of Canadian muscle, perhaps? Another fog-bow showed up about the same time they did.

The third foreign vessel spotted this week was the Mirai, a Japanese research ship that is "ice-strengthened", but not an icebreaker. The only sign we had of it, some 30 miles away, was its trail on our radar mapping system (all ships must broadcast their unique AIS code – automated identification signal).

This hard evidence of increased interest in the Arctic from non-Arctic states reflects the fact that, as it melts, the Arctic Ocean is opening up to more traffic of all kinds. The Arctic Council will soon issue the final version of its interim 2006 Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment to provide some sense of the number of vessels plying the Arctic. The final report is expected in the fall of 2008. Until the interim report, nobody has really had a firm grasp on the number of non-military vessels in the Arctic Ocean.

#14 China in the Arctic

2008-09-02T06:41:00.000-07:00

11:40, August 03, 2008
Icebreaker Xuelong sails into Arctic

The icebreaker Xuelong, the carrier for China's third scientific Arctic expedition, sailed into the Arctic early on Saturday, and the scientists aboard will get down to their Arctic research soon.

The Xuelong, or "Snow Dragon," crossed into the Arctic region at 01:58 local time (1358 GMT Friday) with some 110 scientists on board. The Arctic region covers an area of 21 million square kilometers the North Pole.

Members of China's third scientific Arctic expedition celebrate their entrance into the Arctic region August 2, 2008. (Xinhua)

The team will conduct comprehensive observations and research on the the Chukchi Sea, the submarine plateau of the Chukchi Sea and the Canada Basin, and is scheduled to return to the Port of Shanghai, China, on Sep. 25.

Zhang Haisheng, chief scientist of the team, said that as the Arctic has a notable influence on the climate in China, the current expedition will focus its research on the Arctic climate change's impact on climate change in China, as well as the unique biological and genes resources, and Arctic geology and geophysics.

The icebreaker set off on July 11 from Shanghai and reached the Arctic Circle after a three-week journey through the Sea of Japan, the Sea of Okhotsk, the Bering Sea and the Bering strait.

#13 Ice III

2008-09-02T03:44:00.000-07:00

Satellite image concentration of sea ice on Canadian Archipelago (right side, purple = thicker ice)
Ice – III
Melting and Moving Ice
2008-08-30The few media reports that filter their way through our limited internet access this far north show that experts are expecting new lows in arctic ice yet again this summer. Traveling with an ice scientist on board the Healy allows us to understand better what we are seeing first-hand as we pass through what is clearly a melting and shifting ice scape. Dr. Pablo Clemente-Colon, originally from Puerto Rico, is the lead scientist at the National Ice Center, which is part of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
A few statistics from Pablo help set the scene for what we are seeing: a mix of differently aged ice and a disappearance of the thickest, oldest multi-year arctic ice. As more multi-year ice melts each summer, it is harder for it to recover in winter. The thicker, older ice is replaced with younger, thinner ice, which also melts more quickly in the summer. Both kinds of melting open up more water and create more melt pools on what ice remains: both kinds of water are darker than snow and ice. With increasingly less (white) ice to reflect solar energy and increasingly more (dark) water to absorb it, the feedback loop is exacerbated and melting is accelerated, in what is known as the albedo effect.

Slide courtesy of Dr. Pablo Clemente-Colón

Summer is always a melting season for arctic ice, but over the 28 years since 1979, when satellite measurements first began, the drop in summer ice coverage of the Arctic has been considerable. Pablo provided the first two figures below; the NSIDC* provided the last one, showing the following declines in summer ice coverage in the Arctic:

September 1979: 14.16 million km2
September 2007: 3.98 million km2
August 2008*: 3.43 million km2

*From the National Snow and Ice Data Center, which is a separate entity from the NIC.
With some two weeks still to go in the Arctic summer the last figure above is likely to drop even more. And this is despite the fact that the past winter (2008-08) was colder than the year before and allowed the ice to recover some over the winter months.

The preceding information about the extent of ice cover is gathered primarily by satellite. Ice thickness is another important indicator, measured by buoys that are positioned in the ice and drift with it throughout the various arctic seasons. Buoy data over the last twenty years shows a decrease in thickness of the ice (see figure above).

Based on these figures and other observations, ice experts seem to agree that the actual rate of ice decrease is faster than in previous years. There is simply not much 10+ year ice now left. The thickest ice we have seen appears to be more along the lines of 4 to 5 year ice; only when we stopped at the ice island to deploy the buoy did we come close to seeing thicknesses indicating an age of 8 to 10 years old multi-year ice. As Pablo says, the "precipitous decrease in older ice 1988-1990" is simply continuing. Once that older ice disappears, either by melting or by being moved out of the Arctic by wind and ocean currents, it is much harder to keep the overall ice pack intact.

The image below shows the difference between 1987 and 2007 in the amount of multi-year ice (in white). Steve Howard, the high school science teacher who is traveling with us, describes the movement of ice in the arctic as follows. Since I shared his misconception about how ice moves in the Arctic, I pick up his narrative there:

"One major misconception that I had was that the thickest part of the Arctic Ice Cap was centered on the North Pole. I see now that the ice coverage up here is very dynamic, with wind and water currents pushing the floes around the Arctic Ocean basin like flakes in a cereal bowl. Currently, the thickest ice is not centered on the Pole, but closer to the northern coast of Greenland and the Canadian Archipelago. [As Pablo indicates]… . the Arctic sea ice is retreating faster than previous climate change models had predicted, a consequence of an overall warming of the Arctic at twice the global rate in combination with other atmospheric and oceanic processes…. Anomalous weather patterns, perhaps associated with o ther global changes, have helped blow a lot of this ice out of the Arctic Basin and into the Atlantic Ocean, where it drifts southward and eventually melts." To read more of Steve’s chronicles of day-to-day activities and life on board the Healy, visit his blog.

#12 Ice II - Buoy reprise

2008-09-02T03:34:00.000-07:00

Ice II - Buoy reprise
Friday, 2008-08-29
Well, we finally reached a spot on the old multi-year ice floe that allowed one of the weather buoys to be deployed. If you look at the pictures of the ice above, you will see in part why an ice liberty was decided against (an ice liberty being the chance for all crew to get out onto the ice). There were too many melt pools and structural uncertainties. What you can see in the view from the deck is that the ice was so thick we could not break our way any further into it to get to a more stable section. This is the thickest and oldest multi-year ice we have seen the entire trip, and the type of ice that is so rapidly disappearing from the Arctic (see my Ice – III blog entry #13 for more details).

Landing folks on the ice is quite an effort. The Coast Guard crew uses a crane to lift the open steel box (the "man cage") from deck to ice, carrying one or two people each trip. The first two on ice are the rescue swimmer (yellow suit) and armed polar bear watch. (Polar bears can come out of nowhere at about 30 mph). Both men check the ice for the best place for the others to work. Once the buoy and three other men were on the ice they were able to drill a hole and set up the buoy pretty quickly. The whole operation took about an hour (not including the travel time into the ice floe).

I promised a short bit about Walt Lincoln and Peter Legnos, the business partners who designed and built the buoys. They are engineers, seamen and adventurers, now both based in Connecticut. Walt’s quiet intelligence and vision reflect his MIT PhD and his time as a submariner and Navy captain. Peter started building and sailing boats when he was just a high school kid; decades later he still hasn’t stopped experimenting in the vessels and buoys he designs. They both saw the need for an arctic buoy that could operate in water or in ice.
Until recently, most of the US National Ice Center buoys were built for ice covered polar waters and designed to be deployed on multi-year ice. As the multi-year ice melts, those buoys are sinking and researchers need to find new ways to fill in data gathering blanks. This is where the seasonal buoys that Walt and Peter are developing come in. A NOAA Small Business Innovative Research Grant funds production of their buoys, which are being deployed as part of the larger International Arctic Buoy Program (IABP). The IABP is not a classic international organization, but acts as a forum for sharing of buoy information amongst the arctic states, and other interested states and entities (e.g. Japan, the World Meteorological Organization). All of the members coordinate to provide as much buoy coverage as possible for monitoring ice, weather and other data in the Arctic Ocean. The IABP is yet another example of a functioning mechanism between arctic states that does not need the formal structural requirements of international organizations yet manages to provide an effective forum for the states that know most about a particular arctic issue to address it first hand.

#11 Ice I - A Primer

2008-08-29T04:21:00.000-07:00

"Nilas" ice formed overnight; in winter its layers accumulate to form new ice

Grease ice from above surrounded by thicker new ice with fresh snowfall on it.

Thursday, 2008-08-28

All trip long we’ve been wondering whether we would ever find a floe of multi-year ice large enough and thick enough for an “ice liberty” – when the crew can get out onto the ice for a few hours. We think we may have found one, measuring almost 17 miles in length by some eight miles wide. As I write (0820), it is about five miles to port. Depending on how much backing and ramming we have to do to get through the ice we are now in, it could take anywhere from an hour to three hours to go that five miles.

Even if we do not take an ice liberty, we will stop at the floe to deploy some prototype buoys designed for monitoring changing arctic weather conditions over the course of a year. Because there will be less and less ice in the arctic each summer, these buoys are designed to work both in ice and in open water, and can be deployed by air, at sea or on ice. We will plant one on the ice (it has a self-heating drill to settle itself into the ice) and launch one in open water. For more detail on these buoys, see my entry #12 on Walt Lincoln and Peter Legnos, the men who designed and built them.

Above: One of the weather buoys, waiting for enough ice on which to deploy it.

To understand more about sea ice, it helps to make a very basic distinction between new, first-year and multi-year (or old) sea ice.
NOAA and the National Ice Center include several more stages, ranging from New, to Nilas (less than 4 inches thick) to Young, to First Year (thin, medium and thick) to Multi-year ice. For more complete definitions see their “Observer’s Guide to Sea Ice”; if you’d like a copy, email to: library@hazmat.noaa.gov.New ice is “Ice in the initial stages of ice formation.” This includes Grease ice: “A thin, soapy-looking surface layer of coagulated [new] ice. Since summer is ending and winter is on its way, we have seen quite a bit of new ice forming, especially in the colder hours of the night watch.

Multi-year or old ice is “Sea ice 3 m (10 feet) or more thick that has survived at least one melting season, characterized by undulating, weathered ridges and a well-defined melt water drainage pattern.” (see below)
Most of the arctic multi-year ice this summer appears to be drifting toward the Canadian archipelago and building up there. Here, farther north and west, the mix of open water and multi-year ice has ranged from no coverage near Barrow to full coverage. But most days we travel in and out of open drift (4/ to 6/10ths coverage), close pack (7/ to 8/10ths) and very close to full pack (yep, you guessed it, 9/10ths to 100% cover). Much of the multi-year ice we’ve seen is not very thick; maybe two to three meters. Every so often we have had to break through a major pressure ridge, but our captain says none of these compares to the massive ridges he saw in the Arctic Ocean when he was on the Polar Sea, another USCG icebreaker some 20 years ago.
It’s now 0922 and we are closing in on the ice floe, but it will be a few hours until anyone can get out on it. Since this is the Arctic after all, I will write more on ice in my next entries. Until then, the last shot, to the right, shows deteriorating multi-year ice, with close pack ice in the background.

#10 Pictures at the Commission

2008-08-29T03:39:00.000-07:00

Images courtesy of CCOM/UNH

How the mapping data is used: Pictures at the Commission?
2008-08-28

So, what will be done with the pictures produced from the sonar mapping described in the last blog entry? The geologists and hydrographers on board are already poring over the first processed results of the data, and excited at some of the formations they reveal: possible rifting here, a better picture of known but poorly mapped features there, weird formations that cannot yet be identified: the discoveries and the questions they raise seem endless. The second image above is of the Healy Seamount, a major discovery on the 2003 Healy cruise in the Arctic Ocean. The image is created by taking the kind of colorful swath pictured at the end of yesterday’s blog, interpreting the pings into three-dimensional images of the structures on the ocean floor, and combining it with other information already known about the area from earlier data collection.

Being able to make such discoveries is a valuable side-benefit of the extended continental shelf mapping project, which has been funded by Congress through NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) since 2002. Larry Mayer, the cruise’s Chief Scientist, and his Center for Ocean and Coastal Mapping/Joint Hydrographic Center at UNH, were approached to carry out the mapping with NOAA not only in the Arctic Ocean, but for all of the US coastal areas. Andy Armstrong of CCOM and NOAA is along on this and all of the Healy cruises as the Co-Chief Scientist. CCOM scientists will process the data further when they return to UNH, combining it with data from past years’ Healy mapping cruises to provide more information on where the outer reach of the US-Alaskan extended continental shelf might lie.

The extended continental shelf, or ECS, is that part of a country’s shelf that extends beyond the 200 nautical miles automatically accorded to every coastal state under the LOS Convention and accepted state practice.

Under article 77 of the Convention, the coastal state exercises "sovereign rights for the purpose of exploring and exploiting its natural resources." Those natural resources include oil, of course. The Convention describes the natural resources over which the coastal state exercises those rights as: "mineral and other non-living resources of the seabed and subsoil" and certain sedentary living organisms on or under the seabed.

Every coastal state has rights over its continental shelf whether or not it has joined the Law of the Sea Convention. Each coastal state also sets its own extended continental shelf limits. However, the assertion of those limits by a state that is not party to the LOS Convention is much more vulnerable to challenge than ECS limits that have been confirmed by the delineation process set out in the Convention. Over 150 states are party to the Convention; the US is the only arctic state that is not.

Article 76 of the LOS Convention lays out a process for delimiting the outer reaches of a state’s extended continental shelf. That process involves submitting ocean floor mapping and other data to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS). The CLCS is established by the Convention and comprises 21 experts in geology, geophysics and hydrography. States that follow the delimitation process have the certainty of a "final and binding" status for any limits it sets based on the Commission’s recommendations. But only States that are party to the LOS Convention have the clear right to submit data to the CLCS. So until the US ratifies the Convention, which – remarkably – is far from a foregone conclusion, it cannot obtain the greater certainty as to its shelf limits that comes from Commission review. For more information on the prospects and widespread support for US ratification of the LOS Convention, please see the links at the bottom of my blog page.

Whether or not the US is ever able to submit the data supporting its assertion of extended continental shelf limits to the Commission, the data CCOM is gathering on the Healy cruises will provide the scientific foundation for those limits. It will also provide a much more complete picture of the ocean floor than is now available and offer scientists rich material for further investigation.

#9 The Healy's Marine Science Technicians

2008-08-26T06:08:00.001-07:00

The Healy’s Marine Science Technicians

2008-08-25

Coming off of watch this morning offered a good chance to talk with two of the three Marine Science Technicians on board, Rich Layman and Tom Kruger. The MSTs provide direct logistical, hands-on-the-deck support to the science crew for such projects as deploying and retrieving buoys, drilling for science core samples, and dredging for rock samples. They rotate two to a shift; the third MST is “Runamok Chuck” Bartlett.

This morning I finally watched Rich deploy one of the two daily XBTs (expendable bathymetric thermographs). The XBTs are generally scheduled for 0830 and 2030 but today the ice conditions were such that we grabbed the opportunity closer to 0800, since it looked like the large stretch of open water that was then open would be the only one available much of the morning. The XBTs are shot into the ocean to measure water temperature as against depth, an important input for calibrating the multi-beam sonar equipment. Temperature affects the density of water, which in turn affects sound speed. Since the multi-beam sonar measurements we are using for mapping rely on bouncing sound off of the ocean floor and back to the ship, knowing the density of the water through which the sound travels is essential to understanding the data correctly. The XBTs are little missile shaped devices about 10 inches long that carry a temperature sensor. The XBT is attached to a thin copper wire thousands of meters long and can be “shot” from a hand-held device. XBTs are launched into the water from the ship’s fantail and, once the wire spools out to the desired depth, readings are taken from the information that is sent back up the wire. Once this is done, the MST breaks the wire, letting loose the XBT.

Both Tom and Rich are new to the Healy and to the Arctic, having been here one and two years respectively. This is a product of the Coast Guard’s fairly strict rotation policy of moving personnel from one ship to another every two or three years, depending on their rank. Rich joined the Healy from his prior Coast Guard post at the National Response Center (NRC), a joint undertaking of the USCG, EPA, DOI and several other federal agencies to monitor hazardous materials spills and emissions. Tom’s last Coast Guard position was with the Coast Guard’s regional reporting station in Louisiana. Given the extensive oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, Tom gained considerable experience in related response measures. It is striking how seriously both take the Coast Guard’s responsibility to patrol illegal emissions of hazmats in national waters. They know their CFR (Code of Federal Regulations) well, which is where they find the listings of current “reportable amounts” of hazardous materials.

Perhaps most unexpected were their observations as to how the reporting requirements serve more than the legislatively intended function of generating self-reports from companies and individuals who cause the spills. A reportable spill can range from one drop – if it creates a “sheen” on the water – to tens of thousands of gallons. The additional effect of self-reporting also encourages companies to report incidents whose provenance is unclear. If a company spots a spill of unknown origin, it is most interested in establishing that it has not caused the spill. This leads in turn to pretty effective protocols for checking and ensuring that their own facilities are not “leaking”. We talked a bit as well about their work in earlier positions requiring the boarding of foreign vessels in US waters to enforce international standards such as those set under SOLAS (an International Maritime Organization treaty on the Safety of Life at Sea).

#8 First Polar Bear Sighting

2008-08-25T07:32:00.000-07:00

Polar Bear Sighting

Saturday, 2008-08-23

On night watch, after ten days at sea, we finally saw our first polar bear. On last year’s mapping cruise, which took place at roughly the same time, the science crew began seeing polar bears almost right away. By the end of their 30-day cruise they had spotted 21 of them. Given the even thinner ice cover where we are mapping, we are unlikely to see as many this year.

Yesterday’s New York Times “Evening Digest”* reported that NOAA observers have spotted ten polar bears, “an unusually large number” swimming off the Alaska coast. Some were “heading for shore, some heading for the retreating ice in the Chukchi Sea”, which is where we spent much of our first week of mapping. Tookaq reports that folks back home in Barrow have seen 14 polar bears in town, mostly on land, another sign that the polar bears are struggling with the lack of ice.

As you can see from the photos, the bear we saw was on thick multi-year ice, with intermittent open water as well as melt pools. The melt pools are the bright aquamarine color in the lower left of the picture below.

The polar bear population in the Chukchi Sea region is one 20 such populations identified in the circumpolar Arctic. According to Stirling and Taylor, the populations are divided geographically by ice pattern boundaries and possess slight genetic differences from each other. It takes some 24 years for polar bear populations to double, and scientists are uncertain how diminishing ice cover in summer will affect bears’ reproduction. The IUCN has estimated that “If climatic trends continue polar bears may be extirpated from most of their range within 100 years.” In 2006 IUCN upgraded the polar bear to its Red List of species threatened with extinction, citing climate change as the main reason for the move, see http://www.iucnredlist.org/.

I have posted some links to US steps identifying the polar bear as an endangered species on the right hand side of my blog, but none to the relevant international agreements. The 1973 Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears (ACPB) requires that the five contracting arctic states shall “take appropriate action to protect the ecosystems of which polar bears are a part, with special attention to habitat components such as denning and feeding sites and migration patterns, and shall manage polar bear populations in accordance with sound conservation practices based on the best available scientific data.” What comprises an ecosystem, and how you define a habitat, are not questions easily answered by science, but the general tone of the treaty is one of cooperation based on the best available science. Just how reliant policy makers and lawyers are on scientists to give effect to the policies and laws they draft is being made abundantly clear to me on this trip, and is a theme to which I will return in later blogs and in class.

Other relevant agreements include the 1973 Convention on the Trade in Endangered Species, which included polar bears on its original listing of protected species (Annex II), obligating states to regulate trade in listed species through export permitting. Bilateral agreements cover two other bear populations: a 2000 treaty between the US and Russia regarding the Alaska-Chukotka population and a 1999 agreement between Alaska’s Inupiat and Canada’s Inuvialuit regarding the southern Beaufort region population. For those of you interested in reading more on how other agreements such as the Climate Change Convention and the Convention on Biological Diversity may be relevant to protecting the polar bear, Nigel Bankes at the University of Calgary Law Faculty, on whose work I gratefully draw above, is doing interesting work in this regard.

* The NYT Digest, “Stars and Stripes” (a news digest for armed forces serving overseas), and your emails are our only source of news right now, since we are out of Internet range. David Hassilev, our communications guru, obtains the larger files by iridium phone and distributes them via the ship’s intra-net. This sparse coverage of the Olympics, and of VP picks, is fine with us for now. There is a blissful suspension in not being plugged in around the clock to the world’s news, but it is still good to have some sense of what’s going on out there. We should pick up Internet access again in about a week.

#7 Pressure Ridges and Fogbows

2008-08-22T04:14:00.000-07:00

Fogbow

Above: The pressure ridge in which we are currently stuck

Pressure Ridges and Fogbows
Thursday, August 21, 2008

As I write, we are firmly stuck in a sizable pressure ridge, impeding our mapping progress. The usual process is to back the cutter several ship’s lengths and ram forward, sometimes needing to repeat this multiple times until we break through the ice. This afternoon we are in relatively thick multi-year ice, but for much of last night’s eight-hour watch we may as well have been in Tahiti, as someone joked, there was so much open water. We are mapping around 83° N latitude; take a glance at one of the maps in the links to the right to see just how far north this is. Those who were on last year’s cruise say the ice is slushier and less compacted this year at the same latitude, with fewer thick stretches. Three of our science crewmembers are from the US National Ice Center, and I am eagerly awaiting their presentation at one of our nightly science talks.
Coming off of watch this morning at 0800 we were greeted by a fog-bow (like a rainbow, but pure white because it is reflecting the snow and ice in the seascape over which it hovers). Light filled and mesmerizing.

#6 Tookaq Neakok

2008-08-20T04:17:00.000-07:00

Tookaq on the Bridge

Sunday morning /afternoon, August 17, 2008

A good night’s watch, coming on just after the engine room took on a sea-water leak as we were ramming some of the first serious ice we’ve encountered. It was pretty quickly fixed and we were in and out of mostly first year ice, with increasing multi-year ice. The night watch is ideal for really digging into ideas about the data we are seeing as the contours of the ocean floor literally unroll before our eyes as we track a side profile (created by a single beam sonar) and a swath multi-beam sonar track. I finally feel familiar enough with the process and understanding the data to begin trading ideas with Larry about various ways to approach both measuring and characterizing certain juridical (vs. geological and morphological) aspects of the shelf. More on that process and some of the questions we are poring over in a later entry.

It was a still, clear watch, allowing us to see the moon rise (see photo, below), which was more or less the same time the sun was "setting" or dipping to touch the horizon, around 0200. It is always light. Always. After breakfast I went up to the bridge to watch the ice from the bridge’s sweeping wall of windows, then climbed the ladders up to “aloft conn”, the very highest enclosed point – think “eagle’s nest” -

above the bridge, where the ship is steered. Silas Ayers, Marine Science Officer, was on watch and gave me a great overview of the decisions, timing and protocols involved as he steered the Healy through the ever-changing ice, using “leads” (open water) and other paths of least resistance. Watching the ice is endlessly fascinating. It was a great “lullaby” before heading off to sleep around 0900.

Awoke bolt upright about 1235 remembering I had not “accounted” … a mandatory check-in (by ship intranet) for all crew at lunch and dinner to be sure that all hands are accounted for. I seem to be adapting to a schedule of about 4 hours sleep after our 0000-0800 watch; then grabbing a nap shortly before the watch begins again. Today I got up in what I had thought was time for the protestant church service, which turned out to be at 1300 rather than 1330.

Instead, I sat down for some quiet time in the “lounge” and a few minutes later Tookaq Neakok came in. We’d kept not finding the time to sit and jaw, so we finally did just that and it was great. Barrow’s Inupiat community sends an observer on the Healy voyages, and he’s along for his first time. Tookaq has several roles: making sure we do not interfere with the community’s subsistence whaling, helping us spot wildlife and ice changes evident to him, getting to know more about Coast Guard operations in the Arctic.

“Inupiak” is used to describe the language when two people are speaking; “Inupiat” when more than two are using it. I love the communal implications of that ruddy distinction.

We are about the same age. Tookaq was born in 1960 and has lived in Barrow all of his life, the youngest of 12 children. His grandmother raised him, and he was named according to Inupiat tradition after her husband, having been born shortly after that man’s death. One is named so as to capture and carry on the essence of the person who is departing. Of Tookaq’s eight daughters, the one who was born shortly after his grandmother died was given her name, Akbara. This means to run a long time (not like a marathon, Tookaq made certain to clarify, but a solid practical runner). His son, whose name means little black duck, is the youngest, and Tookaq has a nephew currently serving in Iraq. Tookaq told stories of studying in the BIA schools and the shameful punishments and efforts to keep him and his classmates from speaking Inupiat. Now the language is reviving some, as a number of the kids who leave Barrow for college or work return after life elsewhere.

Tookaq’s name means “head of a harpoon”, which turns out to be very fitting. He began a new whaling crew (there are some 40 of them in Barrow) with one of his friends just three years

ago. The Quvqan Crew has caught two whales in three years; a remarkable track record, really. He says it’s because they have mostly young strong men, most just out of high school. Obviously, landing a whale is a communal effort. If you are interested in reading more about Inupiat whaling, The Whale and the Supercomputer: on the Forefront of Climate Change, by Charles Wohlforth, is a great source of information. It also provides a look into life in Barrow, and the interactions – or not – between the Inupiat community and the science community that has grown up there since the US decided in the late 19th century to station a research outpost there.

In the hour or so we sat there this morning, Tookaq and I talked a lot about the fundamental changes he has seen in his lifetime. The most profound change is the transition from a subsistence and barter economy to purchasing more of what one needs to live. In just 48 years! His family is

still able to live almost entirely from subsistence hunting (whale, fish, duck, caribou, a tundra rhubarb-like plant, salmon-berries, black raspberries, blueberries). He observes that the food in Barrow’s only store is far too expensive to buy on any regular basis.

Tookaq thinks that a number of factors have contributed to this transition away from bartering. These include the growing number of non-Inupiat residents in Barrow, who brought currency with them, and the changing weather making it harder to both whale and to hunt on land. He is saddened to see the slow changes to the Inupiat community by virtue of some people now having more wealth than others. When he was a boy they used to trade with the inland communities. Barrow offered fish and whale and the other communities provided caribou. The beads used when one had no goods were varying shades of blue. We talked a lot about food, which proved to be a great common language; about the locavore movement in Vermont; about how long you have to cook whale meat; about how most people don’t know where the food on their plate comes from.

This year in January water came all the way up to the beach in Barrow. No ice. Tookaq said he had never seen that. The ice cellar they have at home in Barrow, basically an underground freezer in the permafrost, is melting, and water is coming in from the sea (permafrost melts from below because of the insulating properties of snow). The one at their fish camp is still functioning pretty well, but that is further inland.

Above, Barrow in September 08

It’s been great to continue conversations with Tookaq, and good to know we still have some two weeks left. When we wrapped up, he said I enjoyed talking almost as much of his grandmother. Given what he told me of the importance of stories being passed on from generation to generation by the Inupiat elders, and of the stories she used to tell, I think I can take that as a compliment, right?