First commercial transit of North-East-Passage

[Skybird]

Despite the coming ice age and growing ice levels at the poles, neither sun activty nor metaphysics have hindered two German merchants and two russian icebreakers to successfully transit the North-East-Passage, making them the first modern traders doing so.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8251914.stm

Both ships left South Korea in late July, negotiating the passage off north-eastern Siberia behind two Russian icebreakers.

"We are all very proud and delighted to be the first Western shipping company which has successfully transited the legendary North East Passage and delivered the sensitive cargo safely through this extraordinarily demanding sea area", said Beluga CEO Niels Stolberg.

The ships have been offloading some of their cargo. Beluga spokeswoman Verena Beckhusen told AP that the Beluga Fraternity had already left to continue its journey via Murmansk to the Dutch port of Rotterdam.

The Foresight's departure has been postponed until Saturday because of bad weather, she added.

But the once impenetrable ice that prevented ships travelling along the northern Russian coast has been retreating rapidly because of global warming in recent decades.

The passage became passable without ice breakers in 2005.

[Torplexed]

Gotta beat the rush and buy me a lovely beach house on the East Siberian Sea.

[MothBalls]

Now they can transport the drilling equipment up there to start sucking oil out of the region.

Oh the irony.

The burning of fossil fuels causing global warming that melts the ice also gives us access to get more fossil fuels.

[Skybird]

Let's see what the Gulf Stream will have to say on it. the real irony is that man-made global warming maybe could cause some paradox effects. The Guld stream lready has lost around 20% in energetic activity due to changing water conditions (salinity being a key variable). It cannot be ruled out that global warming makes the water pump of the global currents change in ways that they work antagonistic to the warming climate, and cause regional falls in temperature where the rest of the globe heats up. I do not see this as a likely outcome currently, but we are still not competent enough to calculate energetic changes in currents due to changing atmospheric conditions, changes in the balance between salt and sweet water, and the way in which these interact with the global system of deep sea currents. we only know that the less difference there is between salt and sweet water, the less energetic the ocean pump pf ciurrents seem to work. and the polar ice caps are doomed to go, like almost all mountain ice and glaciers (many already gone anyway).

We are bungling things whose complex interactions we just have started to imagine - just to ignore this information next, in the name of economic developement. But everything keeps running in cycles, and what goes up, must and will come down. Including human civilisations.