Breaking the ice

“What’s changing is that the amount of multi-year ice – the ice that survives the summer melt – is going down at a rate that is much greater than the overall reduction of sea ice extent,” explains Stefan Hendricks, an expert in ice physics with the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research.  “Ice cover is becoming more seasonal, which means there are more regions which are ice-free in summer.”

While the wider environmental ramifications of these changes are only beginning to be understood, the geopolitical implications are already clear. Melting ice is redrawing the polar map and opening up previously inaccessible areas.

“The retreating ice makes the Arctic and all its resources accessible,” says  Rear Amiral Nils Wang, Commandant of the Royal Danish Defence College and one of Denmark’s leading Arctic security analysts. “We are already seeing increased maritime activity in the area and this will grow in the coming decade.”
 

New Arctic economy

 Easier navigation of the two great polar seaways – the Northeast Passage (NEP) and the Northwest Passage (NWP) – is a potential game changer. The increasing availability of these routes has the potential to transform the movement of global freight, shrinking sailing distances between Europe and Asian markets.

In summer, the NEP provides a link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans with a route that skirts Norway and the north coast of Russia. The attraction is clear: this distance between Yokohama in Japan and Rotterdam in the Netherlands, for example, is just over 7,000 nautical miles via the NEP.  The conventional Suez Canal route is 4,000 miles longer.

The NWP, the other major polar shortcut, skirts the north coasts of both Canada and the United States, offering an alternative to the Panama Canal. Again, distance savings can be significant. The trip between Canada’s west coast and Finland, for example, is around 1,000 nautical miles shorter via the Arctic.

Ships taking the polar option continue to face formidable challenges, though. Traversing the Arctic depends on icebreaker support; in the case of the NEP, that means calling on Russian assistance (Russia maintains the Northern Sea Route – the central stretch of the wider NEP). Having an ice-capable vessel also helps: even in near-open water, chunks of ice – known as growlers and bergy bits – are an ever-present hazard. And with the exception of the Northern Sea Route, maritime infrastructure such as search and rescue facilities is thin on the ground.

While a major shift in container traffic away from the lower latitude Panama and Suez routes is some way off, destinational shipping within the region is already significant. Research carried out on behalf of the Arctic Council, published in 2009, counted some 6,000 ships and numbers are expected to rise in the coming years.

Moves to exploit the region’s abundant natural resources are one reason for this. The Arctic is rich in hydrocarbons: 13 per cent of the world’s undiscovered oil and 30 per cent of undiscovered natural gas could lie in the region, according to the US Geological Survey.

The region is also a treasure trove of mineral wealth. Greenland, for example, possesses deposits of copper, iron, zinc, gold, molybdenum, uranium and rare earth elements. Extraction and transportation will become easier as the ice retreats.

The Arctic – land of the midnight sun – is increasingly popular with tourists and demand for polar voyages is rising. Cruise ship arrivals at Greenland ports and harbours, for example, more than doubled between 2003 and 2008. Shrinking ice cover could have the effect of luring cruise vessels ever further north.
Increasing competition for scarce marine resources also raises new questions. Pressure on Arctic and near-Arctic fishing grounds, for example, could increase as fish stocks further south are depleted. The situation is complicated by national differences in fishing regulations and by marine boundary disputes.
There’s also the question of dealing with illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing. The potential for flare ups should not be underestimated: the “Icelandic Cod Wars” – the dispute between the UK and Iceland over fishing rights – triggered naval clashes in the North Atlantic as recently as 1976.

Emerging security needs

For governments in the region, escalating activity in the Arctic presents new security challenges:

“All the Arctic states are trying to increase their capabilities to oversee what is going on up there,” says Rear Admiral Wang. “What’s missing at the moment is a complete real-time overview.”

Maintaining peace and stability in the region will increasingly hinge on the ability to monitor land and maritime frontiers. In addition, defence forces need tools to provide early warning of airspace incursions, as well as sonar capabilities to detect unauthorised submarine activity.

Then there’s the requirement to ensure the safety of civilian and military ships and aircraft operating in the region. To get the most out of scarce search and rescue capabilities, and to deploy resources effectively when things go wrong, governments need better real-time visibility of sea, sky and coast.

 There’s also a need to monitor economic activity in the Arctic, particularly oil and gas exploration, fishing and shipping. Governments need to be sure that companies stick to the rules, that quotas are respected and that pollution and environmental impacts are kept in check.
 

Building the picture

 Tackling these complex and interconnected challenges will increasingly depend on the deployment of modern intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) systems. These need to be capable of offering both strategic and tactical visualisations – in short, allowing operators to zoom in on what’s happening.

“You need a layered surveillance suite that provides an overall view of what’s going on, and then the ability to drill down to get a detailed picture of a specific area of interest by inserting airborne and shipborne surveillance power,” says Wang. “These capabilities are necessary whether you are monitoring an oil spill, conducting a search and rescue operation or if there is military activity you want to have a closer look at.” Delivering polar ISR means overcoming a number of hurdles. Logistics is one of them: coastlines are long, remote and sparsely populated; north of 83°30’N, the land stops and there is only ice. This makes it difficult to support ground-based infrastructure such as radar stations and transmitters.

Communication is another challenge. The enormous distances involved rule out extensive hardwired networks. Satellite coverage is patchy. And high frequency radio for long-distance communications is vulnerable to ionospheric interference at higher latitudes.

None of these problems are insurmountable says Marc Essig, Thales’ country director for the Nordic and Baltic states. And the ability to get the most out of infrastructure that is already in place will be critical.

“This is about smart defence,” stresses Essig. “The key will be to re-use existing equipment and to share data across countries.”

New technologies will help to fill in gaps in the surveillance picture. Unmanned aerial vehicles – better known as drones – could play a vital role here, eliminating intelligence blind spots and providing a real-time eye in the sky to assist in reconnaissance operations over the horizon.

As well as mastering the sensor technology needed to capture data, Thales is also a leader in the technology needed to make sense of it all. Thales’ surveillance solutions are designed to assimilate different types of data – such as infrared from satellites, radar returns, imagery captured by drones, sonar from ships and AIS data – and then to convert this into actionable information. Data fusion of this sort is already part of Thales’ command and control systems used by the armed forces and in urban security systems.

“These not only allow operators to visualise what’s happening, but also help them to decide what action is needed via decision support systems,” says Essig. “These capabilities are vital in harsh and complex environments. Thales’ expertise in ISR and our presence in the region means we are ideally placed to provide systems, equipment and support to meet the unique challenges posed by the Arctic environment.”[[asset:signpost:143976 {"mode":"full","align":"","field_admin_link":["node\/2524171"]}]]