![]() ![]() In the past few years, Moscow has also resurrected search and rescue posts and made plans to repair and expand Arctic ports along the coast. His government has set up a Northern Sea Route Administration to regulate foreign shipping traffic through Russian Arctic waters. “States and private companies that choose the Arctic trade routes will undoubtedly reap economic advantages,” he told a conference on Arctic issues in 2011. President Vladimir Putin has strongly backed such ambitions. “In the course of the next 20 to 25 years, we are planning to transport more than 10 times as much via the NSR,” says Igor Chernyshenko, a member of Russia’s upper house of parliament from the Arctic city of Murmansk. ![]() The government has set its sights on much bigger goals. As a result, total cargo volumes recovered to 5.15 million tonnes last year, almost back to the level of 1990. For five of the first six months of 2016, the sea area covered with ice was smaller than any year since satellites started tracking sea-ice extent in 1979. Total cargo transport volumes plummeted from a peak of 6.58 million tonnes in 1987 to just 1.46 million tonnes in 1998.īut over the past decade, rising temperatures have created larger patches of open water on the NSR for longer periods than ever before. But after the disintegration of the USSR, use of the route almost completely stopped, threatening the survival of towns like Tiksi. The Soviet government had used the Northern Sea Route since the 1930s, and extensively since the 1970s: for full-length transits between Europe and Asia, to supply its Arctic settlements with food and fuel and to ship products from northern regions that lacked transport links on land. But when the USSR collapsed in 1991, the money that had kept all this alive dried up, sending Russia’s entire Arctic zone into a two-decades-long tailspin. The Soviet Union developed its Arctic regions very differently from geographically comparable areas in Canada or Alaska: it built full-scale industrial facilities, infrastructure and large permanent settlements. Calculated between the ports of Yokohama and Hamburg, the 7,200 nautical miles shipping distance between Asia and Europe using the NSR is 37 per cent shorter than the southern route via the Suez Canal. In theory, the NSR could compete with routes that have dominated global maritime transport for decades. “That provides extra opportunities for development of the Russian Arctic.” “If you have atomic-powered vessels, the possibility to navigate the Arctic becomes, generally speaking, quite a routine business,” he says, a reference to ships with icebreaking capacity. “The warming creates great opportunities and now we are talking a lot in our country about developing this passage between Europe and Asia,” says Vladimir Kotlyakov, scientific director of the Institute of Geography at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Moscow hopes that such a revival could also resurrect its far northern regions – one-fifth of the country’s territory. Government officials and scholars argue that the Northern Sea Route (NSR), a historic sea link between Europe and Asia traditionally known in the west as the Northeast Passage, is being reborn. But in Russia, the rising temperatures are fuelling expectations that the waters along its northern coast, long a frozen frontier, could once again become a vibrant shipping line, rivalling some of the world’s most important trading routes. Global warming, which is causing Arctic sea ice to melt at an unprecedented pace, is watched with alarm in other parts of the world. This ray of hope comes from an unlikely source: climate change. ![]() Maybe everything will prosper here and there will be no point leaving,” he adds. ![]() Having opted to become a soldier like his father, Kudryashov says he doesn’t feel comfortable on the “mainland” – the word people here use to describe other parts of Russia. “We are planning to stay for the next 10 years or so, and then we’ll see,” he says, his arm around Obidina. The rest stand empty, cracks in the concrete walls widening with every winter, ice falls pouring from burst pipes. In the military district where Kudryashov lives, only a handful of buildings are still in use. “You must come again in winter, when the snowdrifts reach up to the third floor!”īut the harsh climate and remote locale mean the town is struggling for survival. “We live in a wonderful place,” Kudryashov says. Lyudmila Obidina, his 18-year-old girlfriend, moved to Tiksi four years ago with her mother and stepfather. Kudryashov, 20, grew up here, the son of an air force commander. ![]()
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