I was aboard the 364-foot Russian research-cruise ship Akademik Ioffe when it came to a violent stop after grounding on a shoal in a remote region of the Gulf of Boothia in Canada’s Arctic. Fortunately, none of the 102 passengers and 24 crew members were injured. Chemical contaminants that may or may not have been pumped out with the bilge water seemed to be minor.

It could have ended up a lot worse. I was on the ship representing Yale Environment 360, which commissioned me to report on climate change in the Arctic and the research that scientists and students with the U.S. National Foundation sponsored Northwest Passage Project were to be conducting on that three-week voyage.

It took nearly nine hours for a Hercules aircraft to fly in from the Canadian National Defence Joint Rescue Centre in Trenton, Ont., 12 hours for another DND plane to come in from Winnipeg and 20 hours for a Canadian Coast Guard helicopter to fly over. By then we were boarding the Akademik Vavilov, a Russian sister ship that had come to the rescue.

Passengers aboard the Russian research/cruise ship Akademik Ioffe watch a Canadian military aircraft fly overhead as they wait to be rescued after running aground on a shoal in the Arctic. Photo: Edward Struzik

Dangerous scenarios

Had the weather not worked in our favour and had there been thick ice such as the kind we had sailed through hours earlier, we would have faced a number of challenging and potentially dangerous scenarios.

Powerful winds could have spun us around on that rock, possibly ripping a hole into the hull that might have been bigger than the one that was presumably taking in the water we saw being pumped out of the ship. Thick ice grinding up against the ship would have made it almost impossible to get everyone off into lifeboats.

I had warned about a scenario like this in my book Future Arctic, Field Notes from A World On The Edge. Only 10 per cent of the Arctic Ocean in Canada, and less than two per cent of the Arctic Ocean in the United States, is charted. Only 25 per cent of the Canadian paper charts are deemed to be good. Some of the U.S. charts go back to the days of Captains Cook and Vancouver and the time when the Russians owned Alaska.

I’m not the only one who has been raising the red flag. Arctic experts such as Rob Huebert, Whitney Lackenbauer, Michael Byers and the federal Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development have all highlighted the rising risks of shipping in the Arctic, and the formidable challenges associated with timely search and rescues and the staging of oil spill cleanups.

Groundings have increased

Since the catastrophic grounding of the Exxon Valdez off the coast of Alaska in 1989, the list of groundings of fuel tankers, drilling ships, cargo ships and passenger vessels plying the waters of the North American Arctic has risen significantly.

Most notable among them were the cruise ship Hanseatic, which ran aground in the Canadian Arctic in 1996, the Clipper Adventurer which ran aground in Coronation Gulf in 2010 and the Nanny, a fuel tanker that ran aground near Baker Lake in 2012 in an area where marine investigators say there is little margin for error. It was the fifth grounding in that area since 2007.

Passengers disembark the Akademik Ioffe after the Russian ship ran aground in the Canadian Arctic. Photo: Edward Struzik

As sea ice continues to recede in the Arctic, it provides cruise, cargo and tanker companies with new opportunities, and emboldens small vessels to venture into uncharted areas. A recent analysis suggests that the average Arctic ship route has moved more than 180 miles closer to the North Pole in the past seven years. Mines such as the one at Mary River on Baffin Island are planning to use ships to transport their ore. Bigger cruise ships such as the Crystal Serenity that sailed through the Northwest Passage with 1,000 passengers and 600 crew members in 2017 are beginning to test these opportunities.

No rescue ports

There are other factors portending future disasters. There are no ports in the North American Arctic from which to stage a rescue or an oil spill cleanup.

Icebreakers are few and far between. The U.S. Coast Guard has just one in operation. Canada has a few more, but many of them are well on their way to being decommissioned.

Weather forecasting capabilities are poor due to the shortage of meteorological stations and the increasingly unpredictable nature of Arctic weather. Powerful summers storms such as the record-breaking summer cyclone that tore through the Arctic in 2012 are on the increase. Stable shorefast ice is letting go in unpredictable ways.

Our ship, for example, was forced to make a last-minute change to the starting route because of ice that was blocking passage into Resolute Bay. Recognizing the challenges, two cruise companies reportedly cancelled their expeditions this year on short notice.

There is a lot that can and needs to be done to reduce future risks. The Canadian government could compel ships to use forward looking multi-beam sonar with Bluetooth technology. Charts can and need to be updated rapidly. More weather stations are needed. The dumping of bilge water should be banned. A search and rescue team should be seasonally based in a strategic part of the Arctic. An Arctic port is needed sooner rather than later.

There is also a need to determine what impact future shipping will have on beluga and narwhal migrations.

There is time to play catch-up because there are few signs that shipping companies are in a hurry to exploit the short cuts that the Northwest Passage offers between the Atlantic and the Pacific. But the number of partial transits will increase as cruise ships, mining companies and future oil and gas activity focus their eyes on the Arctic.

As things stand now, we are not prepared.

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The crew of the Arctic Joule showed off their rig on Tuesday at Vancouver's Maritime Museum. In less than a week the four adventurers will be embarking on the Mainstream Last First expedition, a 75-day journey from Inuvik, Northwest Territories to Pond Inlet, Nunavut in the 25-foot rowboat to raise awareness about the effects of climate change in the Arctic.

Their goal is to be the first team ever to travel the fabled Northwest Passage on human power alone. It seems like a tall order today, but only fifteen years ago a journey like this would have been absolutely impossible without a steel-hulled icebreaker and a lot of luck.

In recent years rising temperatures have caused the ice around Canada's northernmost islands to melt, opening a corridor that links east and west. The prospect of the new path is exciting, but the opportunity comes at a grave cost, says crewmember Kevin Vallely. “This has not been done until now and it could not have been done until now because of climate change.”

The route of the Mainstream Last First expedition goes from Inuvik to Pond Inlet, through water that was once locked in ice

It was Vallely, whose previous journeys include a record-breaking ten-hour run along Vancouver Island’s West Coast Trail and a hike across Russia’s Lake Baikal, who gave the expedition its name. About fifteen years earlier he and a friend were brainstorming what “firsts” were left now that the tallest mountains have been climbed and both the Poles touched. The Northwest Passage had been concurred, but never on human power alone.

When it became clear that this kind of journey would be possible, Vallely began assembling a crew of veteran adventurers he thought could handle the punishing row. Paul Gleeson of Limerick, Ireland is best known for his harrowing journey across the Atlantic with his then girlfriend Tori Holmes, which led them into a hurricane and two tropical storms. The two co-authored a book about the adventure called Crossing the Swell.

Chronicling the journey will be documentary filmmaker Frank Wolf whose previous expeditions include following the route of the Sandakan Death March in Borneo and a ground-level exploration of the route of the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline.

This will not be Wolf’s first view with the effects of climate change. In 2009 he canoed the 2,004 km from Yellowknife to Rankin Inlet. Along the way he witnessed the physical evidence of climate change, including dwindling caribou populations and damage to local infrastructure. “In Yellowknife there are buildings that are three years old but they’re completely listing and buckling because the permafrost is gone, permafrost that was there for centuries,” he says.

He is particularly looking forward to connecting with local people around Inuvik and at their halfway point in Cambridge Bay who have seen the effects of climate change for themselves.  

The only novice on the trip will be shipping professional Denis Barnett of Dublin, Ireland who moved to Vancouver four-and-a-half years ago, drawn by the skiing and outdoor lifestyle.

Robin Thacker of Vancouver’s Atlantis Kayaks designed the Arctic Joule specifically for the journey. He says the challenge is not so much the route, but the length of the expedition. The boat is equipped with a solar panel to power communications equipment and a sleeping area at one end big enough to fit all four men, although only two will be sleeping at any given time.

Thacker has spent more than a few sleepless nights recently making subtle adjustments to the design. But in the end he knows it’s up to the rowers to make it work. “They have so much experience between them,” he says. “They’ll be fine.”

As well as being an adventure, this expedition will provide invaluable scientific data on the current state of the Arctic. The crew has partnered with the Vancouver Aquarium’s CROW Program (Canadian Rangers Ocean Watch), which has been working with local Indigenous groups in the far North to gather oceanographic data.

Along their route, the crew will be gathering water samples to test the temperatures, salinity and chemical make-up of the newly melted waters. “Because we’re going so slow, we can take samples in a lot of places,” says Wolf. “Most motor [propelled] boats, if they’re going through, will only take one-tenth of the samples that we will.”

Aquarium Director of Arctic Programs Eric Solomon says he was skeptical when the crew first approached him about the Mainstream Last First.

“The first thing I thought was let me think of all the reasons we’re probably not going to get involved with this,” he says. “I was thinking, first of all, they’re probably going to totally miss the point.”

But after they explained to him their message about climate change and their desire to bring Northern perspectives to Southern audiences, he was sold.

“At the Vancouver Aquarium it’s really important for us the recognition that the environment doesn’t just exist in a vacuum outside the contexts that are political and cultural, economic and social, even nutritional,” he explains. “Clearly this is something these guys get.”

The break-up of ancient arctic ice has opened up the Northwest Passage but still remains a challenge for a rowboat

Irish company Mainstream Renewable Energy is sponsoring the trip. The company’s Country Manager for Canada, Sherra Zulerons, believes that the expedition’s environmental message was a perfect fit for their mission to help wean the world off of fossil fuels.

“While it’s an adventure it’s also a sad time for mankind because it’s demonstrating that climate change is happening, it’s here today and it’s something that is no longer just a story,” she says.

As a testament to the power of that message, Mainstream Last First has already made one convert before it even left land. Barnett, the crew’s youngest member, came onboard for the adventure but says he’d never given much thought to the climate change issue.

“I drive a car with an engine that’s way too big; it’s really not fuel-efficient,” he says. “I used to leave lights on. I didn’t really care. The more I get to know about it, the more terrifying it is. There are people who are streets ahead of us, who are really passionate about it, and they know what they’re talking about. It’s the average Joe on the street like me that needs to be exposed to it.”

Now a convert, Barnett hopes that the Mainstream Last First expedition might help entice people like him to find ways to fight climate change in their own lives. “Hopefully people can relate to what we’re doing—four guys going on an adventure—and go, hang on a second, this is more important,” he says. “This isn’t cool; we’ve got to do something.”

Image Credit: Erika Thorkelson

Image Credit: Mainstream Last First via Flickr

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.