Northwest Passage Reloaded

Update: right on cue, a photo exhibit on Arctic Life and Climate Change in Budapest HU on Euronews.

Here is an old webpage from 1996 I had to retire a couple years ago. It smacks of urban legend, had I not been told by airport staff in Resolute on Cornwallis Isl., the Arctic Canadian hub (read on):

1985 - Arctic Islands: I spent a short summer in the High Arctic with the Geological Survey of Canada [now part of Environment & Natural Resources Canada]: do you know why the central airport in the Canadian high Arctic is at Resolute Bay on Cornwallis Island? Not only is it very near the magnetic pole (little one can do about that), but it's amidst a well-know perennial fog-bank in the summer (something could've been done about it, read on).

There used to be a friendly cat&mouse game going on between US and CAN, of lesser importance in the post-Cold War era [2009 update: but of renewed importance in the current Arctic geopolitics here]: Canada claims sovereignty over the entire pie from the Yukon/Alaska border up to the pole and down between Baffin Isl. and Greenland through Nares Straight. US claims the intervening international waters beyond the 200 nautical mile Economic Exclusion Zone [see bottom update]. 

To test that sovereignty, the US Army Corps of Engineers [USACE see bottom] used to ship a barge yearly through the Northwest Passage - from New York, north of Baffin Island, past Cornwallis Island and Mackenzie Delta, on to Prudhoe Bay. To further test this in the mid-fifties, the US decided to build an airbase to help with surveillance missions in the former Soviet Union. On the appointed summer, bureaucratic tie-ups and the extra organisation to ship an airport in spare parts delayed the departure of the convoy until September. 

Wouldn't you know that by end of month when they reached Cornwallis Island then, the ice-bank had already closed across the straight as it does every year by October. So the convoy turned around, but only after off-loading said airport materials to pick up next year, and make the round-trip faster and cheaper - the Arctic is very dry and sparsely inhabited, so leaving gear up there is no big deal (I found many caches from forty years ago, with pristine cans of peanut butter, dried bananas... and spam).

So the USACE went back next year and earlier in August, but that one was one cold summer where the ice never left the ground (same as ‘85 when I went up, which is why I was told this story). Having gone all that way and looking for something to show for their travails, they decided then&there to build the airport right where the gear was dumped on Cornwallis Island. Voilà! Instant airport with no rationale as to its location, other than traveling mishaps and ice - which, in their defence, is the rule in the Arctic anyway... It has been used ever since. 

Resolute Bay is a thriving community, used by CAN government field parties that spend summers there as part of the claim to sovereignty (a whole program called Polar Continental Shelf Project went for almost 50 years though it's staggering nowadays amidst government cutbacks and new Arctic geopolitics). The only problem however is that Resolute Bay sits right in the middle of a perennial fog-bank, which any Inuit (Eskimo) could have informed anyone who cared to ask! So it's a ritual up there to build in ten days slack on each end of a short summer field season, just in case fog fails to lift at appointed flight times...

"Remembering the Franklin Expedition": I joined this Facebook Group (here), because Owen Beatty (Wikipedia) discovered the first terrestrial remains in the Arctic Isl. just a few summers prior to when I was there.  It's such a small world: one Inuit participant recalled the Inuit guide I had who hails from Spence Bay now Taloyoak; another Caucasian participant thinks he recalls the Vietnam helicopter pilot who had a habit of wagging the tail rotor prior to take-off (key piece of equipment for flight stability, and a whole other story you can ask for in the comments section).

The Northwest Passage is inevitably the topic, especially that Climate Change may re-open it for better access than the stories above (not necessarily a good thing by the way, leave a comment too re: that). Here is therefore a quick map to depict the locales mentioned above:

click to enlarge

Notice the black squiggly lines at top left are the ice extent minima, where ice starts to rebuild ever fall, and Cornwallis is in that vicinity.

The Franklin Expedition route in purple with yellow dots veered south, it's not clear if it was currents or exceptional ice thickness.

The Northwest Passage route in red dashes is extended in solid green to NYC, the North Atlantic USACE base, to show the distances involved:

https://bit.ly/48hWyZg

In closing, another reason I don't believe this to be an urban legend, is a USACE engineer corroborated this 20 yrs. ago when I was at Esri, whose software I made this map with (all data sources ArcGIS Online). 

2020 update: The Exclusive Economic Zone map was added later on; it shows this was a largely academic excercise, as the bulk of the Arctic Isl. fall within it:

click to enlarge

 Then CAN Prime Minister Diefenbaker had a frosty relationship with then US President Eisenhower, whom he distanced himself w.r.t. Soviet matters. Canada played neutral with its neigbour across the N Pole, here's another entry from ye olde website for couleur locale:

A coincidence in geology and geography made Siberia and northern Alberta very similar. Both had two petroleum provinces mid-continent in the foothills of orogenic belts, with shallow clastic and deep reef oil and gas deposits in significant amounts. And both were plains of rather higher elevation against mountain ranges with short summer long days, and long dry winters. As Canada was not involved in the Cold War (indeed Kennedy suspected Trudeau sympathised with Krushtchev), there was a natural affinity, and petroleum technology was freely exchanged across the N Pole. Every two weeks, for example, a charter flight flew then over the pole from Calgary to Novosibirsk. 

[For a twist of Cold War geopolitics, see this other old post on my Arctic experience:

... In 1985, we hear East German radio broadcasts over the Pole, extolling the virtues of Communism to anyone who cared to listen in German across the Arctic (likely no Inuit and few visitors spoke, but I did).]