Arctic Urban Legends

An update to a Northwest Passage blogpost posted to the Facebook Rememberig Frankline Expedition group, elicited a response from @aaron.spitzer. I post his comment below, which I thanked him for citing the fact my stories were from conversations that weren't fact-checked. That in turn got me to fact-check another story from the same 1986 summer in the Arctic Islands from my now-defunct original website reposted at bottom.

Map

First, here is the map of the region from the blogpost in question, reprojected in the NWT Albers for better map illustration. It also includes two additional airports mentionned at the bottom. The post was about navigating the Northwest Passage through history, the Arctic Islands dispatch base of Resolute Bay and an extension to New York.

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Comment

This is the comment to the group in question by a Whitehorse YT resident familiar with regional lore: 

I feel like this story confuses and conflates multiple true stories. To challenge Canadian sovereignty, the US *did* send the USS Manhattan oil tanker (not a barge) through the passage in 1969 (not the 1950s). And regarding Resolute's location, it was supposed to have been built farther west IN CANADA (not in Alaska), on Bathurst Island I think, but ice blocked the delivery of materials so they built the station at Resolute instead. This was, I'm pretty sure, part of the JAWS (Joint Arctic Weather Station) project, involving US and Canadian collaboration in the 1950s, so it was 1) well before the discovery of oil led to any development at Prudhoe Bay, and 2) not at all done against Canadian wishes. Also, the US does not "claim" the Northwest Passage. Rather, the US views the Northwest Passage as an international strait over which ALL nations have a "right of transit passage." That right means a nation can pass through between two areas of "high seas." It does NOT mean that a nation can conduct research, fish, build anything, or touch land in any way. Certainly the US does not, and has not ever, asserted a right to build anything in Canadian Arctic. There is not a single morsel of contested land in the entire circumpolar Arctic.

Let me add to these fantastic details, that there are indeed no international waters here: the Exclusive Economic Zone in blue cover the entire Arctic Islands.

Another story

Here is another I posted on my now-defunct otiginal website, returning from the Arctic via Yellowknife

... Return to Yellowknife, and watch the F-18 jet fighter from the USAF take off in waves... thundering down the runway, tilting nose-up and using the ground (not thin air) to augment their thrust and climb vertiginously... these are war-games with US Navy jets based in Nanisivik on Baffin Island further east... their 'playground' consists of the entire pie from the Alaska border, up to the North Pole, and down toward Greenland... the previous year, the Navy won the war-games by using automobile radar detectors, which gave their pilots a split-second advantage to detect USAF jets... radar detectors cost $100 each, against jets $10M apiece?

I simply googled here the range in nautical miles of the fighter jets in question. I conservatively mapped a 1250 mile buffer around the two airbases . Iqaluit (frmr. Pond Inlet) is actually the correct air base, Nanisivik being in far North Ellesmere Island. A mistake in my original post was further compounded by the simple fact that aircraft ranges are an order of magnitude shorter than that originally imagined!

Fact checking urban legends

This map shows how easy it is to fact-check with publicly available data on easy-to-create maps on the web. I further expanded on that in a paper on story maps as a tool toward better news casting here, Map stories can provide dynamic visualizations of the Anthropocene to broaden factually based public understanding [July 2014, The Anthropocene Review 1(3)]:

 

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