See full version: Northwest Passage; Closed For Business
The latest report from Dec. 2018 lists 290 crossings since 1903 and shows only two in 2018, with a third ship (a tug) exiting after wintering 3 years.
https://www.spri.cam.ac.uk/resources/infosheets/northwestpassage.pdf
More at post https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2016/11/27/todays-arctic-compares-with-150-years-ago/
If once means many times and open means closed, then the Grifftard didn’t lie and is factually correct about something. But then, that depends… [links]
However, the Northwest Passage was open in 1903. more
My Northwest Passage trip was cancelled last year, because of too much ice.
The official record of ship transits through the NW Passage is kept by the Scott Polar Institute at Cambridge. Many ships have made through, including the explorers 150 years ago in wood vessels, along with sleds.
The 19th century explorers are shown on map below:
https://rclutz.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/arctic-explorers-fig2.jpg [links]
This graph shows the relationship between climate alarmists and reality. more
Moli (Mo for short) is being piloted singlehandedly by Randall Reeves, who has already circumnavigated Antarctica and is hell bent on circumnavigating America too!
[Edit – August 16th] [links]
However one such vessel is already en route to the Arctic Circle, so why don’t we take a look at its live tracking map?
For over 500 years, Arctic explorers have sought a passage between the North Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Such a passage, often called the Northwest Passage, would connect Europe to Asia via shorter routes than the long voyage south around Africa. In 1497, English King Henry VII sent Italian explorer John Cabot to look for this hypothetical route and expeditions from some of the most famous explorers in the centuries that followed—Sir Francis Drake and Captain James Cook among them—met with failure. The combined efforts of a number of explorers eventually uncovered a winding path from the Atlantic to the Arctic and Pacific Oceans through the ice-bound islands of northern Canada. Even in modern times, navigating from the Atlantic to the Pacific through Canada’s Arctic islands has been difficult. The summer of 2007, however, melted enough sea ice in Canada’s far north to open up this long-sought passage.
Multi-year ice (ice that survives more than one melt season) tends to be thicker and more resistant to melt than first-year ice (formed over just one winter). According to John Falkingham of the Canadian Ice Service, most of the multi-year ice melted from Victoria Strait and McClintock Channel in the summer of 2006, leaving these traditionally difficult areas more open. In mid-August 2007, only patchy areas of ice filled Victoria Strait and Larsen Sound. Falkingham described the Northwest Passage as “nearly open.” Changes in the Northwest Passage were part of a larger pattern of melt in 2007 that also affected the East Siberian Sea. [links]
This image shows the islands north of mainland Canada adjacent to Greenland, as observed by the the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite on August 29, 2007. While the usual veil of clouds over the Arctic is visible through the scene, the sea ice pack that normally covers the water between the islands is absent. Areas often choked with ice at this time of year, but free of it in this MODIS scene, include the Parry and McClintock Channels and the McClure Strait. Larsen Sound and Victoria Strait are hidden beneath cloud cover, but they are also largely free of sea ice. This provided a nearly ice-free connection between Baffin Bay (a long body of water between Canada’s Baffin Island and Greenland that is regularly ice-free in summer) and the Arctic Ocean. An ice-free gap between the North American mainland and the Arctic sea, not shown here, extends all the way to the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia, creating a connection almost free of all sea ice from the North Atlantic to the North Pacific.
Peter Smith in Kiwi Roa is safely through Bellot Strait and is now heading for Lancaster Sound:
Whilst there are certainly some cruise ships planning on voyaging through the Northwest Passage this summer it looks as though there will be very few yachts or other small vessels. According to Transport Canada:
Snow White is pleased to announce that she cut the ribbon at the 2020 Northwest Passage route 6 opening ceremony earlier today: here
The CAA was fairly cloud free on June 23rd, and this satellite image shows that surface melt had started across the entire central section of the Northwest Passage:
The Northwest Passage is still not “officially” open! more
[Edit – August 25th] [links]