Dutch Harbor could be the new marine crossroads of the world, if and when Arctic shipping routes open up between Alaska and Europe across the Arctic Ocean, according to an Arctic expert.
''Shipping could cost as little as $500 a container to transit from Alaska to Northern Europe,'' said Mr. Mead Treadwell, chair of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission. Those same containers currently cost shippers $1,500 each to go from Asia to Europe through the Suez Canal, he said.

Treadwell spoke at the World Trade Center Alaska's ''Trade is Transportation'' seminar in Anchorage on Nov.7. Treadwell was appointed to the U.S. Arctic Research Commission in 2001, and was designated the commission chair by President Bush in 2006. The Arctic ice pack is melting at a rate of 10 percent per year in the summer and 2 percent per year in the winter. If that continues, an area equal to the length of the Mississippi River will become open water. The diminishing polar pack ice, as well as mineral, territory and border claims by Russia and Canada has the U.S. clamoring for its place in the Arctic, he added. The rush by the U.S., Canada and Russia to claim subsurface rights for minerals is certainly a motivator. But the surface transportation could cut thousands of miles, and several days off shipping, trips that currently follow the Suez or the Panama canals.

Meanwhile a move to attract attention to the Russian Arctic also woke up Canada and the U.S. to its possibilities also. Russian official Mr. Artur Chilingarov planted a flag at the North Pole, miles under water and about 1,200 miles north of Alaska's Point Barrow. He did it mainly to make a point that it could be done, and that the Russians would be the first to do it. Mr. Chilingarov reportedly said that the flag would be a permanent mark of Russia's presence at the pole. ''If a hundred or a thousand years from now someone goes down to where we were, they will see the Russian flag,'' the Itar-Tass news agency quoted him as saying.

 The move also instigated further mapping of the Arctic for U.S. territorial claims. Several mapping expeditions in arctic waters this summer solidified what some suspected: The U.S. could claim sub-surface mineral rights, even though it has never ratified the Law of the Ocean set forth by the United Nations. Treadwell said that a plot of land an area twice the size of California from Alaska's north coast to the North Pole could be claimed.

While the mineral riches hidden under the Arctic Ocean are being explored, Treadwell seized on the transportation and communication aspects of the Arctic. ''The possibility to lay a fiber optic cable between Prudhoe Bay and Norway or Iceland could open up whole new technological possibilities,'' Mr. Treadwell said.
Treadwell and the Institute of the North, along with former Gov. Wally Hickel, have kept the Arctic shipping issue alive with their research on a trans-Arctic route. Now, with a melting polar ice cap, that may happen in their lifetimes. Careful to point out that the Bering Straits is a choke point leading to Arctic marine routes, Alaska should be concerned about the impact to marine mammals, security threats, and oil or chemical spill issues, he added.
Thinner seasonal ice is already easier to break through with specially built vessels, Mr. Treadwell said.

Source: www.hellenicshippingnews.com