Sailing the North-West Passage...

Lots of stories this week about the clear sailing of the North-West passage...but Lorne Gunter points out in the National Post that this is nothing new...

As Mr. Sheppard points out, the great Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen navigated the Northwest Passage in 1905 in a wooden sailboat with a crew of just seven. The passage was sufficiently ice-free that year for the little craft to make it through with little ice-breaking capacity.

And in 1944, the tiny RCMP patrol vessel the St. Roch (which can still be seen at the Vancouver Maritime Museum) sailed from Halifax to Vancouver through the passage in a single season --a first --because it met little ice.

In a report to the Admiralty in 1817, the British Royal Society noted that "the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been during the last two years greatly abated." The "Arctic Seas," it noted, were "more accessible than they have been for centuries past," making exploration and trade possible during the summer melt.

This has happened before.

Instead of warning that this summer's melt was the greatest "ever," perhaps the headlines should have read "Arctic melt this year biggest since last big melt."