The Arctic whaling journals of William Scoresby the younger
1875 map detailing the Northwest Passage
LIFE AT THE POLES. – DISCOVERY OF A NORTHWEST PASSAGE. – NYTimes.com
29 Oct 1879 – DISCOVERY OF THE NORTH-EAST PASSAGE.
AMUNDSON NAVIGATES NORTHWEST PASSAGE -NYTimes.com
“the latter part of the third summer was devoted to making the northwest passage. The Gjoa cruised along the shore and through the islands and straits of the coast of America…the Dolphin and Union Strait was clear of ice”
22 Sep 1906 – THROUGH THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE.
27 Sep 1911 – ARCTIC EXPEDITION. MADE NORTH- WEST PASSAGE. QUE…
Disrupting the Borg is expensive and time consuming!
Recent Comments
saveenergy on Paid To Produce Gibberish saveenergy on The End Of Snow In Wales Morgan Wright on ““verging on climate den… Bob Greene on ““verging on climate den… Morgan Wright on Captain Kirk Says CO2 Will Kil… saveenergy on Freezing Canada Morgan Wright on Freezing Canada saveenergy on Leon Heller’s Doctoral T… daveburton on Leon Heller’s Doctoral T… JapanT on “dozens of former intel…
A List of the Full Transits of the Canadian Northwest Passage 1903 to 2006
by John MacFarlane (1990 – Revised 1995, 2011 & 2012)
Any vessel crossing both the entry to the Bering Strait and Davis Strait (or vice versa) is deemed to have made a full transit of the Northwest Passage.
http://www.nauticapedia.ca/Articles/NWP_Fulltransits.php
It is clear that a graph of successful transits over the duration of this record would look like an exponential curve.
There were more successful transits in 2006 than in the entire first fifty year interval.
It’s also interesting to note that some of the early passages took two or three years, with the vessels iced in over winter. There were a great many unsuccessful attempts (not shown in the linked table) during this era, many vessels being trapped and some abandoned.
The next group of passages are almost entirely by icebreakers, so there is no support for the notion that the passage was ice free at any time during this period.
A transit in 1969 was successful, the first time for a commercial ship of any kind, but it was decided that the route was still not viable. US$40 million was spent just supporting the transit, even though the SS Manhattan had already been redesigned and rebuilt as the world’s only ice-breaking supertanker, “a sea-going fortress”, with a potential to force through pressure ridges 100′ deep. Nevertheless, three additional icebreakers had to work in relays, specially equipped coastguard planes surveyed the passage continually, and helicopters searched ahead for open leads.
Nowadays, regular sized, non ice-strengthened cargo and cruise ships regularly make the passage without external support and without problems.
Whoa!
Thinking is seldom done, especially when rhetoric so easily works.
Thinking is seldom done, especially when rhetoric so easily works. It appears that polar ice ebbs and flows.
I wonder where the climat change alarmists were during tose years,
Mmm, Doctors Without Borders, seems to have some Doctors Without Consideration!
I am new to this site, and not sure I follow the implication re: these postings about the history of the NWP navigations in the 20th and 21st century. Can someone enlighten me? I do however clearly remember the Manhattan tanker crossing in ’69; it was big news down in Houston, TX; there was even an Exxon produced documentary on local TV about the event. But the hazards of such a journey proved higher than the risk of building and operating the above-ground Alaska Pipeline in the 1970’s, and so that’s what was built (the pipe).
One of the tenants of warmunism is that polar amplification is causing Arctic summer ice to disappear (so polar bears will all die). This ignores much historical evidence that Arctic ice waxes and wanes on something like a ~60year cycle, as Tony shows in this thread. It so happens that the beginning of a natural Arctic ice downturn from peak coincided roughly with the begining of satellite based ice observation. The natural nadir was probably 2007, as 2012 was driven by an Arctic cyclone. Arctic ice recovery, like the pause and the lack of SLR acceleration, will be one of the key observations refuting warmunism. More in essay Northwest Passage in my ebook.