Break On Through - The Northwest Passage

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Outside Magazine February 2004

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Break On Through
The dream of a Northwest Passage linking the Atlantic to the riches of Asia has driven explorers and visionary adventurers for centuries. With climate change in the air, Natasha Singer braves the frigid 900-mile journey to find out if the old, mythic dream is becoming an epic new reality.

By Natasha Singer


	The USCGC Healy navigates the Beaufort Sea (photograph by Joshua Paul)

The weather reports from the top of the world last summer were not good. Miles of sea ice went missing in the Arctic Ocean. Biologists warned that polar bears would soon have no place to live. The 170-square-mile Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, at the northern end of Ellesmere Island, broke apart for the first time in thousands of years. And 950 miles south of the North Pole, off northwestern Greenland, the U.S. Coast Guard's newest and largest icebreaker, the Healy, was having trouble finding any ice to break at all.

It was August in this lonely corner of the Arctic Ocean, and the iceboat's chief, Captain Daniel K. Oliver, picked up his binoculars and took in the view from the Healy's bridge. There was not much to report in the way of upcoming hazards. We were surrounded by deep blue sea.

During routine ice-breaking, there is usually a lot to do on the Healy—scrutinizing satellite images for ice migration, replotting the ship's course, crushing big chunks into smaller chunks—but absent the frozen obstacle course, life on board slowed down considerably. The 92 members of the crew piled too much food on their trays from the all-you-can-eat buffet and wandered the floors. Even the announcements broadcast over the shipwide intercom grew lethargic. Instead of "Attention, all hands! Following is a test of the flight-crash alarm!" or "Secure all doors and hatches!" we got "Now, all hands! There will be a morale skeet shoot at fifteen hundred on the flight deck." And "Now, for the attention of all hands, there will be a pudding-eating contest on the mess deck."

Not that the Healy eschews diversions: For example, there are Polar Bear initiation rites (in which "Bluenoses"—Arctic first-timers—prove their mettle by swimming in frigid water) and Ice Liberty (a few hours of shore leave on an ice floe during which each Coastie is allotted a ration of two beers). But the lack of any kind of ice whatsoever made even boozing on a berg—or any other ice-related fun—impossible.

The Healy had just departed the harbor of the U.S. Air Force's Thule Air Base, in Greenland, and was sailing to its next assignment, in the Beaufort Sea, north of Alaska. The ship was going to smash through the 900-mile-long Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The only other time the Healy accomplished this was on its maiden voyage, in July 2000—a test to see whether this behemoth ice-breaking machine could survive the waterway.

Built with state-of-the-art laboratories and sonar mapping systems, the four-year-old, 420-foot, 16,000-ton, $350 million Coast Guard icebreaker was designed to be a platform for Arctic exploration. The ship's crew regularly hosts visiting research teams who do everything from collecting water samples to monitoring how clams survive on the polar seafloor. Although no extensive experiments were planned for this voyage, scientists—like Dave Monahan, director of ocean mapping for the Canadian Hydrographic Service, who was on board to map spots on the passage's seafloor that have remained blank on nautical charts for 500 years—would be gathering anecdotal information.

As the Healy cruised through calm seas, Captain Oliver, a soft-spoken 46-year-old from California, underlined the fact that, on a calm day like today, even a yacht would be able to sail unhindered to the Alert radar station—the Canadian Forces' acoustic surveillance facility about 400 miles away on the tip of Ellesmere Island and the northernmost permanently inhabited spot in the world.

"Don't forget: The Alert station is named after the HMS Alert, a steamship that got up that far in 1876," the captain said. "Back in the 19th century, when they didn't even have icebreakers, a lot of navigators made it up to Alert, because there was open water."

The captain was making an important point: If wooden schooners could sail that far more than a hundred years ago, then the recent disappearance of Arctic ice might be the result of the earth's naturally cyclical climate, rather than human-induced global warming. Blame Mother Nature or human nature, but my mission was the same: to conquer the passage and jump ship when the boat arrived at Barrow, Alaska, 14 days later.

- On the bridge, Captain Oliver set down his binoculars. "Six weeks ago, I suspect, there would have been so much ice, we wouldn't have been able to cross the Northwest Passage."

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Correspondent Natasha Singer wrote about adventure travel in Iceland in June 2002.

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