First it was server cooling rooms. Now, new, trans-Arctic telecommunications cables might be the next big thing up north. At this year’s Pacific Telecommunications Council conference in Honolulu, Hawaii, there was much talk about a potential subsea optical transmission cable that could be laid under the Arctic Ocean …
Royal Canadian Navy Intelligence Officer Jeffrey Delisle was arrested in Halifax last week for espionage. He is being charged under the Security of Information Act with “breach of trust and communicating safeguarded information to a foreign entity” between July 6, 2007 and January 13, 2012, the date on which he …
Updated Below
The isolation of Nome, Alaska has garnered the small city a certain degree of infamy. No roads lead to the city of 3,500 from the rest of the state. The only way in is by plane, ship, or dogsled, as was done in 1925 to bring emergency medical supplies …
In recent days, two op-eds on the Arctic have been published in North American newspapers. In the Canadian daily, the Toronto Star, Michael Byers, a professor at the University of British Columbia and an expert on the Arctic, penned a piece lamenting Northern Canada’s lack of development compared …
I received a large reader response to my post about the trapped Beluga whales on December 15. Russia’s Ministry of Emergency Situations sent the ship, the Rubin, to break up the ice in the Sinyavinsky Channel to free the 100 whales, but severe weather forced the ship to …
Just a couple of weeks ago, a Russian oil rig sank off the coast of Sakhalin Island, leaving at least 17 dead and 36 more missing. Only 14 people survived, and the search has been called off to ensure the safety of the rescuers in harsh conditions. Now, in the …
The Russian oil rig Kolskaya sunk 200 miles off the east coast of Sakhalin late Saturday night in stormy weather with 67 crewmembers were on board. So far, four people have been found dead and 14 people rescued, while 49 people still remain lost. The Kolskaya sunk in twenty minutes in …
Off the east coast of Chukotka’s peninsula, winter has come hard and fast, freezing parts of the Bering Strait. Fifteen miles south of the village of Yanrakynnot in the Sinyavinsky Strait, 100 beluga whales are trapped in the ice. Hunters have reported that they are in two polynyas and are currently able to …
The Congressional Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation, part of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, held a hearing on Thursday, December 1 on U.S. Coast Guard operations in the Arctic. The chief topic of concern was icebreakers. As I reported back in February, the U.S. will be without heavy …
Summary of the Past Year
This year, the Arctic has witnessed a lot more cooperation and a lot less conflict. Whereas past years were marked by sovereignty squabbles, boundary disputes, and accusations of airspace intrusions, this year, events took a more peaceful turn. First of all, members of the Arctic council …
Iceland’s Minister of the Interior, Ögmundur Jónasson, rejected Chinese businessman Huang Nubo’s bid to purchase a large tract of territory in the northeastern region of the country. Huang had sought an exemption from an Icelandic law which prohibits nationals from outside the European Economic Association from purchasing large amounts of …
For fifty years, the U.S. has debated drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). In 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Secretary of the Interior Fred Seaton declared 8.9 million acres in northeast Alaska to be a federally protected area, called the Alaska National Wildlife Range. In 1980, Congress passed …
Countries, non-profit organizations, indigenous peoples, and natural resource companies are all interested in obtaining a part of the Arctic. Now, we can add a hedge fund to the list. Guggenheim Partners, the financial services company which manages over $125 billion in assets, has confirmed that it …
I read in the Economist (November 5-11 edition) about a new project Wikipedia is undertaking to encourage greater production of articles in other countries by people within those countries. The company is partnering with three universities in Pune, India, offering course credit to students in exchange for their …
Peter Taksoe-Jensen, the Danish Ambassador to the U.S., gave a talk at Dartmouth on Tuesday entitled, “Arctic Challenges and Opportunities: A Danish Perspective.” I wasn’t able to find a transcript of his speech online, but Dartmouth’s school newspaper has a few quotes from his talk, which he gave …
