A Modern Odyssey

The ice-class bulk carrier Nordic Odyssey docked at the port of Murmansk, Russia, on July 5, 2012. It had come to pick up sixty-five thousand tons of iron ore and take it to China via the Northern Sea Route-through the ice of the Arctic seas and then down through the Bering Strait. The Odyssey is owned by a Danish shipping company called Nordic Bulk. In 2010, the company was asked to get a load of ore from Norway to China. The company's co-chairman, Mads Petersen, decided that the Northeast Passage was the shortest route. He made a deal to send his cargo through the Arctic with an icebreaker escort. At its maximum extent, ice covers the entire Arctic Ocean and most of its marginal seas for about fifteen million square kilometers. In recent years, it has been shrinking by more than half. The thickness of the ice is also rapidly decreasing. The primary cause of this decline is warmer air temperatures in the Arctic, an area that has been more affected by global warming than any other place on earth. The Odyssey's trip was a test case for the proposition that the Northern Sea Route could be reliably traversed. On the morning of July 13th, the ship crossed the seventy-fifth parallel. Over the next eight days, they saw an incredible variety of ice, some of it floating in isolated islands along the water. In the East Siberian Sea, they encountered a different kind of ice-thicker and older, stretching north as far as the eye could see. The Odyssey went slowly. Here was a landscape that was simply disappearing.
KEITH GESSEN

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