A few days ago, people were trying to claim that the Northwest Passage is open. Some people might get lucky and get through the ice, but the passage is definitely not “open.”
Disrupting the Borg is expensive and time consuming!
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“the Northwest Passage is open”. Posted Sept. 1, 2014, at Real Science. Bwahahahhaha!!! — Al.
Real Science is open too.
Open for ridicule.
Give me that nuclear-powered icebreaker, and about a dozen cases of beer, and I could get thru.
(Disclaimer: Not responsible for polar bears, damage to icebreaker, or reactor meltdown.)
How about this baby? …boats that can literally fly over flat surfaces, like water or snow, exceeding speeds of 100 mph while transporting significant amounts of cargo…
A toy . . . compared to the Russian Ekranoplan.
Gail,
How about this baby? http://www.damninteresting.com/ground-effect-vehicles/
As Gamecock points out, ‘a toy’ It might be used to soak up funding grants for a couple of years without getting serious.
Davet916
I see how it works now…Turney puts in a phone call, offering his expert antarctic experience to help “Da Boys” get thru that dang northwest passage…to make a point of course. Then, we have to rescue them when, of all the unpredictable things in nature, the wind shifts, and they are locked in ice.
They never learn.
Steve, can’t you see the ships & sailboats
If you have a nuclear ice breaker, the northwest passage is open. This doesn’t mean your logic is incorrect. The passage is full of ice. It’s just not full of ice thick enough to stop a nuclear ice breaker.
The US navy animated map for 2014 shows the NW passage blocked too:
Depends on what the definition of “open” IS.
Bellot Strait was open for a few hours and a few yachts transited east to wests. As Steve said, it closed up again. They then needed the wind to push the ice west so they could dash south. Both occurred so the passage was “open” for a few hours. To transit, you had to be sitting and waiting near Ft. Ross at the eastern end of Bellot Strait.
Using real-time data from modern technology to dart through areas where the wind pushes ice aside for a few hours is quite different from the relative ease with which people traversed the Northwest Passage early last century.
BS indeed.
+1
Nice post KTM and the comment is excellent too 😉
I don’t doubt that the NWP opened for a day or so – allowing 4 or 5 boats to make a dash for it. This was not sue to any rapid melt but just a change in winds, which the experienced skippers had been waiting for. It came just in the nick of time by all accounts, and some boats had already decided to give up, and head back rather than risk an over-winter.
http://northwestpassage2014.blogspot.co.uk/
From the S/V EMPIRICUS’s GPS tracker it does look like the Bellot Strait closed up again pretty quick, and they were lucky to get through at all. http://northwestpassage2014.blogspot.com/2014/09/sv-empiricus-makes-east-bound-transit.html
http://northwestpassage2014.blogspot.com/2014/09/old-timer-says-if-you-are-in-passage-on.html for a summary of other boats on 1st September.
since when did transiting bellot strait constitute making a north west passage. a north west passage means transiting the arctic circle from east to west or west to east ,if that happens a north west passage has occurred.
Ahh definitions. Ephemeral things in the “information” age. Remember that a million square kilometers of ice in the Arctic is “ice free” so 4 small boats dodging wind driven ice is “open for business.” It’s NewSpeak.
🙂
NOW WE KNOW MORE ON YOUR PERSPECTIVE… NARROW
Open today closed tomorrow – summer ICE MOVES according to weather… call it open or call it closed depends on the moment in time for any given location… glad to help calm your nerves.
IF you want to worry – the Tug NORDBERG POLAR towing the pontoon salvage barge LARSEN is going to be a wintering over problem…. the tug captain does not want to navigate the shallow Gjoa Haven route and says he is waiting for Victoria to open… Victoria is not going to open in 2014 unless a BIG STORM moves through AND the tug captain gets out of Fort Ross into the western side of Bellot Strait so he can move AND IF conditions become favorable… I’d bet wintering over is now on their preparations list for staff in Cambridge Bay.
I bet the Russian ice breaker is warming up the crew quarters for another rescue mission to extract another load of fools from the ice.
The Russian website of 9TV has this remarkable news item:
Inhabitants of Yekaterinburg found a new tombstone in the center of their city. The monument stands in the city’s Historical Park. On the monument is an inscription to the memory of the late and misunderstood Yekaterinburg summer 2014. Already the first flowers have been placed to the monument, two cloves. While it is difficult to guess who placed this unusual momument, and why he placed it in the city, it is easier to understand why he did it. It is considered very well possible that the citizens would like to remember the past summer because it was the coldest summer of the last hundred years. The city and the surrounding region saw hurricanes, fallen trees, heavy rainfalls and flooded streets. According to Znak.com the average temperature did not exceed 12 to 16 degrees Celsius above zero. The apotheosis of the weather of last summer was the snow that fell in July near Kachnakar, a small city in the region, located about two hundred and fifty kilometers from the capital of the Ural.
http://9tv.co.il/news/2014/09/02/184296.html
Here is a good description of the “open” NW passage.
http://northwestpassage2014.blogspot.ca/2014/09/sv-gjoa-section-from-their-blog-dundas.html