Northeast Passage

The Northeast Passage (abbreviated as NEP; Russian: Северо-Восточный проход, romanized: Severo-Vostochnyy prokhod, Norwegian: Nordøstpassasjen) is the shipping route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, along the Arctic coasts of Norway and Russia.

[1][2] The first confirmed complete passage, from west to east, was made by the Finland-Swedish explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, with the Swedish ship Vega 1878–79 backed by the royal funding of king Oscar II of Sweden.

The most notable was the 1596 expedition led by Dutch navigator Willem Barentsz, who discovered Spitsbergen and Bear Island, and rounded the north end of Novaya Zemlya.

Pomor activity in Northern Asia declined and most Arctic exploration in the 17th century was carried out by Siberian Cossacks, sailing from one river mouth to another in their Arctic-worthy kochs.

In 1648, the most famous of these expeditions, led by Fedot Alekseev and Semyon Dezhnev, sailed east from the mouth of the Kolyma River to the Pacific Ocean, and rounded the Chukchi Peninsula, thus proving that no land connection existed between Asia and North America.

Later expeditions to explore the Northeast Passage took place in the 1760s (Vasiliy Chichagov), 1785–95 (Joseph Billings and Gavril Sarychev), the 1820s and 1830s (Baron Ferdinand Petrovich Wrangel, Pyotr Fyodorovich Anjou, Count Fyodor Litke and others).

In 1932, a Soviet expedition on the icebreaker A. Sibiryakov led by Professor Otto Yulievich Schmidt was the first to sail all the way from Arkhangelsk to the Bering Strait in the same summer without wintering en route.

During the early part of World War II, the Soviets allowed the German auxiliary cruiser Komet to use the Northern Sea Route in the summer of 1940 to evade the British Royal Navy and break out into the Pacific Ocean.

The effort was not successful due to diplomatic reasons and caused an international incident between the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A.[13] After the Soviet Union dissolved in the early 1990s, commercial navigation in the Siberian Arctic went into decline.

The Northern Sea Route serves the Arctic ports and major rivers of Siberia by importing fuel, equipment, food and exporting timber and minerals.

The main sources of governance are the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the Arctic Council (AC), the International Maritime Organization (IMO), and the domestic legislation of the Russian Federation.

In combination, they cover territorial claims, economic exploitation, technical shipping requirements, environmental protection, and search and rescue responsibilities.

[20] For this purpose, the Directorate of the Northern Sea Route was formed, that now manages three subordinate organizations "Atomflot" (ROSATOMFLOT), "Hydrographic Enterprise" and "ChukotAtomEnergo".

Recently, the "Main Directorate of the Northern Sea Route" ("Glavsevmorput") was established on the basis of the Naval Operations Headquarters of FSUE “Atomflot”.

For the corporate players in bulk shipping of relative low-value raw materials, cost savings for fuel may appear as a driver to explore the Northern Sea Route for commercial transits, and not necessarily reduced lead time.

[23] In August 2012, Russian media reported that 85% of vessels transiting the Northern Sea Route in 2011 were carrying gas or oil, and 80% were high-capacity tankers.

[24] As the Northern Sea Route is a strategically important transport artery, it can already be called economically profitable in comparison, for example, with the Suez Canal due to a number of reasons: In September 2012, Inuit Circumpolar Conference Chair Jimmy Stotts was reported as saying there is concern that increased shipping could adversely affect indigenous hunting of marine mammals.

Since the early 2000s the summer melting has been stronger, and the winter freezing has been weaker, opening the waters to the possibility of more non-ice breaking ships taking advantage of the route for longer periods of time.

Beyond the Bering Strait, the end of the Northern Sea Route, and south along Russia's Pacific seaboard Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka, Vanino, Nakhodka, and Vladivostok are accessible year-round.

The NSR greatly developed as a heavily subsidized domestic route, with traffic peaking in 1987 with 6.58 million tons of cargo carried by 331 ships over 1306 voyages.

[37] State Corporation Rosatom assumes the possibility and functions of the NSR and ensures the safety of navigation on the high technological level.

This system will represent a digital space that will provide various services to cargo carriers, shipowners, captains, insurers, and other participants in the logistics market on the NSR.

The single digital platform will collect information from all the available sources, for example, hydrometeorological data, the location of ships and icebreakers, port congestion.

[44] In 2009, the Bremen-based Beluga Group claimed they were the first Western company to attempt to cross the Northern Sea Route for shipping without assistance from icebreakers, cutting 4000 nautical miles off the journey between Ulsan, Korea and Rotterdam.

[46][47][48][49] In 1997, a Finnish oil tanker, Uikku, sailed the length of the Northern Sea Route from Murmansk to the Bering Strait, becoming the first Western ship to complete the voyage.

The two vessels embarked Russian ice pilots for the voyage to the western Siberian port of Novyy, in the Yamburg region in the delta of the Ob River.

"[51] The president of Beluga Shipping claimed the voyage saved each vessel about 300,000 euros, compared to the normal Korea-to-Rotterdam route by way of the Suez Canal.

[57] On 28 July 2009, the sailing yacht RX II (36-foot length), with expedition leader Trond Aasvoll and crew Hans Fredrik Haukland and Finn Andreassen left Vardø in Norway on a quest to circumnavigate the North Pole.

The vessel completed the westbound voyage in ballast in only six days and planned to sail back to Asia in November with a full load of liquified natural gas.