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The Northern Sea Route (Russian: Се́верный морско́й путь, Severnyy morskoy put’, shortened to Sevmorput) is a shipping lane from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean along the Russian Arctic coast from the Barents Sea, along Siberia, to the Far East. The route lies in Arctic waters and parts are free of ice for only two months per year. Before the beginning of the 20th century it was known as the North East Passage, and is still sometimes referred to by that name.
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The motivation to navigate the North East Passage was initially economic. In Russia the idea of a possible seaway connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific was first put forward by the diplomat Gerasimov in 1525. However, Russian settlers and traders on the coast of the White Sea, the Pomors, had been exploring parts of the route as early as the 11th century.
During a voyage across the Barents Sea in search of the North East Passage in 1553, English explorer Hugh Willoughby thought he saw islands to the north, and islands called Willoughby's Land were shown on maps published by Plancius and Mercator in the 1590s and they continued to appear on maps by Jan Janssonius and Willem Blaeu into the 1640s.[1]
By the 17th century, traders had established a continuous sea route from Arkhangelsk to the Yamal Peninsula, where they portaged to the Gulf of Ob. This route, known as Mangazeya seaway, after its eastern terminus, the trade depot of Mangazeya, was an early precursor to the Northern Sea Route.
East of the Yamal, the route north of the Taimyr Peninsula proved impossible or impractical. East of the Taimyr, from the 1630s, Russians began to sail the Arctic coast from the mouth of the Lena River to a point beyond the mouth of the Kolyma River. Bering and Captain Cook entered the Bering Strait and sailed some distance north west, but from 1648 (Semyon Dezhnev) to 1879 (Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld) no one is recorded as having sailed between the Kolyma and Bering Strait.
Western parts of the passage were simultaneously being explored by Northern European countries such as England, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway, looking for an alternative seaway to China and India. Although these expeditions failed, new coasts and islands were discovered. Most notable is the 1596 expedition led by Dutch navigator Willem Barentsz who discovered Spitsbergen and Bear Island and rounded the north of Novaya Zemlya.
Fearing English and Dutch penetration into Siberia, Russia closed the Mangazeya seaway in 1619. Pomor activity in Northern Asia declined and the bulk of 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 Kolyma to the Pacific and rounded the Chukchi Peninsula, thus proving that no land connection between Asia and North America exists.
Eighty years after Dezhnev, in 1725, another Russian explorer, Danish-born Vitus Bering on Svyatoy Gavriil made a similar voyage in reverse, starting in Kamchatka and going north to the passage that now bears his name (Bering Strait). It was Bering who gave their current names to Diomede Islands, vaguely mentioned by Dezhnev.
Bering's explorations between 1725–30 were part of a larger scheme initially devised by Peter the Great and known as The Kamchatka (Great Northern) expedition. The Second Kamchatka expedition took place in 1735–42. This time there were two ships, Sv. Pyotr and Sv. Pavel, the latter commanded by Bering's deputy in the first expedition, Captain Aleksey Chirikov. During that voyage they became the first Westerners to sight (Bering) and land on (Chirikov) the coast of the north-western North America, a storm having separated the two ships earlier. On his way back Bering discovered the Aleutian Islands but fell ill, and Sv. Pyotr had to take shelter on an island off Kamchatka, where Bering died (Bering Island).
Independent of Bering and Chirikov, other Russian Imperial Navy parties took part in the Second Great Northern Expedition. One of these, led by Semyon Chelyuskin, in May 1742 reached the northernmost point of both the North East Passage and the Eurasian continent (Cape Chelyuskin).
Later expeditions to explore the North East Passage took place in the 1760s (Vasiliy Chichagov), 1785–95 (Joseph Billings and Gavril Sarychev), the 1820s (Ferdinand Petrovich Wrangel, Pyotr Fyodorovich Anjou, Count Fyodor Litke and others), and the 1830s. Possibility of navigation the whole length of the passage was proven by mid-19th century. However, it was only in 1878 that Finland-Swedish explorer Nordenskiöld made the first successful attempt to completely navigate the North East Passage from west to east during the Vega expedition. The ship's captain on this expedition was lieutenant Louis Palander of the Swedish Royal Navy. In 1915 a Russian expedition led by Boris Vilkitskiy made the passage from east to west.
One year before Nordenskiöld's voyage, commercial exploitation of the route started with the so-called Kara expeditions, exporting Siberian agricultural produce via the Kara Sea. Of 122 convoys between 1877 and 1919 only 75 succeeded, transporting as little as 55 tons of cargo. From 1911 steamboats ran from Vladivostok to Kolyma (the Kolyma steamboats) once a year.
Nordenskiöld, Nansen, Amundsen, DeLong, Makarov and others ran expeditions mainly for scientific and cartographic reasons.
The introduction of radio, steamboats and icebreakers made running the Northern Sea Route viable. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Soviet Union was isolated from the western powers, which made it imperative to use this route. Besides being the shortest seaway between the West and the Far East areas of the USSR it was the only one which lay inside Soviet internal waters and did not impinge upon those which belonged to nearby opposing countries.
In 1932 a Soviet expedition 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. After a couple more trial runs, in 1933 and 1934, the Northern Sea Route was officially open and commercial exploitation began in 1935. The next year, part of the Baltic Fleet made the passage to the Pacific where armed conflict with Japan was looming.
A special governing body Glavsevmorput', the Administration of the Northern Sea Route, was set up in 1932 and Otto Schmidt became its first director. It supervised navigation and built Arctic ports.
During the early part of World War II the German auxiliary cruiser Komet was allowed by the Soviets to use the Northern Sea Route in the summer of 1940 in order to avoid the British Royal Navy and breakout into the Pacific Ocean. The Komet was escorted by Soviet icebreakers during her journey. After the start of the Soviet-German War the Soviets transferred several destroyers from the Pacific Fleet to the Northern Fleet via the Arctic Ocean. The Soviets also used the Northern Sea Route to transfer materials from the Soviet Far East to European Russia and the Germans launched Operation Wunderland in order to interdict this traffic.
After the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, commercial navigation in the Siberian Arctic went into decline. More or less regular shipping is to be found only from Murmansk to Dudinka in the west and between Vladivostok and Pevek in the east. Ports between Dudinka and Pevek see virtually no shipping. Logashkino and Nordvik were abandoned and are now ghost towns.
Several seaports along the route are ice-free all year round. They are, west to east, Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula, and on Russia's Pacific seaboard Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka, Vanino, Nakhodka, and Vladivostok. Arctic ports are generally usable July to October, or, such as Dudinka, are being served by nuclear powered icebreakers.
The regional warming has brought about the possibility of navigating the North-East passage without the assistance of icebreakers during the warmer part of the year. Previously, Russian authorities would permit vessels passage only when assisted by Russian icebreakers, thus incurring prohibitive cost. Permission for vessels with reinforced hulls to pass without Russian assistance has been granted only recently.
The Frenchman Eric Brossier made the first passage by sailboat in only one season in summer 2002.[3] He returned to Europe the following summer by the Northwest Passage.
The Northern Sea Route was opened by receding ice in 2005 but was closed by 2007. The amount of polar ice had receded to 2005 levels in August 2008. In late August 2008, it was reported that images from the NASA Aqua satellite had revealed that the last ice blockage of the Northern Sea Route in the Laptev Sea had melted. This would have been the first time since satellite records began that both the Northwest Passage and Northern Sea Route had been open simultaneously.[4] However, other scientists suggested that the satellite images may have been misread and that the sea route was not yet passable. [5]
The Bremen-based Beluga Group claimed in 2009 to be the first Western company to attempt to the Northern Sea Route for shipping without assistance from icebreakers, cutting 4000 nautical miles off the journey between Ulsan, Korea and Rotterdam.[4][6]
The heavy lift vessels Beluga Fraternity and Beluga Foresight did commence an East-to-West passage of the Northern Sea Route in August 2009.[5][7] However they were part of a small convoy escorted by the Russian nuclear icebreaker 50 Years Since Victory, westward through the Bering, Sannikov and Vilkizki Straits. The two, new (2008) ice-strengthened heavy-lift 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. The ships arrived Novvy on 7 September, discharged their cargo to barges and departed on the 12th, bound for the Kara Gates and Rotterdam.
In completing this journey, they were the first commercial vessels from the Western World to do so.[8] The captain of the Beluga Foresight, Valeriy Durov, described the achievement as "great news for our industry".[8]
The company 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. The company did not disclose how much they paid for the escort service and the Russian pilots. An 18 September 2009 press release stated that the company is already planning for six vessels to make Arctic delivieries in 2010.[9]
