A revolution in remote sensing is under way

GeoOptics is putting a constellation of nanosatellites into space.

Radio signals collected by these satellites yield 100- to 500-meter vertical resolution.

From ESRI

Remote sensing, weather forecasting, and climate science are undergoing a drastic change.
Nanosatellites, which cost much less to produce and launch than traditional satellites, can now collect vast amounts of extremely accurate atmospheric data using a technique called radio occultation.
This data collection method wields GPS to monitor all sorts of variables between the earth’s surface and the top of the stratosphere—from atmospheric refractivity to moisture, pressure, and temperature.

The pioneer behind this science is Dr. Thomas Yunck, a leading expert on GPS and the founder, chairman, and chief technology officer of a startup called GeoOptics.

“This is a huge revolution,” said Yunck, who first looked into using GPS for science in 1979 while working as an engineer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
He wrote the first-ever proposal to use GPS signals to measure the earth’s atmosphere from space in 1988, and he has been deeply involved in developing and validating this technology ever since.

“It’s disruptive technology that could replace the traditional, old, slow way of collecting modern, high-resolution weather data,” said Lawrie Jordan, Esri’s director of imagery and remote sensing.

Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems Inc. CICERO 6U Nanosatellite for GeoOptics

Picture Courtesy: CISION PR Newswire

An Ideal Solution to a Lot of Problems

Forty years ago, when GPS was brand-new, Yunck looked into how to apply the technology to science.
“We were using it to support deep space navigation at JPL, so we were investigating it for that purpose,” Yunck recalled.

After studying GPS for what he believes was about two weeks, he wrote an unassuming report stating that it was promising technology for the future.
“Little did I know that one day, it would consume my life,” he said.
“As time went on, we found that GPS was essentially an ideal solution to a lot of problems: navigating spacecraft, determining the locations of points on the ground, determining Earth’s rotation, and much more.
All these things could be addressed extremely efficiently with GPS.”

Throughout the 1980s, he and his colleagues at JPL devised a variety of precise techniques for using GPS to help map the topography of the ocean’s surface and measure tectonic plate motion, which had never been observed before.
The applications for GPS grew even further in the 1990s, and Yunck kept devising new ways to use the technology.

“It occurred to me that we could use GPS receivers on satellites to observe GPS signals passing through the atmosphere,” he said.
“If we could point antennas on satellites at the horizon, we could watch signals rise and set in the atmosphere, and we could observe the atmosphere itself.
This was a rather novel idea for GPS.”

It would also turn out to be an entirely different method for measuring the atmosphere, leading to more precise weather forecasting and studies on climate change.

NASA funded the early development of this idea, and that started the worldwide discipline for radio occultation.
But the technology is highly disruptive, especially now.

Shrinking Technology and Shifting the Paradigm

While Yunck and his colleagues at JPL were developing radio occultation, technological devices were shrinking physically.
“A cell phone is basically what, 20 years ago, would have been a super computer in a room,” said Yunck.
“Cell phones, computers, and other consumer-type devices like flat-screen TVs—they’ve all gotten a lot smaller and/or cheaper.”

The same kind of technology that facilitated the compression of consumer devices is now making it possible to build very powerful satellites that weigh 10 kilograms, have a volume of 6 liters, and cost under $1 million to build and a few hundred thousand dollars to launch.
“It’s that kind of technology that allows us to miniaturize spacecraft that used to be as big as a bus or a minivan and cost a billion dollars to build,” explained Yunck.

But the aerospace industry has been slow to get on board with miniaturization, mostly because government agencies have always had vertical control over space-based data collection—from developing the technology and getting it into orbit to gathering the data and using it.

In 2005, Yunck realized that the revolution he was trying so hard to push would have to materialize from the outside.
He got a few colleagues on board and formed GeoOptics, a small, private company based in Pasadena, California.

“We’re overturning a decades-long paradigm of having many government-owned assets in space and shifting to privately owned assets, where small companies are gathering, generating, and delivering data to governments,” said Yunck.
“Over the next 10 to 15 years, everything about remote sensing is going to change.”

Much More Accurate Atmospheric Data

Since its founding, GeoOptics has faced some technological and financial difficulties.
But the company now has three operational nanosatellites in orbit and, as of November 2018, is under contract to deliver its science-quality radio occultation data to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the US Air Force.

“In the last couple years, they have come around to the concept of buying data from a private company because it’s much more cost-effective,” said Yunck.

Working with another Southern California-based startup, Tyvak, which builds the nanosatellites, Yunck and his team aim to put a group of satellites into space.
They call this the CICERO constellation, which stands for Community Initiative for Continuous Earth Remote Observation.

Radio signals originate at very high-altitude Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) satellites, pass through the atmosphere, and are received by much lower-altitude CICERO satellites.

As CICERO satellites move in orbit, they see the radio signal pass from the top of the atmosphere down to the surface before disappearing.

“I expect that within 10 years, we will have over 100 satellites,” said Yunck.
“That’s going to change the world.”

Using radio occultation, these nanosatellites produce better data than typical satellites, according to Yunck.
They collect active radio signals passing through the atmosphere to detect the atmosphere’s refractivity.
This lets scientists observe atmospheric density, pressure, temperature, and moisture.
They can also derive information about high-altitude winds from that data.

A radio signal collected by a CICERO satellite goes from the earth’s surface to the top of the atmosphere in about 60 seconds and yields 100- to 500-meter vertical resolution.
This allows them to measure over 150 levels of the atmosphere—far more than bigger instruments, such as radiometers, which typically measure 6 to 10 levels.
“It’s very high-resolution, high-frequency data,” said Jordan.
“It’s much more accurate, which will improve weather forecasts.”
“These satellites will have a direct impact on all the regimes of weather forecasting, such as 1- to 15-day weather forecasts, seasonal and longer climate forecasts, and severe storm forecasts,” said Yunck.

When monitoring a hurricane, for example, knowing the atmospheric pressure and moisture levels is critical to determining where the tropical storm is heading and how strong it will be when it makes landfall.
More accurate data will allow forecasters to make more specific predictions much farther in advance.

The red line shows atmospheric measurements made by CICERO satellites, while the blue line reflects the data model used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The two lines essentially match, but the measurements taken with the nanosatellites are much more detailed and precise.

It is also more useful for assessing how weather patterns change over time—i.e., climate change.
Currently, indicators of rising temperatures around the globe are derived from measurements taken on the earth’s surface.
While that’s useful, Yunck says we also need to know what’s happening in the atmosphere.
This is much more difficult.
But nanosatellites using radio occultation can get an abundance of three-dimensional atmospheric measurements, which Yunck says is critical for studying climate change.

How to Weather the Future
The future of weather prediction is here. Enormous computer models of the Earth’s atmosphere underlie modern weather forecasts, and driven by improvements in data, computers and modeling, today’s five day forecast has become as accurate as the three day forecast was in 1980.

Achieving the next decade’s improvement requires a new paradigm of data, created by small satellites that can generate orders of magnitude more data at lower cost.

GeoOptics CICERO constellation will use GPS radio occultation and other techniques to measure global weather patterns thousands of times per day.

The Gravity of Water
Water is life.

The first step to managing the world’s water resources is to know where they are, and where they are at risk.

From glaciers and icebergs to groundwater and acquifers, water can be detected by its tremendous weight.

NASA’s GRACE satellite (first proposed by GeoOptics founder Tom Yunck, while he was at JPL) has measured the Earth’s gravitational field to produce incredible data on the flow of water around the world.

Now, in cooperation with NASA and partners at Tyvak, we are beginning work on the next gravity satellite constellation that will measure the movement of water across the globe in unprecedented detail.

“Our technique is so precise that our ability to measure temperature in the atmosphere is at least 20 times more accurate than any other known technique in space,” said Yunck.
“So far, it’s the only technique that can observe global warming over a short period of time—months or a few years, as opposed to 5 or 10 or 20 years.”

Links :

• SpaceNews : Three companies win NOAA commercial weather data pilot contracts
• Technobreaks : Small Satellite Market to Witness a Pronounce Growth by 2026
• ScientificAmerican blog : A Quiet Revolution in Weather Forecasting
• Medium : Smaller Satellites — Smarter Forecasts? 
• eoportal : CICERO   
• PlanetiQ 
• GeoGarage blog : Under 30 satellite companies Spire and ICEYE team ... / Spire, 40 cubesats in orbit, competing more directly ... / The future of personal satellite technology is here ...

Stars above Lofoten

Stars above Lofoten from Jørn Nyseth Ranum

Data visualization for human transportation

Red lines are flights, blue line are ship tracks and green lines are roads

Created by London-based data visualisation studio Kiln and the UCL Energy Institute

This video and interactive map of global ship movements based on AIS data is worth a minute of your time

Computing the maximum of each pixel across a time series of Sentinel-1 images enables to visualize sea lanes.
When a ship is illuminated by Sentinel1’s radar, it returns a strong signal & a bright spot is captured, while sea surface absorbs most of the signal & looks darker

Vessel density EMODnet map allows users to visualize vessel movement patterns & distribution of maritime traffic in EU waters by ship type. 

Links :

• EMODnet 
• StatMaps&Pix : Watching ships go by UK marine traffic
• GoogleMapsMania : Europe busiest shipping routes revealed / World map of shipping traffic

Is this the world's most dangerous sea route?

  Tierra del Fuego with the GeoGarage platform (SHN Argentina chart)

From BBC by James Clark

To commemorate the 500th anniversary of the discovery of the Strait of Magellan, a writer sets off in his grandfather’s wake to the deadly Cape Horn headland.

When I was a child, my grandfather Alfred Downes often spoke about the 128-day journey that he took in 1949 aboard the Pamir.
The famous four-masted barque, a German Flying P-Liner ship, was sailing from Port Elizabeth in Adelaide, Australia, to the town of Falmouth in Cornwall, England, filled with 60,000 sacks of Australian grain.
It was the barque’s final journey through the stormy seas of the Drake Passage, and it would be the last time a commercial sailing ship ever rounded Cape Horn in southern Chile.

To commemorate the 70th anniversary of my grandfather’s voyage and the upcoming 500th anniversary of the discovery of the Strait of Magellan sea route that separates South America’s southernmost tip with Chile’s Tierra del Fuego archipelago, I boarded the Ventus Australis expedition cruise liner in Punta Arenas, Chile.
I had always wanted to see some of the landscapes my grandfather spoke about, and while it was impossible to replicate his four-month odyssey, my four-night jaunt let me follow in the spirit of his adventure, taking me through the Strait’s narrow fjords that he sailed around and then south to the climax of his voyage: the perilous Cape Horn headland that stayed with him for the rest of his life.

Author James Clark travelled through the Strait of Magellan nearly 500 years after the sea route’s discovery (Credit: James Clark)

My grandfather left Australia as a 20-year-old deckhand on the Pamir and never returned home.
He had long dreamed of leaving Australia, as his relationship with his father was not a happy one.
His father wanted him to marry a girl from his hometown in the Adelaide suburbs and work on the family farm.
Instead, he wanted to start a new life in England.
It was a country that he knew little about, but he had always been fascinated by its history as a schoolboy.

When an opportunity to join the Pamir arose courtesy of a family friend, my grandfather quickly accepted and boarded the ship three days later alongside 33 other crewmembers.
He worked 18-hour shifts and spent his days cleaning and mopping the deck, helping in the kitchen and emptying toilets.
He hated the work so much that while other crewmembers were signing up for the 128-day return voyage back to Australia, he disembarked and headed straight to the town of Wymondham in Norfolk.
He’d heard rumours there were opportunities for farmers in the market town’s rolling countryside, and he lived there for 54 years until he died in 2003.

The only things my grandfather loved about the journey were seeing the remote Tierra del Fuego archipelago that shelters the Strait of Magellan from the ocean, breathing the Antarctic air deep into his lungs and feeling the icy-cold breeze blowing in his face.
“It was like nowhere else on Earth and a far cry from my life working on my father’s dry and arid farm,” he told me when I was a 10-year-old boy, with a look of wonder in his eyes.
“Not one single thing reminded me of home.
I felt lost and frightened, yet free.”

In 1949, the author's grandfather embarked on a 26,000km voyage aboard the Pamir from Australia to England

Seventy years later, I arrived in Punta Arenas and wandered through the city’s main square, Plaza de Armas.
A bronze statue of Ferdinand Magellan, the first European to navigate the eponymous strait in 1520 during his global, circumnavigational voyage, towers over a cannon.
The Portuguese explorer sailed near the present-day city – located near the southernmost stretch of Chile’s Patagonia region – and, as evidenced by the discolouration of his bronze boots, it is now considered good luck for those boarding cruises to touch Magellan’s toes before following in his footsteps and journeying through his strait.

For nearly 400 years, the Strait of Magellan was the main route for ships travelling between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
Despite its narrow 600km-long passage through a clustered network of islands and fjords, it was thought to be a quicker and safer route than rounding Cape Horn to the south and entering the infamously turbulent Drake Passage that separates Cape Horn and Antarctica’s South Shetland Islands.

The completion of the Panama Canal in 1914 caused sea traffic through the Strait to decline significantly, but unlike steamships, sailing ships coming from Australia had difficulty accessing the Canal’s western entrance because of its location in the middle of a notorious belt of doldrums.
But because of the Pamir’s 114m length and 14m beam, the mammoth, steel-hulled barque was too large to sail through the winding Strait.
Thus, my grandfather had no choice but to skirt the edges of the strait and Tierra del Fuego islands and round Cape Horn.
He was quite proud that he and his crewmates were the last commercial sailors to ever do so, saying, “Last is good, as first you go down in history.”

Author James Clark standing at the foot of the memorial to the many sailors who have lost their lives attempting to 'round the Cape' (Credit: Ben Sayer)

I sipped on a pisco sour as the crew of the Ventus Australis pulled up anchor in Punta Arenas.
The difference between my grandfather’s experience and mine wasn’t lost on me: if navigating 26,000km through some of the world’s stormiest seas was like climbing Mount Everest for a sailor, my cruise was kind of like climbing on a Sherpa’s shoulders to carry me to the top.

The lights of Punta Arenas faded as we entered the maze-like channels of the Strait.
The sky soon turned black and all I could sense was the ship’s movement over the waves.
My grandfather had spoken about long nights of darkness and loneliness on the open seas.
It had been difficult for him to leave his mother and sisters behind, but he never questioned his decision to start a new life in a new land on his own terms.

Early the next morning, I boarded a small, inflatable Zodiac and motored to the rocky shores of Ainsworth Bay.
The long fjord is surrounded by a sub-polar forest and set beneath the towering white peaks of Marinelli Glacier.
As we headed closer to the icecaps, I was stunned by the beauty of the place.
The sun reflected off of the glacier and the sea was so clear that it could have been mistaken for fresh drinking water.

I spent two hours hiking the crest of a glacial lake, passing turquoise streams and waterfalls.
The sheer silence of the place was magical.
My grandfather often recalled the silence of the region – a phenomenon he described as ‘The Patagonia Moment’.
As a child, this notion had been difficult for me to grasp, but as an adult, I loved it.
Whenever I would talk over him and my grandfather wanted me to be quiet, he would look at me sternly and say, “It’s about time you experienced The Patagonia Moment.
Just be quiet.” Ainsworth Bay was the first time in my life that I had ever experienced complete silence, and I couldn’t help but think of him.

Set in the Strait of Magellan, Ainsworth Bay is marked by a long fjord and surrounded by a sub-polar forest (Credit: James Clark)

Later that afternoon, we jumped back onto the Zodiac and travelled through much rougher seas to observe Magellanic penguins on Tuckers Islets.
My grandfather liked to recall a rocky Patagonian island covered in penguins that he viewed from the Pamir’s deck.
He described the birds as ‘smelly, funny-looking things’ and often made jokes about eating them.
The 4,000 penguins that inhabit Tuckers today appeared quite content as the sky tuned dark grey and it began to pour.
I smiled to myself as I watched the penguins at play, wondering if they were the distant relatives of those my grandfather had seen 70 years ago.

As we approached Pia Glacier the next morning and a spectacular landscape known as Glacier Alley, I remembered my grandfather excitedly talking about a dramatic stretch of water amid the Tierra del Fuego islands filled with icefields and “huge chunks of ice between mountains”.
It was only much later in life that he learned these formations had a name: glaciers.
Whenever the Pamir would pass one of these ‘chunks of ice’, he recalled that the crew would stop what they were doing to take in the spectacular scene.
It must have felt otherworldly to them.

“It was the most astonishing site!” he told me one Christmas morning when I was eight years old as he stared out of my bedroom window at a dangling icicle.
“I’d never seen a glacier before.
We didn’t have them in Adelaide.”

Beagle Channel (SHN charts)

Frozen in the north-west corner of the Beagle Channel, Pia Glacier was once a 14-sq-km hunk of ice and has now shrunk to around 7 sq km.
As I wandered close to the glacier and climbed high into the Darwin Mountain Range, the sounds of ice tearing off the glacier and plummeting into the sea below shattered the silence.

I felt like a bit of a cheat as I remained on board that afternoon in the warmth and watched one giant glacier after another.
My grandfather often talked about sitting on deck with a drink in one hand to keep warm and a cigarette in the other while inhaling freezing-cold air.
As our ship navigated around floating chunks of ice, I watched as a small pod of dolphins swam alongside us.
Later, I spotted a whale, just 20m from the ship, spray water 1m into the air like an exploding geyser.

At the end of Glacier Alley, we veered south-east and headed towards the highlight of my grandfather’s and my journeys: Cape Horn.
The Pamir had to approach this rocky headland by braving the Drake Passage, whose frequent gale-force winds and 10-storey swells have caused hundreds of ships to sink, and inspired Charles Darwin, Herman Melville and Jules Verne to write of its fury.

Frozen in the north-west corner of the Beagle Channel, Pia Glacier was once a 14-sq-km hunk of ice and has now shrunk to around 7 sq km

(Credit: James Clark)

I knew we were getting close when I awoke sharply at 04:30 as the ship began to roll on large waves.
Even aboard a cruise, the waters around the Drake Passage are still known as one of the most dangerous maritime routes in the world.
I struggled to make my way into the shower as the ship listed, and a sharp knock to the ribs in the strong current helped wake me up.

Due to the area’s erratic weather conditions, many cruises aren’t able to land in Cape Horn.
In fact, as the Pamir approached the Cape in 1949, my grandfather and other crewmembers spent the morning shovelling snow off the ship’s deck.
But as the wind calmed enough for us to eventually reach the Cape safely on the Zodiac, I could feel my grandfather smiling down on me.

Rain, hail and wind pelted my face as we landed on Cape Horn.
I climbed up the rocks towards a lighthouse, a small chapel and a giant sculpture commemorating the thousands of sailors who had died attempting to ‘round the Cape’.

Floating ice sheets surround Pia Glacier in the Strait of Magellan (Credit: James Clark)

The Pamir didn’t land at Cape Horn, but my grandfather never forgot what he described as an ‘evil-looking’ rock on the island staring back at him from the ship.
“Too many had died there before me, doing exactly what I was doing,” he once told me.
“I was keen to get away from Cape Horn as quickly as possible, and had no intention of ever returning.”

Yet, here I was staring squarely at the jagged landscape that had inspired my grandfather to keep sailing, keep living and never look back.
I wondered what he would have thought about me trying to follow in his wake, and I hopped back in the Zodiac, letting the wind push me onwards.

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : Sailing in Patagonia

Polar powers: Russia’s bid for supremacy in the Arctic Ocean

Russia is spending billions to assert control over a vital shipping route in the Arctic.

It's much faster than the traditional route, and with the hydrocarbon reserves that lie beneath it, the Northern Sea Route is a goldmine for global powers

From Financial Times by

As climate change opens northern shipping lanes, Moscow is spending billions to dominate the region

Just days before a major Arctic conference this month in St Petersburg, where president Vladimir Putin was to host four regional leaders under the banner “Arctic: Territory of Dialogue”, Russian warships were on manoeuvres in the frigid northern waters.
On the waves of the Barents Sea, a frigate from the Northern Fleet fired rockets to shoot down cruise missiles launched from one of its own anti-submarine warships.
It was a show of strength not missed by Mr Putin’s guests.
The Barents, whose waters lap Norway’s coast, marks the western boundary of the Northern Sea Route, a stretch of water encircling the North Pole that has for thousands of years remained mainly ice-bound, but whose rapid thaw has ushered in one of the world’s biggest emerging geopolitical flashpoints.
Fuelled by climate change that is rapidly shrinking the northern ice cap, the NSR has become an arena of growing competition.
Its potential as a preferential shipping route between Europe and Asia could change global trade flows.
The colossal hydrocarbon reserves that lie beneath it could upend energy markets.
And its growing militarisation has caught the attention of world powers.

 Russia has an extensive sea bottom claim in the Arctic region.

The large hashed area reflects Russia's current extended continental shelf claim

While dozens of countries have begun staking claims to its riches, none has been as proactive as Russia in seeking to exploit the region, leaving others scrambling to keep pace.
One-tenth of all of Russia’s economic investments are currently in the Arctic region, Mr Putin said this month in St Petersburg.
Since 2013, Russia has spent billions of dollars on building or upgrading seven military bases on islands and peninsulas along the route, deploying advanced radar and missile defence systems — capable of hitting aircraft, missiles and ships — to sites where temperatures can fall below -50C.
It gives Moscow almost complete coverage of the entire coastline and adjacent waters.
The message is clear.
If you want to sail through the Arctic and travel to and from Asia faster, or have designs on the oil and gas assets beneath the sea, you will be under Russian oversight.
“The Americans think that only themselves can alter the music and make the rules,” Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, told the St Petersburg gathering.
“In terms of the NSR, this is our national transport artery.
That is obvious . . . It is like traffic rules.
If you go to another country and drive, you abide by their rules.” While traffic is light today, it is growing.
Experts estimate that during ice-free months, eastward shipment from Europe to China through the NSR is estimated to be around 40 per cent faster than the same journey via the Suez Canal, lopping hundreds of thousands of dollars off fuel costs and potentially cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 52 per cent.
At the moment the Arctic Ocean has just three ice-free months a year but several estimates suggest that number will increase in coming years, boosting access and driving up traffic.

Boosting Northern Sea Route shipping is a big part of the Arctic development plan.

wearctic.ru

The 50 Let Pobedy nuclear-powered icebreaker, operated by Atomflot, smashing through the frozen waters of the Gulf of Ob In anticipation of a shipping boom, Russia has pushed through legislation to increase its control, including giving Rosatom, its state-owned nuclear power conglomerate, a monopoly over managing access to the NSR through icebreakers that can chaperone ships.
With a fifth of its land inside the Arctic Circle, Russia has gone in search of more territory, claiming that underwater ridges mean it should be granted another 1.2m square kilometres of the Arctic Ocean.
The UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf has recognised part of the neutral Arctic waters as a continuation of the Russian shelf.
As a result, the Mendeleev Rise and the Lomonosov Ridge may become Russian by the summer of 2020, says an official familiar with the talks.
Rivals are scrambling to catch up: This week the US announced it had ordered its first icebreaker for more than two decades, spending $746m on a ship to be ready in 2024.
“Against the backdrop of great power competition, the [ship] is key to our nation’s presence in the polar regions,” says Admiral Karl Schultz, commandant of the US Coast Guard, citing “increased commerce, tourism, research, and international activities in the Arctic”.
In 2007, Russian explorers planted a titanium white, blue and red tricolour flag on the seabed below the North Pole.
That act, the most audacious and theatrical part of a bid to claim the Pole, came almost 300 years after Russia’s Arctic exploration began.
Expeditions ordered by Peter the Great first mapped out an Arctic coastline of around 24,000km — roughly the same length as Russia’s entire land borders.
Russia built the world’s first icebreaker, the Yermak, 120 years ago.
In 1957, it built the first nuclear-powered version, the Lenin.
Its Arktika icebreaker was the first to reach the North Pole in 1977.
“Little has changed essentially in those years, both in the shape of the frame and the inside components,” says Sergei Frank, head of state-owned shipping company Sovcomflot.
During the cold war, the Soviet Union threw huge resources at the region.
The Northern Fleet was the largest in the Soviet Navy, and Arctic air bases provided refuelling points for nuclear-capable bombers.

Western powers settled for containment, with Nato forces patrolling the gaps between Greenland, Iceland and the UK in a bid to prevent Soviet submarines armed with ballistic missiles from passing into the Atlantic undetected.
But as the Soviet economy crumbled, the Arctic infrastructure steadily fell into disrepair.
Expensive to maintain and lacking a strategic rationale, Moscow slowly shifted focus.
Climate change and the growing power of Asian economies have changed that calculation.
Arctic ice has shrunk by 12.8 per cent a decade on average since 1979, according to Nasa data, and last year’s September ice cover was 42 per cent lower than in 1980, turning a frozen, secure northern border into a hotbed of potential exploitation and conflict.
Last year Russia’s Northern Fleet conducted its largest military exercise for a decade.

“Russia simply doesn’t have another ocean,” the country’s natural resources minister, Dmitry Kobylkin, said last week.
“All projects implemented in the Arctic are our future horizons.” But where Moscow sees a security challenge, other countries see opportunity.
Last August, Danish shipping major Maersk ran a trial shipment along the NSR, when the Venta Maersk ferried electronics, minerals and 660 containers of frozen fish from Vladivostok to St Petersburg.
The first-ever NSR transit by a container ship, which Maersk says was a “one-off trial” to gain experience, was chaperoned by a Russian icebreaker along most of the country’s north-eastern coastline.
Ships from 20 different countries plied the waters of the NSR last year, carrying a total of 20m tonnes of cargo.
While paltry in comparison to traditional global shipping routes, it is double the amount in 2017, and Russia expects that figure to quadruple by 2025.
“This is a realistic, well-calculated and concrete task,” Mr Putin said this month.
“We need to make the Northern Sea Route safe and commercially feasible.” Rosatom says the cargo target could be beaten, provided it receives new icebreakers on time.
“Life doesn’t end there,” says Alexei Likhachev, Rosatom’s head.
“We are aiming for 92.6m tonnes in transit by 2024 rather than 80m tonnes.
And by 2030, we hope to add a significant part of international transit to that.” China’s increased interest in the Arctic, and its developing friendship with Russia, will be critical in hitting that target.

In this photo taken on April 3, 2019, a Russian solder stands guard near a Pansyr-S1 air defense system on the Kotelny Island, part of the New Siberian Islands archipelago located between the Laptev Sea and the East Siberian Sea, Russia.

Beijing has observer status on the Arctic Council, a body designed to manage regional co-operation; has a research station on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard; and is the biggest foreign shareholder in Russia’s Arctic liquefied natural gas projects, which will rely on NSR shipments for exports.
Last year, China published an Arctic policy paper that explicitly linked the NSR to its ambitious Belt and Road strategy of developing pathways for both trade and influence, dubbing it the “Polar Silk Road”.
“I remember that just two decades ago people were saying [the NSR] was impossible,” says a foreign ambassador in Moscow.
“But when I heard the term Polar Silk Road and realised the Chinese were interested, I knew it was serious.” Shipping companies from South Korea, where many of Russia’s cargo tankers are built, have also conducted pilot voyages since 2013.
“South Korea and other Asian countries consider the NSR the shortest shipping route linking Asia and Europe and one of great commercial potential,” says Park Heung Kyeong, ambassador for Arctic affairs for Seoul’s foreign ministry.
Yet turning potential into profit will not be easy.
Ships often require an escort from an icebreaker as a precaution even when the NSR is ice-free.
“This is a very difficult and technologically intense task because we exist in a very competitive environment,” says Maxim Akimov, Russia’s deputy prime minister.
Russia has the world’s only fleet of nuclear icebreakers.
All but one of its four-strong fleet will be replaced over the next decade at an estimated cost of between $500m and $1.5bn each.
By 2035, its Arctic fleet will include least 13 icebreakers, including nine nuclear powered vessels, according to Mr Putin.

Moscow also needs to expand and develop ports at both ends of the route — Murmansk close to the Norwegian border and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky on the Kamchatka Peninsula near Japan — and has invited foreign companies to invest in the projects.
“We are convinced that there is demand for the NSR and plan to implement the project with the help of broad international partnerships,” says Rosatom.
At the St Petersburg conference, the most commonly used word among foreign officials was “co-operation”.
Although senior representatives from Canada and the US were conspicuous by their absence, presidents, prime ministers and top diplomats from European Arctic powers were at pains to make clear they wanted to work with Moscow.
Indeed they might.
Russia’s rapid and determined push to assert its control over the NSR has unnerved many of its Arctic neighbours, which are now seeking to collaborate with the Kremlin.
Complicating the issue is the soured relationship between Russia and the west, due to Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, the attempted assassination of a former spy in the UK last year and efforts to meddle in foreign elections.
Those factors, and the resulting sanctions levied by western countries, mean some governments are tentative about working closely with Moscow on commercial or security issues, and have instead focused on areas such as environmental protection and safety.
Without action to mitigate human sources of greenhouse gas emissions, the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free during the summer months before 2050, and possibly within the next decade or two, a UK parliament defence committee report warned last year.
“We want to have good relations with Russia, but at the same time we do not give up on the things which we believe in and things which we look at differently,” Sweden’s prime minister Stefan Löfven told Mr Putin on stage in St Petersburg.

Marie-Anne Coninsx, the EU’s ambassador-at-large for the Arctic, denies that Brussels had been slow to react to the region’s potential.
“We have for many years been engaged with the Arctic,” she says.
“We are co-operating well with Russia — co-operation not competition.” Brussels is working with Moscow on issues ranging from water waste management to the treatment of nuclear waste in the region, she adds.
“The EU’s member states have the biggest merchant fleet in the world,” Ms Coninsx says.
“If there are new economic opportunities, they will be used.” But the west’s other response was illustrated last October, when Nato troops carrying assault rifles poured out of landing craft on to beaches in northern Norway.
Operation Trident Juncture was the military alliance’s largest war games since the cold war, and saw 50,000 troops, 10,000 vehicles and 250 aircraft from 31 countries participate in a four-week long exercise close to the country’s border with Russia.
Condemned by Moscow as aggressive posturing, analysts said it illustrated how seriously Nato took Russia’s ambitions in the frozen north, and its understanding that its troops needed experience of operating in the region.
Russia is “staking a claim and militarising the region”, UK defence secretary Gavin Williamson said last September as he announced the country’s new Arctic defence strategy.
“We must be ready to deal with all threats as they emerge.”

Around 800 Royal Marines troops are training in Norway this year, while four RAF Typhoons are patrolling in the skies above Iceland for the first time.
The US is expected to release a new Arctic strategy this summer, a document that the Pentagon has said will focus on how to “best defend US national interests and support security and stability in the Arctic”.
“Russia’s development of its Arctic areas . . . gets immense attention, and that creates both fair and unfair competition, which is pure politics,” says Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the foreign affairs committee at Russia’s upper house of parliament.
That challenge of balancing defence and development is the biggest question facing Russia, says Chris Tooke, analyst at GPW, a political risk consultancy.
Moscow helped Arctic gas producer Novatek by relaxing a requirement that only Russian-registered vessels can traverse the NSR which would have dented its export potential.
But Mr Tooke believes such steps will be rare.
“On balance, I would expect security imperatives to trump commercial interests, and this tension and the need to develop infrastructure will probably slow progress in commercial exploitation in the medium term,” he says.
“But the potential is definitely there.”

Links :

• FT : Russia's Arctic obsession
• CNN : Inside the military base at the heart of Putin's Arctic ambitions
• MoscowTimes : Russia Is Building a New Arctic, With Private Money / 
• NYTimes : Military Drills in Arctic Aim to Counter Russia, but the First Mission Is to ...
• VOA : As Russia Touts Expanded Arctic Sea Routes, US Observers See Veiled Threat