Luxury Arctic cruise raises safety questions

Record low Arctic Sea ice cover this year is opening the eyes of climate watchers.

So is news of a scheduled Arctic luxury cruise this summer. A non ice-rated cruise ship with 1,700 on board sailing for a month through suddenly shifting ice floes thousands of miles from civilization. What could possibly go wrong?

Wired has more on the scheduled, and sold out Arctic cruise this summer.

On April 13, coast guard officials from the US and Canada will train for a cruise ship catastrophe: a mass rescue from a luxury liner on its maiden voyage through the remote and deathly cold waters between the Northwest Passage and the Bering Strait.

The prospect of just such a disaster occurring amid the uncharted waters and capricious weather of the Arctic is becoming all too real.

The loss of Arctic sea ice cover, due to climate change, has spurred a sharp rise in shipping traffic—as well as coast guard rescue missions—and increased the risks of oil spills, shipping accidents, and pollution, much to the apprehension of native communities who make their living on the ice.

It’s into these turbulent waters that the luxury cruise ship Crystal Serenity will set sail next August, departing from Seward, Alaska, and transiting the Bering Strait and Northwest Passage, before docking in New York City 32 days later.

The scale of the Crystal—1,700 passengers and crew—and the potential for higher-volume traffic in the Arctic has commanded the attention of the coast guard, government officials and local communities, all trying to navigate an Arctic without year-round ice.

“If something were to go wrong it would be very, very bad,” said Richard Beneville, the mayor of the coastal town of Nome, which the Crystal is due to visit. “Most cruise ships that get here have passenger manifests of 100, maybe 150. This is a very different ship.”

Sudden Antarctic melt on the radar

It's one of the mysteries of the uncharted waters we call climate change. Why does the Antarctic seem to be slower than the Arctic to respond as temperatures warm globally?

One study last year found as much as a 200 year time lag in the way Antarctic ice sheets responded to previous climate shifts compared to Greenland. This week a new study in the journal Nature suggests that once significant warming in Antarctica occurs, ice sheets there could begin to undergo rapid disintegration in a process referred to as runaway melting.

The study seems to suggest that sea level rise could be more sudden than previously expected once significant potions of the Antarctic ice sheet begins to melt.

The good news? Antarctic ice sheets may be relatively stable at temperature increases below +2 degrees Celsius. The bad news. More rapid disintegration of Antarctic ice sheets could begin as temperatures warm above the +2C threshold, and we're already halfway there.

Climate Central elaborates on the notion that melting in the Antarctic ice sheets may not follow a steady, straight line.

The world’s greatest reservoir of ice is verging on a breakdown that could push seas to heights not experienced since prehistoric times, drowning dense coastal neighborhoods during the decades ahead, new computer models have shown.

A pair of researchers developed the models to help them understand high sea levels during previous eras of warmer temperatures. Then they ran simulations using those models and found that rising levels of greenhouse gases could trigger runaway Antarctic melting that alone could push sea levels up by more than three feet by century’s end.

The new findings were published Wednesday in the journal Nature, helping to fill yawning gaps in earlier projections of sea level rise.

“Sea level has risen a lot — 10 to 20 meters — in warm periods in the past, and our ice sheet models couldn’t make the Antarctic ice sheet retreat enough to explain that,” said David Pollard, a Penn State climate scientist who produced Wednesday’s study with UMass professor Robert DeConto.

“We were looking for new mechanisms that could make the ice more vulnerable to climate warming to explain past sea level rise,” Pollard said.

The breakdown that they discovered was not triggered when warming in the models was limited to levels similar to those called for under the Paris Agreement — something that Pollard described as potentially “good news.” That agreement aims to keep warming to well below 2°C (3.6°F) compared with preindustrial times. Since then, temperatures have already warmed 1°C.

Offshore wind farms ahead

Generating power from all that free wind blowing along our coastlines seems like a good idea. Now it's happening.

More from Climate Central.

America’s next experiment in offshore wind energy has been given the green light in Virginia, and in just a few years, wind turbines could be twirling in two places in the open waters of the U.S. East Coast.

The federal government last week approved a research project off the coast of Virginia that is expected to help demonstrate the viability of offshore wind energy in the U.S. The nation’s first offshore wind farm, off the coast of Rhode Island, is already under construction and could begin operating within the next year.

Whereas Europe has been building offshore wind turbines for many years, offshore wind energy is a vast untapped renewable energy resource in the U.S. The potential is so huge that more than 4 terawatts of wind power capacity could be built off of the East and West coasts — enough to light up about 480 million homes if fully developed.

The Virginia wind farm will be will be tiny — two 6 megawatt wind turbines powerful enough to generate electricity for 3,000 homes. The federal government granted the lease to the state of Virginia, and the wind farm will be operated by Dominion Resources.

The turbines will be the precursor to a much larger potential development. Dominion was the winning bidder in a 2013 lease sale giving it the right to develop a 2 gigawatt wind farm across nearly 113,000 acres in the open Atlantic 23 miles east of Virginia Beach. If built, that farm could power 700,000 homes.