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Navy preps for uncharted Arctic waters

Time to order some new parkas, wool watchcaps and warm gloves.

As polar ice melts at the top of the world, more space to drive ships will open, meaning job opportunities for the surface fleet.

In the next four years, the Navy, Coast Guard and other government organizations will figure out what ships, training, equipment, rules and schedules they will need for a whole new operating area, through their “Arctic Roadmap” released Nov. 10.

“As the ice melts back, it is an ocean, and we as the United States Navy work in every ocean in the world,” Rear Adm. Dave Titley, oceanographer and navigator of the Navy, said in a telephone interview. “The Arctic is a challenge; it’s not a crisis. Nothing is in danger today, but it’s something we realize we’re going to have to take a look at.”

The Navy expects to contend with increased maritime traffic combined with international disputes over passage rights, sovereignty, and access to oil, minerals and natural gas.

Titley said that by the late 2030s, if melting continues at the current rates, the Arctic will be “ice-free for at least a period of several weeks each summer.”

That means young sailors and officers today need to get familiar with uncharted waters.

“When the ice really starts melting back and we really have to be up there,” he said, “the officers and senior enlisted of that Navy, if we do our jobs right, will have experience working in that environment.”

Today, the only Navy vessels to regularly cut across the top of the globe and train beneath the ice are submarines.

Over the next four years, Task Force Climate Change, under the oceanographer’s office, should have figured out what it will take for arctic fleet operations, including communications and logistics, down to how well forecasters can tell a ship captain whether he should expect ice ahead.

In the meantime, sailors will get more chances to see how other navies deal with extremely cold conditions and ice-choked seas.

Titley said some 2nd Fleet sailors rode to the Arctic with the Canadian Navy this summer for Exercise Nanook. They learned, for example, those ship crews shut down and drift at night to avoid driving into undetected ice.

Training exercises organized by Fleet Forces Command and 2nd Fleet tentatively chalked for the coming years will also provide planners with lessons for the decisions ahead.

By the end of 2011, several assessments should determine, among other things, how to strengthen hulls and communications to operate in cold, hostile conditions.

The Arctic remains largely unknown because the water has been inaccessible. “Because it’s been ice, right now the best estimates are that 5 percent of the Arctic Ocean has been charted to modern standards,” Titley said.

More exercises

Submariners already know about the biennial ICEX trips to the Arctic, where the chosen subs poke through the ice near a hasty research camp for a week or so of experimentation and torpedo shoots in frigid conditions. But as part of the road map through climate change in the Arctic, exercises Northern Eagle, Arctic Edge and Arctic Care, among others, are identified as opportunities to learn the area. In Northern Eagle 2008, for example, the frigate Elrod trained with Russian and Norwegian forces in the Barents Sea, south of the Arctic Ocean.