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Arctic Impacts and Reverberations of Expanding Global Maritime Trade Routes
Climate change has induced a decline in Arctic sea ice, increasing the viability of cargo vessels passing through Arctic waters into the future.
A growth in cargo traffic in these pristine waterways will affect sea life, the environment, the coastal communities along the routes, as well as local and global economies. While short in distance, these passages are likely to remain risky for a long time to come due to, for example, unsuitable bathymetric charts, extreme low temperatures, high wind, poor visibility, and increased numbers of ice growlers and bergy bits arising from glacial calving. Thus, tradeoffs between risks and cost savings from shorter distances will remain.
To predict the global shifts in maritime-based trade flows toward routes that employ the Arctic passageways under future climate scenarios, the Arctic Impacts and Reverberations of Expanding Global Maritime Trade Routes team has developed a set of mathematical and algorithmic methods. The scenarios are developed from the High-resolution Ice-Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System for Future Projections (HIOMAS-FP) tool. Also, with incident risk estimates from their developed data-driven Bayesian network methodology, the team’s maritime cargo flow model can predict future maritime cargo traffic. Initial findings from the application of these methodologies on a case study involving a portion of the world’s current vessel traffic are currently being analyzed. In coming months, the project team hopes to be able to share their full-scale global estimates.
For more information, please contact PI Elise Miller-Hooks (miller@gmu.edu).
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