Open waters: Coast Guard examines future of patrolling the Arctic.

• Author: Wright, Austin
• Position: Maritime Security

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. -- The Arctic is often characterized as global warming's canary in the coal mine. Climate experts warn that Arctic glaciers are retreating and are likely to melt completely during the hottest months of the year if current trends continue over the next two or three decades. The Coast Guard is watching this closely. It anticipates increased duties patrolling the Arctic region--a tough task considering that two of its three polar icebreaking vessels are set to be decommissioned in less than a decade, said Adm. Thad W. Allen, the service's commandant.

"This is a significant issue that needs to be addressed in the next two years," Allen told National Defense in a November interview at the annual Coast Guard conference. "We now have a territorial sea and a contiguous zone and an exclusive economic zone that are going to require some kind of Coast Guard presence and a response capability."

The Coast Guard is the only U.S. military service with polar icebreaking vessels in its fleet. Both the Polar Star, commissioned in 1976, and the Polar Sea, commissioned in 1978, have about seven years of operational life remaining, and there are currently no plans to replace them, Allen said. The third icebreaker, the Healy, was commissioned in 1999 and is mainly used to transport researchers.

"We need to conduct what we call a mission analysis on what our future icebreaking requirements are going to be," Allen said. "There has to be a national policy discussion about icebreaking requirements in the Arctic."

Pablo Clemente-Colon, chief scientist at the National Ice Center, presented a number of charts at the conference that showed that in recent years polar ice sheets have retreated farther and faster than ever before. The ice center provides climate-change data to the Navy, Coast Guard and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and in October the center issued a news release that says sea-ice levels were lower in the last three years than at any other period since 1979, when it began keeping such records.

"It's difficult to predict what sea routes will be open and what sea routes will be closed each year," Clemente-Colon said. "But as the reduction continues, it's foreseeable that we will have a transpolar route opening."

Allen put it this way: "There's open water where there didn't used to be."

The U.S. Navy and Coast Guard, which dwarf all other countries' warship fleets in size and capability, have fallen behind several Arctic...