Visit Marport at World Fishing Exhibition
The Exhibition Centre of Cotogrande in Vigo, Spain opens its doors today to host the World Fishing Exhibition 2009. The exhibition is open from September 16 – 19th
The World Fishing Exhibition has grown to become the world’s greatest commercial fisheries exhibition. It encompasses everything from sea to plate, with the emphasis on catching and processing. It’s an excellent opportunity to meet Marport commercial and technical personnel who will be presenting our latest technical advances and cost-effective solutions for catch control and gear monitoring.
The exhibition is the sixth to be held in the European fishing port. The previous exhibition in 2003 consisted of almost 800 companies from 80 nations. Over 70,000 worldwide professionals attended that show spending an estimated 400 million euros.
Iceland May Not Have To Surrender Fishing Rights For EU Membership
It is beginning to emerge that Iceland may not after all have to surrender her fishing grounds or fish stocks to foreign predators as an exchange for European Union membership. Joining both the EU and the euro currency was suggested recently as offering the only ‘durable solution’ to Iceland’s economic problems, and a major hurdle was overcome recently when the government agreed to compensate the British and Dutch for the four billion euros lost after the collapse of its banks.
Iceland’s foreign minister, Ossur Skarphedinsson recently told Brussels that under no circumstances will the country’s territorial waters be completely opened up to foreign fishermen – and this seems to have been broadly accepted.
Negotiations will get under way next year and there will be pressure, probably from the Spanish, Portuguese and French for Iceland to relax its strong opposition to a foreign trawlers fishing in its waters.
Reykjavik is expected to impose strict and conditions a wholesale surrender of fishing rights is not on the cards. Such a move would be almost certainly rejected in a referendum if it was ever seriously proposed.
There is also general recognition that the current Common Fisheries Policy, which is about to undergo a fundamental review, has been a total failure. By 2013 the current quota and discards policy is almost certain to be replaced by days at sea restrictions.
New Robot Monitors Deep-sea Ecosystems
During July 2009, the Benthic Rover traveled across the seafloor while hooked up to the Monterey Accelerated Research System ocean observatory. This allowed researchers to control the vehiclein real time. (Credit:MBARI)
Like the robotic rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which wheeled tirelessly across the dusty surface of Mars, a new robot spent most of July traveling across the muddy ocean bottom, about 40 kilometres (25 miles) off the California coast. This robot, the Benthic Rover, has been providing scientists with an entirely new view of life on the deep seafloor. It will also give scientists a way to document the effects of climate change on the deep sea. The Rover is the result of four years of hard work by a team of engineers and scientists led by MBARI project engineer Alana Sherman and marine biologist Ken Smith.
About the size and weight of a small compact car, the Benthic Rover moves very slowly across the seafloor, taking photographs of the animals and sediment in its path. Every three to five meters (10 to 16 feet) the Rover stops and makes a series of measurements on the community of organisms living in the seafloor sediment. These measurements will help scientists understand one of the ongoing mysteries of the ocean—how animals on the deep seafloor find enough food to survive.
Most life in the deep sea feeds on particles of organic debris, known as “marine snow”, which drift slowly down from the sunlit surface layers of the ocean. But even after decades of research, marine biologists have not been able to figure out how the small amount of nutrition in marine snow can support the large numbers of organisms that live on and in seafloor sediment.
The Benthic Rover carries two experimental chambers called “benthic respirometers” that are inserted a few centimetres into the seafloor to measure how much oxygen is being consumed by the community of organisms within the sediment. This, in turn, allows scientists to calculate how much food the organisms are consuming. At the same time, optical sensors on the Rover scan the seafloor to measure how much food has arrived recently from the surface waters.
MBARI researchers have been working on the Benthic Rover since 2005, overcoming many challenges along the way. The most obvious challenge was designing the Rover to survive at depths where the pressure of seawater is about 420 kilograms per square meter (6,000 pounds per square inch). To withstand this pressure, the engineers had to shield the Rover’s electronics and batteries inside custom-made titanium pressure spheres.
To keep the Rover from sinking into the soft seafloor mud, the engineers outfitted the vehicle with large yellow blocks of buoyant foam that will not collapse under extreme pressure. This foam gives the Rover, which weighs about 1,400 kilograms (3,000 pounds) in air, a weight of only about 45 kilograms (100 pounds) in seawater.
Other engineering challenges required less high-tech solutions. In constructing the Rover’s tractor-like treads, the design team used a decidedly low-tech material—commercial conveyor belts. After watching the Benthic Rover on the seafloor using MBARI’s remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), however, the researchers discovered that the belts were picking up mud and depositing it in front of the vehicle, where it was contaminating the scientific measurements. In response, the team came up with a low-tech but effective solution: they removed the heads from two push brooms and bolted them onto the vehicle so that the stiff bristles would clean off the treads as they rotated.
The team also discovered that whenever the Rover moved, it stirred up a cloud of sediment like the cloud of dust that follows the character “Pig-Pen” in the Charlie Brown comic strip. This mud could have affected the Rover’s measurements. To reduce this risk, the engineers programmed the Rover to move very, very slowly—about one meter (3 feet) a minute. The Rover is also programmed to sense the direction of the prevailing current, and only move in an up-current direction, so that any stirred-up mud will be carried away from the front of the vehicle.
In its basic configuration, the Benthic Rover is designed to operate on batteries, without any human input. However, during its month-long journey this summer, the Rover was connected by a long extension cord to a newly-completed underwater observatory. This observatory, known as the Monterey Accelerated Research System (MARS), provided power for the robot, as well as a high-speed data link back to shore.
According to Sherman, “Hooking up the Rover to the observatory opened up a whole new world of interactivity. Usually when we deploy the Rover, we have little or no communication with the vehicle. We drop it overboard, cross our fingers, and hope that it works.” In this case, however, the observatory connection allowed MBARI researchers to fine tune the Rover’s performance and view its data, videos, and still images in real time. Sherman recalls, “One weekend I was at home, with my laptop on the kitchen table, controlling the vehicle and watching the live video from 900 meters below the surface of Monterey Bay. It was amazing!”
Later this fall, the Rover will be sent back down to the undersea observatory site in Monterey Bay for a two-month deployment. Next year the team hopes to take the Rover out to a site about 220 km (140 miles) offshore of Central California. They will let the Rover sink 4,000 meters down to the seafloor, where it will make measurements on its own for six months. The team would also like to take the Rover to Antarctica, to study the unique seafloor ecosystems there. The Rover may also be hooked up to a proposed deep-water observatory several hundred miles off the coast of Washington state.
In addition to answering some key questions of oceanography, the Benthic Rover will help researchers study the effects of climate change in the ocean. As the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans become warmer, even life in the deep sea will be affected. The Benthic Rover, and its possible successors, will help researchers understand how deep-sea communities are changing over time.
Just as the rovers Spirit and Opportunity gave us dramatic new perspectives on the planet Mars, so the Benthic Rover is giving researchers new perspectives of a dark world that is in some ways more mysterious than the surface of the distant red planet.
Satellites And Submarines Give The Skinny On Sea Ice Thickness
Patterns of average winter ice thickness from February to March show thicker ice in 1988 (above), compared to thinner ice averaged from 2003-2008 (below). (Credit: Ronald Kwok/NASA)
This summer, a group of scientists and students — as well as a Canadian senator, a writer, and a filmmaker — set out from Resolute Bay, Canada, on the icebreaker Louis S. St-Laurent. They were headed through the Northwest Passage, but instead of opening shipping lanes in the ice, they had gathered to open up new lines of thinking on Arctic science.Among the participants in the shipboard workshop (hosted by Fisheries and Oceans Canada) was Ron Kwok of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Kwok has long provided checkups on the health of Arctic sea ice — the frozen sea water floating within the Arctic Ocean basin. He also knows that some important clues about ice changes can’t be seen from a ship.
Extending the Record
While satellites provide accurate and expansive coverage of ice in the Arctic Ocean, the records are relatively new. Satellites have only monitored sea ice extent since 1973. NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) has been on the task since 2003, allowing researchers to estimate ice thickness as well. To extend the record, Kwok and Drew Rothrock of the University of Washington, Seattle, recently combined the high spatial coverage from satellites with a longer record from Cold War submarines to piece together a history of ice thickness that spans close to 50 years.
Analysis of the new record shows that since a peak in 1980, sea ice thickness has declined 53 percent. “It’s an astonishing number,” Kwok said. The study, published online in Geophysical Research Letters, shows that the current thinning of Arctic sea ice has actually been going on for quite some time.
“A fantastic change is happening on Earth — it’s truly one of the biggest changes in environmental conditions on Earth since the end of the ice age,” said Tom Wagner, cryosphere program manager at NASA Headquarters. “It’s not an easy thing to observe, let alone predict, what might happen next.”
Sea ice influences the Arctic’s local weather, climate, and ecosystems. It also affects global climate. As sea ice melts, there is less white surface area to reflect sunlight into space. Sunlight is instead absorbed by the ocean and land, raising the overall temperature and fueling further melting. Ice loss puts a damper on the Arctic air conditioner, disrupting global atmospheric and ocean circulation.
To better identify what these changes mean for the future, scientists need a long-term look at past ice behavior. Each year, Arctic ice undergoes changes brought about by the seasons, melting in the summer warmth and refreezing in the cold, dark winter. A single extreme melt or freeze season may be the result of any number of seasonal factors, from storminess to the Arctic Oscillation (variations in atmospheric circulation over the polar regions that occur on time scales from weeks to decades).
But climate is not the same as weather. Climate fluctuates subtly over decades and centuries, while weather changes from day to day and by greater extremes.
“We need to understand the long-term trends, rather than the short-term trends that could be easily biased by short-term changes,” Kwok said. “Long-term trends are more reliable indicators of how sea ice is changing with the global and regional climate.” That’s why a long-term series of data was necessary. “Even decadal changes can be cyclical, but this decline for more than three decades does not appear to be cyclical,” Rothrock said.
All the Ice Counts
Arctic sea ice records have become increasingly comprehensive since the latter half of the 20th century, with records of sea ice anomalies viewed from satellites, ships, and ice charts collected by various countries. Most of that record, kept in the United States by the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, describes the areal extent of sea ice.
But a complete picture of sea ice requires an additional, vertical measurement: thickness. Melting affects more than just ice area; it can also impact ice above and below the waterline. By combining thickness and extent measurements, scientists can better understand how the Arctic ice cover is changing.
Kwok and other researchers used ICESat’s Geoscience Laser Altimeter System to estimate the height of sea ice above the ocean surface. Knowing the height, scientists can estimate how much ice is below the surface.
Buoyancy causes a fraction (about 10 percent) of sea ice to stick out above the sea surface. By knowing the density of the ice and applying “Archimedes’ Principle” — an object immersed in a fluid is buoyed by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object — and accounting for the accumulation of snowfall, the total thickness of the ice can be calculated.
In 2008, Kwok and colleagues used ICESat to produce an ice thickness map over the entire Arctic basin. Then in July 2009, Kwok and colleagues reported that multiyear ‘permanent’ ice in the Arctic Ocean has thinned by more than 40 percent since 2004. For the first time, thin seasonal ice has overtaken thick older ice as the dominant type.
Submarines and Satellites
To put the recent decline in context, Kwok and Rothrock examined the recent five-year record from ICESat in the context of the longer history of ice thickness observed by U.S. Navy submarines. During the Cold War, the submarines collected upward-looking sonar profiles, for navigation and defense, and converted the information into an estimate of ice thickness. Scientists also gathered profiles during a five-year collaboration between the Navy and academic researchers called the Scientific Ice Expeditions, or “SCICEX,” of which Rothrock was a participant. In total, declassified submarine data span nearly five decades—from 1958 to 2000—and cover a study area of more than 1 million square miles, or close to 40 percent of the Arctic Ocean.
Kwok and Rothrock compared the submarine data with the newer ICESat data from the same study area and spanning 2003 to 2007. The combined record shows that ice thickness in winter of 1980 averaged 3.64 meters. By the end of 2007, the average was 1.89 meters.
“The dramatic decrease in multiyear ice coverage is quite remarkable and explains to a large degree the decrease in total ice area and volume,” Kwok said.
Rothrock, who has worked extensively with the submarine data, agrees. “This paper shows one of the most compelling signals of global warming with one of the greatest and fastest regional environmental impacts.”
Ice Through Human Eyes
While it is critical to keep monitoring the Arctic with satellites and aircraft, Kwok believes there is also a benefit in physically standing in a place and seeing the changes through human eyes—particularly for non-scientists, who do not keep a close watch on sea ice.
The August 2009 workshop in the Northwest Passage brought together an eclectic group of politicians, artists, and scientists to see the ice firsthand. The challenge was to see the problem of a changing Arctic environment from a variety of scientific, political, cultural and human perspectives and to discuss the future of collaborative study in the Arctic. The science of sea ice has implications for people’s livelihoods, for long-established ecosystems, and for opening a new part of the world to exploration and exploitation.
The workshop participants now take their experiences and observations back to warmer climates, where there is sometimes less urgency about ice retreat.
“Sea ice is about more than just hard science; it’s a geopolitical and human issue,” Kwok noted. “There is a big personal impact when you get away from your desk and see it in person.”
Fishing Study Highlights Economic Pressures
A new study on the impact of the economic downturn and conservation measures on the fishing industry was published yesterday. The study was commissioned by the Scottish government earlier this year to demonstrate to the European Commission the financial difficulties facing fishermen.
Carried out by economists at industry authority Seafish, it looked at the current and future impacts on fleets of fuel and fish prices, quota reductions and restrictions on days at sea.
The study found that this year fuel and fish prices are the key factors affecting the profits of the nephrops (prawn/langoustine) sector. Additional restrictions proposed by Europe for 2010 are estimated to have a further impact but, even without these, the sector is likely to remain financially fragile.
For the demersal (cod, haddock and whiting) sector, the report indicates that days at sea restrictions have a critical impact and additional restrictions proposed by Europe for 2010 would result in some fishing operations making a net loss.
Commenting on the study, Fisheries Secretary Richard Lochhead said: ‘Fishing is a tough way of life at the best of times but this year the combined effect of the economic climate and the tough restrictions imposed by Europe has made life particularly difficult for our fishermen.
We have stressed this point a number of times in our dealings with the European Commission and commissioned this study to provide robust evidence. It shows just how economically fragile our fleets are.
‘We are about to enter the annual round of autumn negotiations in Europe, when crucial decisions are taken on quotas and days at sea. This study will help inform our negotiating position and, as a first step, we will be discussing it with Commission officials later this month.’
The report is entitled Economic Impact Assessment of the Cod Recovery Plan and can be downloaded from here: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Fisheries/Sea-Fisheries/ScottishFisheriesCounci/CodRecvoeryPlanFull
Japan Launches Second ASW Aircraft Carrier
Japan launched its second aircraft carrier (the Ise) on August 21st.
This past March, it commissioned the first of these ships, the “helicopter-carrying destroyer”, the Hyuga. These are 610 foot long, 18,000 ton warships that operate up to 11 (mostly SH-60) helicopters from a full length flight deck. Although called a destroyer, it very much looks like an aircraft carrier. While its primary function is anti-submarine warfare, the vessels also give Japan its first real power projection capability since 1945.
These vessels are the largest warships built in Japan since World War II. The Japanese constitution forbids it to have aircraft carriers, which is the main reason it is called a destroyer.
The ships also have 16 Mk41 VLS (Vertical Launch System) cells for anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles. There are also two 20mm Phalanx anti-missile cannon and two triple 12.75-inch torpedo mounts. There is a crew of 350 and a top speed of about 60 kilometers. Vertical takeoff jets like the Harrier and F-35B could also operate from the ship. A third Hyuga class is planned.
Marport C-Tech to Exhibit at DEFSEC Atlantic 2009
The 2009 Canadian Defence, Security and Aerospace Exhibition will take place Sept. 9 to 11, at the Cunard Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia. DEFSEC Atlantic has evolved to become Atlantic Canada’s largest industry exhibition, and the second largest in Canada.
Exhibitors include international and Canadian suppliers and manufacturers. Panel discussions will explore Canada’s roles in NATO and in the Arctic. Several feature speakers will discuss international trade and Arctic affairs, including ownership, shipping, sovereignty and aboriginal rights.
The show will feature product presentations and capability displays of Canada’s leading edge defence and security technologies to a wide audience that includes government agencies and departments with interests in security, public safety, risk mitigation, threat response and emergency planning.
Requests for meetings can be co-ordinated with Glenda Leyte. Glenda’s email is: gleyte@marport.com
India, Russia Near New Deal on Aircraft Carrier
A new deal between India and Russia on the funds for the refit of aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov will be signed in mid-October, the head of the state technology corporation said on Thursday. “An additional agreement will be signed,” Sergei Chemezov, head of Rostekhnologii, told a news conference in Moscow.
Under the original $1.5 billion 2004 contract between Russia’s state-run arms exporter Rosoboronexport and the Indian Navy, which includes delivery of MiG-29K Fulcrum carrier-based fighters, the work on the aircraft carrier was to have been completed in 2008.
However, Russia later claimed it had underestimated the scale and the cost of the modernisation, and asked for an additional $1.2 billion, which New Delhi said was “exorbitant”.
After long-running delays and disputes, India offered in February 2008 to raise the refit costs for the aircraft carrier, docked at the Sevmash shipyard in northern Russia for the past 12 years, by up to $600 million.
Russia said it was not satisfied with the proposed amount and the issue of the additional funding remains unresolved.
Talks on the additional funding agreement are currently underway. Russia has pledged to finish the Admiral Gorshkov’s overhaul as soon as possible and deliver it to India in 2012 if the additional $1.2 billion funding is provided by New Delhi.
According to Russian media, India has no alternative but to allocate the required funds, despite recent objections from the government’s accounting office, because the Indian Navy desperately needs to replace its INS Viraat, which, although currently operational, is now 50 years old.
After modernisation, the carrier will join the Indian Navy as INS Vikramaditya, and is expected to be seaworthy for 30 years.
Admiral Gorshkov is a modified Kiev class aircraft carrier, originally named Baku.
The ship was laid down in 1978 at the Nikolayev South shipyard in Ukraine, launched in 1982, and commissioned with the Soviet Navy in 1987.
It was renamed after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
In 1994, following a boiler room explosion, the Admiral Gorshkov sat in dock for a year for repairs. After a brief return to service in 1995, it was finally withdrawn from service in 1996 and put up for sale.
The ship’s displacement is 45,000 tonnes. It has a maximum speed of 32 knots and an endurance of 13,500 nautical miles (25,000 km) at a cruising speed of 18 knots.
BP makes “giant” oil find in Gulf of Mexico
Oil major BP Plc said it has made an oil discovery in the Gulf of Mexico, which analysts believe could contain over 1 billion barrels of recoverable reserves, reaffirming the Gulf’s strategic importance to the industry.
BP said in a statement on Wednesday that it had made the “giant” find at its Tiber Prospect in the Keathley Canyon block 102, by drilling one of the deepest wells ever sunk by the industry.
Further appraisal will be required to ascertain the size of volumes of oil present, but a spokesman said the find should be bigger than its Kaskida discovery which has over 3 billion barrels of oil in place.
Estimates of recoverable reserves range from around 20 percent of oil in place.
“Assuming reserves in place of 4 billion barrels and a 35 percent recovery rate, BP’s proven reserves .. would rise by 868 million barrels — equivalent to 4.8 percent of the group’s 18.14 billion barrels of proven reserves,” Aymeric De-Villaret, oil analyst at Societe Generale said in a research note.
BP, the biggest oil producer in the U.S. and biggest leaseholder in the Gulf of Mexico, has a 62 percent working interest in the block, while Brazilian state-controlled Petrobras owns 20 percent and U.S. oil major ConocoPhillips owns 18 percent.
Iain Armstrong, analyst at Brewin Dolphin, said the discovery may have implications for long-term oil prices.
“It will ease concerns about peak oil because it shows there is life left in these mature areas,” he said, adding that it could be the second half of the next decade before the find is producing.
The discovery also bodes well for other exploration in that part of the Gulf of Mexico, including at Royal Dutch Shell’s nearby Great White field, Jason Kenny, oil analyst at ING in Edinburgh, said.
The Gulf of Mexico has become increasingly important to Western oil majors as oil rich-countries such as Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Russia reserve their richest fields to be developed by their state-owned oil companies.
The Gulf is especially attractive because it offers high profit margins, due to relatively low taxation compared to countries such as Russia and Nigeria, and because of the low political risk.
As nearer-shore discoveries dry up, companies have pushed further out to sea, which has forced them to develop new technologies to detect and extract the oil.
The prospects for massive discoveries in the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico is also good news for U.S. politicians’ ambitions to reduce the country’s reliance on imported oil, although oil executives doubt the U.S. is capable of becoming self sufficient in oil.
United States Arctic Fishing Policy Latest in Can-Am Dispute
Scientists examine ice conditions in the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska in this January 2009 file photo. A U.S. moratorium on new fisheries in the Beaufort Sea has highlighted a long-simmering boundary dispute with Canada in the Arctic waters north of Yukon and Alaska. Photograph by: Handout, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
A U.S. moratorium on new fisheries in the Beaufort Sea has highlighted a long-simmering boundary dispute with Canada in the Arctic waters north of Yukon and Alaska.
The new U.S. policy, announced last week by Commerce Secretary Gary Locke as a “precautionary” measure pending further study of the rapidly changing polar environment, covers a huge swath of the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska and running east to the U.S.-Canada maritime boundary — including a contentious, 11,500-sq.-km. expanse of water that both countries claim.
Crafted by the regional fishery management council in Alaska, the new Arctic Fishery Management Plan closes about 150,000 square nautical miles, an area larger than California and five times larger than all national parks combined.
There is currently no significant commercial fishing in the area, but fisheries managers expect it to become a target for commercial fishers chasing cod and snow crab as ice melts and fisheries shift north. Fishing fleets from around the globe are signalling an interest in moving into an area that hold stocks of crab, Arctic cod, and, increasingly, limited numbers of pollack and salmon as they migrate north. There are major fishing grounds south of the new protected area. Alaska’s Bering Sea is the United States’ “fish basket,” with about 60 percent of U.S. commercial landings, according to the state fishing industry.
A Canadian government spokesman told Canwest News Service this week that the U.S. fishing moratorium “does not alter Canada’s legal position with respect to the bilateral dispute regarding the maritime delimitation of part of the Beaufort Sea.”
Department of Foreign Affairs spokesman Alain Cacchione stated in an e-mail that “Canadian sovereignty over the lands, islands and waters of the Canadian Arctic is long-standing, well-established and based on historic title” — an oft-repeated message from the federal government when it comes to Arctic sovereignty issues.
While noting that Canada “shares concerns with the U.S. on proper management of living marine resources in the Arctic,” and that the Beaufort Sea boundary dispute is “well managed by both sides,” the government’s statement acknowledges the possibility that the two countries may ultimately pursue different conservation strategies in the region despite last week’s “unilateral” decision by the U.S.
“The U.S. has made some unilateral closures in their waters and in a disputed zone in the Arctic as their expression of ‘precaution’ in the absence of information,” the statement said. “However, closures are only one tool for addressing sustainability risks. Other tools, such as exploratory fisheries protocols, area closures, etc., are risk-based yet compatible with sustainable use.”
University of Calgary political scientist Rob Huebert, who argues that Canada is likely to face mounting jurisdictional challenges from the U.S. and Russia as Arctic shipping and fishing open up in the future, said the Canadian response to the U.S. moratorium appears to be “more assertive” than previous statements about the disputed Beaufort zone.
“I think it’s good, the way this response says they’re obviously not pleased with this,” Huebert told Canwest News Service from Iqaluit, where he’s observing a Canadian Forces sovereignty operation. “Usually it’s, ‘Don’t worry, be happy, this isn’t an issue.’ The fact that they’re noting the ‘unilateral’ moratorium is significant. This is obviously going to be aggravating the situation.”
Canada may well choose to follow the U.S. lead and impose a temporary ban on commercial fishing in the Canadian Beaufort, including the area of overlapping claims. Former fisheries scientist Burton Ayles, a federal appointee to the Inuvialuit region’s Fisheries Joint Management Committee, told Canwest News Service earlier this week that discussions about declaring a moratorium on industrial-scale commercial fisheries have already begun in Western Arctic communities.
The committee members, coastal communities and environmental groups are all cautious about exploiting potential new resources until more is known about the viability of fish populations migrating into warming Arctic waters and the long-term impact of climate change in the region.
Huebert said despite the wisdom of the precautionary approach being pursued by both countries when it comes to new Arctic fisheries, the U.S. officials drafting the terms of the moratorium pointedly failed to acknowledge that a sizable portion of the area affected by the policy is in disputed waters.
He argues that shows the U.S. is “taking a harder line” when it comes to asserting its own interests in the Arctic — a move he said is consistent with the tough tone in a January presidential directive on the Arctic issued in the final days of the Bush administration.
“They’ve moved away from the softer language of the disputed zone into what I would interpret as clearer position — and a more assertive position — on what they see as their slice of the Beaufort Sea.”
