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People sometimes forget that the mission of Christopher Columbus was not to discover the New World but to find a faster sea route between Europe and China than the route around the southern tip of Africa. In seeking to sail westward to China and the East Indies, Columbus ran into a major barrier in the form of the Western Hemisphere which was a solid land mass stretching from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Oh, there were two water routes around this land mass – the Straits of Magellan that separate the southern tip of South America from the Antarctic and the Arctic Ocean, the body of water which lay at the top of the world with connections to both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Both of these routes posed problems. First, both Europe and China are in the Northern Hemisphere while the Straits of Magellan are deep in the Southern Hemisphere, a fact that added thousands of miles to the route as, instead of simply sailing straight west from Europe to China, one had to detour far to the south in order to get around the American landmass and, once around the tip of South America, sail the same distance north again before continuing west to China. In addition to the extra miles was the fact that extreme weather and very rough seas made transit through the Straits of Magellan very dangerous with the result that many ships, along with their crews and cargoes were lost.

As to the Arctic Ocean, well, that was a frozen sea which had the effect of blocking shipping. Not that people didn't try to find a way. Rewards were offered to the discoverer of a Northwest Passage and for over 500 years explorers risked their lives and ships exploring the island and ice filled waters between Canada and the North Pole. Early explorers like Sir Martin Frobisher, Henry Hudson, John Cabot and his son Sebastian spent years trying to find this elusive route as did those who followed them. It wasn't until 1906 that the Norwegian explorer Ronald Amundsen managed to sail, in a fishing boat, across the Arctic Ocean between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Since then military and scientific expeditions have sailed the Northwest Passage, but it has never proved to be a viable commercial route.

For centuries, the narrow isthmus of Central America which connects the continents of North and South America provided one of the shortest routes from Europe to China. But this involved unloading cargo on one coast of Panama and transporting it, originally by mule train and later in the nineteenth century by railroad trains, to the other coast where it was loaded on another boat and continued its journey. In 1914 the Panama Canal across the Isthmus was completed and this allowed ships to pass directly from Atlantic to Pacific or vice versa and carry their cargoes to their destination without unloading and reloading enroute.

However, today, one of the side effects of global warming is the reducing of the ice in the Arctic Ocean and offering the possibility of low cost transit of merchant ships through the Arctic Ocean. Such a route would greatly reduce the time and energy needed to sail ships from Europe to the Orient or even from the east coast of North America to Asia (or the west coast of North America to Europe). Since both time and fuel cost money, the financial savings could be enormous.

As yet there is still too much ice for merchant ships to safely and economically navigate the Northwest Passage. Investors and commercial interests are beginning to look at the possibilities that the opening of the Northwest Passage may offer in terms of investment possibilities. However, as yet private investors and corporations, both of which have to use their own funds for investment purposes, have not been rushing to invest in shipping via the Northwest Passage. It is still too early and the financial risks too great. But risk and lack clear indications as to how the future will unfold has not stopped governments from investing. Of course, the politicians use money extracted from taxpayers so they are not as concerned about losing it – after all they can always hit the taxpayers up for more in the future.

Right now the focus is on the little northern Manitoba city of Churchill which sits on Hudson's Bay. Representatives from the Russian Government have been meeting with provincial government leaders in Manitoba to discuss using Russian icebreakers to keep the waters in Hudson's Bay and the channels leading into it open so that merchant ships have clear passage from the northern Russian port of Murmansk to Churchill. This would not only reduce shipping costs to merchant ships (with Russian taxpayers footing the bill for clearing the ice – a nice little subsidy for the merchants) carrying goods from Europe to North America but also allow the ships to unload their cargoes in the center of the continent and then moving it south by train or truck to the populous midsection of Canada and the U.S.

Assuming we are moving into a new phase of the Earth's climate cycle and can expect to experience a warmer climate in the coming centuries, the Northwest Passage will become a reality and cities like Churchill will blossom into large commercial centers. However, it is still too early to know if the current melting of the Arctic ice cap is a harbinger of things to come or a simple blip in the cycle with the climate not changing that much and thereby leaving the Arctic regions covered in ice and inaccessible to commerce.

However, politicians, possibly believing their own propaganda about global warming, are moving to extend political control over the Arctic. Four nations, the United States, Canada, Russia and Denmark can all claim borders stretching to the North Pole. Canada and Russia have the strongest claims because they have the longest borders along the shores of the Arctic Ocean. But the U.S., with Alaska, and Denmark, with Greenland, also have claims. For the U.S. at the moment the objective is not so much a desire to extend its northern border to the North Pole but to keep Canada from doing so. The objective here is enforcement of America's long standing policy of open seas and, in accordance with this policy the U.S. wants the Northwest Passage waterway – if and when it becomes a waterway and is no longer a part of the polar icecap – to be international, not Canadian, waters. Canada, on the other hand is interested in both controlling its northern border for security purposes, which means it has to have jurisdiction over the Northwest Passage as it winds among the numerous islands that Canada claims, and to enforce its claims on the potential undersea mineral resources thought to lay in the Arctic Ocean under the icecap. It is for this reason that it lodges diplomatic protests whenever U.S. naval vessels enter these waters without asking permission and why it has been fighting a decades long diplomatic war with Denmark over a half mile square piece of rock in the channel between Canada's Ellesmere Island and Greenland.

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