Record Short Ice Road Season Stunts Canadian Mining Efforts

[hatrack]

A winter highway winding north along frozen lakes and across rock and frozen tundra for 568 kilometres northeast from Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories is a living metaphor for where Canada's North may be heading. Is it onward to new prosperity and growth fuelled by diamonds and new oil and natural gas discoveries? Or is it into a host of problems caused by global warming?

The winter road is the lifeline to a string of diamond mines that have revitalized the mining sector in what the Fraser Institute has described as the richest jurisdiction in all Canada in terms of mineral wealth. Every winter since 1982, work crews prepare and groom the Tibbitt to Contwoyto road as the lakes freeze in the grip of temperatures dropping to minus 60C. (The road starts at Tibbitt, 70 kilometres east of Yellowknife, and ends north of the Arctic Circle at Ulu, in Nunavut, 150 kilometres north of Contwoyto Lake.) Surface transport in summer across the surface of thawed permafrost is impossible. So, in the brief window averaging 68 days between late December and early April, as many as 9,000 truckloads of heavy mining and construction equipment and enough fuel and other supplies to last for a whole year are hauled north across the frozen landscape.

But this past winter, warmer than usual temperatures kept the ice on frozen lakes too thin to support full loads. As well, the ice highway opened late and melted early, cutting the number of truck loads to about 7,000, far from optimistic hopes for future 12,000-load seasons. "There's thousands of tonnes of stuff stockpiled around Yellowknife," says Mike Olson, head of sales for First Air's Western region. "Tonnes of steel, thousands of bags of cement, dry goods, fuel — millions and millions of gallons of fuel — a massive part of a giant power shovel. It's all still sitting here."

EDIT

Problem is, there's no guarantee next winter will be any colder. The trend toward shorter seasons on northern ice highways and ice river crossings has become pronounced in the past three years. The reality of global warming will prompt a harder look at ambitious projects such as the proposed $700 million, 210-kilometre, all-weather highway linking the Tibbitt-to-Contwoyto winter road with a proposed Arctic Ocean seaport on Bathurst Inlet. Bathurst Inlet is a jagged finger stabbing south from Coronation Gulf of on the central Arctic Ocean coast. The hamlet of Bathurst Inlet is one of the most isolated spots in Canada, but, theoretically at least, its 18 Inuit inhabitants would be able to drive all the way to Toronto if the road were ever built.

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http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1147470610708&call_pageid=968332188774&col=968350116467

[benburch]

1. Sounds like somebody ought to revive the "heavy lift airship" idea.

Nothing except an airship can move loads like that to places that have no paved runways.