Global warming opens up Arctic for undersea cable

The proposed system would nearly cut in half the time it takes to send messages from the United Kingdom to Asia, said Walt Ebell, CEO of Kodiak-Kenai Cable Co. The route is the shortest underwater path between Tokyo and London.

The quicker transmission time is important in the financial world where milliseconds can count in executing profitable trades and transactions. “Speed is the crux,” Ebell said. “You're cutting the delay from 140 milliseconds to 88 milliseconds.” The project, while still facing many significant obstacles, also serves as an example of how warming has altered the Arctic landscape in profound ways.

The loss of summer sea ice prompted the U.S. to list polar bears as a threatened species in May 2008. Walrus in two of the last three years gathered by the thousands on Alaska's northwest shore rather than ride pack ice to unproductive waters beyond the outer continental shelf.

Summer sea ice melted to its lowest recorded level ever in late 2007, and most climate modelers predict a continued downward spiral. The result is a path through the Northwest Passage, the Arctic route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific that has fascinated explorers for centuries.

“That opens up the construction window to actually do something like this without the need of heavy icebreakers,” Ebell said. “On the other side, you've got the market part of it and the increasing demand we're seeing for lower and lower latencies, or transmission times.”

But the project, called ArcticLink, is not without hurdles -- namely the estimated construction price of US$1.2 billion, said Alan Mauldin, research director at TeleGeography Research, a Washington, D.C.-based telecommunications market research company.

“That's not a cheap project,” he said by phone from the Slovak Republic.

By comparison, a line beginning service next month between Japan and the U.S. West Coast was built for US$300 million, he said.

The leaders of the project will need to persuade telecommunications companies to buy a piece of the capacity created by the cable. Telecom companies will make that decision largely based on demand from financial companies.

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