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Bering Sea traffic raises concerns for locals As Bering Strait shipping increases as sea ice recedes, communities worry about oil spill risks, impacts on subsistence resources ALAN BAILEY Petroleum News
When in December President Obama issued an executive order establishing a Northern Bering Sea Climate Resilience Area, some Alaska lawmakers expressed vehement concerns about the potential locking up or obstruction of commercial activity across more than 100,000 square miles of ocean. But exactly what are the concerns of the Native communities that live in the impacted region and that expressed support for the president’s action?
On Feb. 6 during the annual Alaska Forum on the Environment in Anchorage, Austin Ahmasuk, marine advocate for Kawerak Inc., a tribal organization in the Bering Straits region, explained the communities’ concerns and some of the dynamics that had led to the president’s order.
“The northern Bering Sea is extremely important to our people,” Ahmasuk said. “It’s an ancestral connection to the Earth basically for us.”
Concerned about shipping As the volume of shipping in the northern Bering Straits increases, the communities in the region have become very worried about the impacts of the shipping, including the discharge of waste materials into the sea and the risk of oil spills. The people of the region have said multiple times that there must be no discharge of anything overboard from the large ships that traverse the region, Ahmasuk said. He cited the Deepwater Horizon disaster and the grounding of Shell’s drilling facility, the Kulluk, as examples situations where people had underestimated risks.
“We are simply not willing to underestimate any risk when it comes to our waters,” Ahmasuk said.
The communities, anxious to continue to practice their subsistence way of life, are planning how to protect their environment. They want to see regulations that mitigate the impact of shipping on the migratory routes for marine mammals. And, when it comes to oil spills, local people become first responders but do not have training in how to conduct a response, Ahmasuk said.
The arrival at Nome last year of the Crystal Serenity, the huge cruise ship that traversed the Northwest Passage during the open water season, brought home to Ahmasuk the changing nature of Arctic shipping. As the vessel towered over the small Arctic town, Ahmasuk was surprised that a support vessel which he had understood would accompany the cruise ship on its voyage did not in fact materialize, the plan for the cruise arrangements having apparently been changed.
Evolving concepts When Kawerak started its marine program in 2014, the people in the organization began thinking about how to address the shipping impacts, Ahmasuk said. The first idea was to propose the establishment of a marine monument in the northern Bering Sea region and the Norton Sound. However, after discussions with Native groups and environmental organizations, it became obvious that this contentious option would not be politically feasible, he said.
Kawerak also backed off the idea of establishing a mechanism for co-management of the region with federal agencies - the agencies would be unlikely to share power in this way, Ahmasuk said. Another possibility would be to make an aboriginal claim on the outer continental shelf. Apparently there was a 1983 lawsuit in which two tribes had sued the federal government over oil and gas leasing in Norton Sound and the northern Bering Sea. Although the tribes had not prevailed in their arguments, the lawsuit had left an unresolved issue over an aboriginal claim in the offshore, Ahmasuk said. However, resolution of that issue is unlikely for some time to come, he said.
In October 2015 Kawerak and its partner organizations realized that they could ask President Obama for an executive order for the northern Bering Sea. And in June 2016 the Kawerak board passed a resolution formally asking the president for some form of executive action for the region. The result was the president’s executive order establishing the Northern Bering Sea Climate Resilience Area, Ahmasuk said. Among other things, the order enables indigenous involvement in an advisory capacity in the management of the northern Bering Sea region, he commented.
He said that following the presidential election the communities are now trying hard to convince the state and federal people, the federal administration, of the importance of the northern Bering Sea order.
“Things lately have gotten a little more complicated and we are not totally certain if this executive order is going to stay,” Ahmasuk said.
Modeling shipping movements Tahzay Jones from the U.S. National Park Service talked to the Forum on the Environment about work that the Park Service is carrying out to model shipping patterns in the Bering Sea and Strait, and hence to assess the possible future impact of shipping on the region. The idea is to use historic shipping data and forecasted shipping trends to model potential future shipping routes and intensity, and to assess resulting environmental impacts and oil spill risks.
The NPS researchers have obtained shipping movement data from 2010 to 2013 from the Automatic Identification System, or AIS, a system used to track vessel movements for traffic collision avoidance and other purposes. By analyzing the types of vessel traversing the Bering Sea and Strait, and the itineraries of these vessels, it became possible to identify just under 4,000 distinct itineraries for transiting the region, Jones said. These results provided input to a computer model for forecasting future shipping movements.
The researchers validated the model by using it to generate simulated vessel counts through various marine passages in the region and then verifying that these counts matched observed data. In addition, a visual display of the model output matched what had been observed in practice, Jones said. The majority of vessels moved up the Russian coast and around the western side of Saint Lawrence Island in conjunction with a transit of the Bering Strait. A few vessels moved up and down the west coast of Alaska.
The next step was to model potential vessel movements in the region in 2025. To do this, the researchers assumed that, on the basis of transportation economics, 2 to 8 percent of vessels that would otherwise have used the Suez or Panama canals instead would use an Arctic route through the Bering Strait. The model indicated anywhere from 115 to 275 vessels transiting the Bering Seas region, a major increase in traffic density.
The researchers are now assessing potential impact between that future shipping and wildlife and subsistence hunting. Future plans for the research include the modeling of vessels noise, drift modeling to assess where a vessel might hit land following a loss of power and, hence, an assessment of which areas might be most at risk from an oil spill.
Oil contamination And oil spills in the region are not a theoretical concept. Gay Sheffield, a marine mammal biologist from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, talked to the forum about some shipping accidents that had occurred in the region and, in particular, an oiled wildlife issue that emerged between 2012 and 2014. During that period there were several instances of harvested seals and seabirds being oil fouled. Worryingly, the oil had entered some of the animals’ metabolisms, thus posing health concerns for the subsistence harvest. The oil was determined to be weathered fuel oil of mixed source, some of which had been onshore and some of which may have been in the water. Despite extensive searches no source for the oil contamination could be found on the U.S. side of the border with Russia.
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