IMO adopts US recommended Bering Sea route

Alan Bailey

Petroleum News

The International Maritime Organization has adopted a two-way route proposed by the United States for vessel traffic passing through the Bering Strait and the Bering Sea, the Pew Charitable Trust has announced. The idea is to ensure that vessels avoid some areas of particular environmental sensitivity, while also reducing the risks of vessels running aground, colliding with each other, or interfering with subsistence hunting.

“These first-ever vessel routing measures - areas to be avoided and a two-way route - through the Bering Sea and the Bering Strait are a significant step toward safer shipping in the Arctic,” said Eleanor Huffines, senior officer with Pew’s U.S. Arctic program. “Large vessels will now have lanes charted to modern standards and areas to be avoided that can keep them from navigating too close to ecologically sensitive underwater habitat.”

The U.S. Coast Guard proposed new Bering Sea shipping routes in March 2017, in particular to keep vessels away from areas where shallow water and inaccurate charts pose vessel grounding risks, and where there is particular environmental sensitivity. The primary two-way route runs north-south through the Bering Strait to Unimak Channel, an opening through the Aleutians into the north Pacific. The route passes east of St. Lawrence Island. Another route component branches to the southwest, from the Bering Strait - this branch passes between St. Lawrence Island and the Russian mainland.

In an analysis of marine accidents in the Bering Sea region the Coast Guard found that the most common type of accident was vessel grounding, with vessel loss of control also appearing high on the list of accident causes.

- ALAN BAILEY