An Ice-Free Passage

Exp

lorers have been searching for the Northwest Passage—the legendary sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific—since the 16th century, but their way has always been blocked by ice. Global warming is changing that. The deterioration of the Arctic ice pack, which had been shrinking at the rate of 10% per year, is starting to accelerate. Last year’s ice covered the smallest area ever recorded, and scientists now estimate that the passage could be ice-free—for at least part of the year—by 2050, if not sooner.

The great melt may not bode well for polar bears or Inuits, but it could be a boon for shipping and transportation entrepreneurs, and none has stepped into the icy breach with more foresight than Pat Broe, a Denver-based real-estate and railroad magnate. The press-shy Broe, 58, who describes himself as a junk dealer ("I buy troubled stuff and turn it around," he says), has a history of contrarian investments. When he purchased 807 miles of nationally owned railway stock from the Canadian government for $11 million in 1997, he also picked up, for the token sum of roughly $8, the port of Churchill, Manitoba.

A Hudson bay trading post built in 1689 put Churchill on the map, but today polar bears outnumber humans and the town's main businesses are tourism and hunting. It is the nearest port to the cereal fields of central Canada, however, and when the ice melts, it could find itself at the nexus of the first new trade route since the construction of the Panama and Suez canals.

What Churchill offers is a sea-and-land short cut for ships carrying goods along a north-south axis between Europe and the Americas. Cargo from, say, Murmansk, Russia, can be unloaded at the port and carried by rail to Canada, midwestern U.S. states or even Mexico. The port is already ice-free five months of the year, and with some judicious ice- breaking that season could be extended by a full 30 days on either end. Broe, who happens to own North America's largest privately held railway, profits from both legs of the journey. "No one has ever paid attention to this port," says Broe. Global warming will make them wish they had.—