NOME, ALASKA — Most days in Nome, you're not likely to run into anybody you didn't see at the Breakers Bar on Friday night. More than 500 roadless miles from Anchorage, rugged tundra and frigid Bering Sea waters have a way of discouraging visitors.
So it was a big deal when the World, a 644-foot residential cruise ship with condos costing several million dollars apiece, dropped anchor during the summer for a two-day look-see.
"We never had a ship anywhere near this size before," Chamber of Commerce director Mitch Erickson said. "My guess is they've probably been everywhere else in the world, and now they're going to the places most people haven't seen yet."
That's about to change.
The record shrinking of the polar ice cap is turning the forbidding waters at the top of the world into important new shipping routes.
Four other cruise ships also docked in Nome recently. The Coast Guard deployed its first small Arctic patrol vessels last year. Fleets of research vessels steamed north all summer, while ships surveying the vast oil and gas deposits under the Arctic seabed have talked of using Nome as a base.
In fact, this town of about 9,300 on the edge of the Bering Strait sees itself as the gateway to a newly accessible maritime frontier. Nome's ship traffic is eight times what it was in 1990, and the town recently spent close to $90 million renovating its port to accommodate bigger ships.
To the north, Kotzebue would like to build its own deep-water port a few miles outside town. And Barrow, a remote Eskimo whaling village that sits at the very top of the continent, for the last few summers has had cruise ships full of German tourists and Coast Guard patrol boats docking near its rudimentary landing facility.
"We can no longer assume," Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell said at a congressional hearing, "that the Arctic is an impenetrable barrier."
The coming shipping boom has intensified concerns about how to regulate maritime operations and protect one of the most fragile and least-understood environments on Earth.
Binding international rules on what kind of vessels can operate in the Arctic do not exist. Nor do uniform regulations for routine waste discharges from ships, or reliable protocols for cleaning up spills under extreme ice conditions.
Detailed terrain maps that meet international standards exist for only about 9% of the Arctic floor, and there are no reliable high-frequency communications systems.
