It runs from Baffin Bay – where fractured flotillas are constantly calved from western Greenland’s giant glaciers – down along their route to Newfoundland. I sailed down part of it three years ago and it is a dramatically beautiful, if dangerous, place.
Over the past 200 years, some 560 collisions have been recorded there between ships and bergs (though the Titanic went down further south). In 1982 a storm, raising waves up to 65 feet high , sank a giant drilling ship, the Ocean Ranger, killing 84 people.
So it’s not the sort of spot, you would think, to go looking for oil following BP’s disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
Think again. This month, a British company started on the first of four planned exploration wells in these wild waters. Both the United States and Canada have temporarily stopped issuing permits for drilling in the Arctic, but Greenland is allowing the Edinburgh-based Cairn Energy to forge ahead.
It is just the latest example of how our apparently unquenchable thirst for fuel is driving us into ever more difficult and dangerous territory, risking even more damaging spills than the one that has been gushing into the Gulf. As hopes rise that, after three months, BP has finally succeeded in sealing its well, a mile beneath the waves, experts say that more blowouts, even harder to control, are bound to follow.
To fix most of the problems with the earliest offshore wells, you would probably have needed nothing more sophisticated than a snorkel – even the first platform to be established out of sight of land, off the coast of Louisiana in 1847, stood in just 16ft of water.
But the easy stuff has now been found, and the industry is being forced to explore ever-further frontiers. In 2002, less than one barrel of oil in 30 came from more than 1,000ft down; by 2012, it will be one in 10. Already, such deep-sea sources account for nearly three quarters of the Gulf of Mexico’s oil.
BP’s ill-fated well was not the deepest in the Gulf: others reach down twice as far, to more than 10,000ft. Giant oil reservoirs have been found off Brazil under two and a half miles of shifting salt and sand and one and a half miles of water; more lie in deep water off west Africa. And a fifth of the remaining oil in British waters is as far down as in the Gulf, but under more treacherous seas.
As Dr Peter Linke, of Germany’s Leibnitz Institute of Marine Sciences, points out, “the risk multiplies exponentially in deep water”. Prof Robert Bea, of the University of California, adds: “We are taking risks we do not understand.”
BP found that techniques for stopping the flow that had worked in shallow waters failed at Deepwater Horizon’s depth, where temperatures are close to freezing and the pressure is 152 times greater than at the surface – enough to crush most machinery. Fixing a leak twice as far down would be harder still, if not impossible.
And yet the Gulf has warm seas, a relatively benign climate, and is an epicentre of the offshore oil industry, with state-of-the-art equipment and experienced contractors on the spot. The Arctic is a very different kettle of oily fish.
Obviously, it is remote. The nearest caches of spill-containing booms are thousands of miles away, and with no big ports or airfields, it would be very hard to rush them, or other equipment, to the site of a blowout. The extreme conditions make an accident both more likely and much harder to address, even in relatively shallow waters like those where Cairn is operating.
To make matters worse, there’s no proven technology for cleaning oil in icy water, still less for quenching a volcano of the stuff under seas that freeze for half of the year: one that erupted in the autumn could gush uncontrolled for six months, with a relief well having to wait until the ice thawed. And the natural micro-organisms that help degrade oil in warmer waters can’t do the job in colder seas.
“If you put a million barrels of oil in the Arctic Ocean, it would be there for decades,” says Rick Steiner, an Alaskan marine scientist who was involved in tackling the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill.
No wonder the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last year urged a halt to drilling in the Arctic, warning that the risks had been “greatly understated”.
But it is not likely to prevail for long: the area is thought to contain about 13 per cent of the world’s remaining oil, and companies such as Shell, Exxon, Chevron and, yes, BP are piling in. Iceberg Alley, and the rest of the frozen ocean, are likely to become much too crowded for the world’s comfort.