The Northwest Passage

For three centuries European navigators died looking for it, and when it was finally sailed, it turned out to be almost useless. The Northwest Passage threads through the maze of islands in the Canadian Arctic, linking the Atlantic and the Pacific across the top of North America. Warming has thinned its ice, and a few dozen vessels now complete it in a good year, most of them yachts and expedition cruise ships, with a handful of cargo ships supplying Arctic communities and mines. It also carries a quiet dispute between close allies: Canada says these are its internal waters, and the United States says they form an international strait.

There is no single passage but a set of routes, at least seven, running about 2,800 to 3,400 nautical miles between Baffin Bay and the Bering Strait. Most start through Lancaster Sound and Barrow Strait, past the hamlet of Resolute. The deep northern option continues west through M'Clure Strait, often choked by thick multiyear ice blown in from the Arctic Ocean. The southern routes turn down Peel Sound and Franklin Strait toward the Inuit communities of Gjoa Haven and Cambridge Bay, then run along the coast through Amundsen Gulf to the Beaufort Sea. Shallows, poor charts, fog, and moving ice limit the size of ships, and the short season usually runs from August into October.

John Franklin's 1845 expedition vanished here with 129 men, its ships found only in 2014 and 2016. Roald Amundsen made the first transit, aboard the Gjøa, from 1903 to 1906. The voyages of the U.S. tanker Manhattan in 1969 and the Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Sea in 1985 prompted Canada to draw straight baselines around the archipelago, effective in 1986, enclosing the passage as historic internal waters. The United States has never accepted that claim and treats the passage as a strait open to transit passage. A 1988 agreement, under which Washington notifies Ottawa of icebreaker voyages, set the dispute aside without settling it. Traffic remains small, with record complete transits of 41 in 2023 and 38 in 2024, by Robert Headland's count. Amid U.S. pressure on allies over Arctic security in 2025 and 2026, neither government changed its position.

• Hans Island
  The Arctic rock that Canada and Denmark contested with flags and liquor, then split in 2022 another Canadian Arctic dispute
• The Northern Sea Route
  Russia's Arctic shortcut between Europe and East Asia, open for a few months a year behind nuclear icebreakers Arctic counterpart
• Canada
  The world's second-largest country, from Atlantic to Pacific to Arctic claimed as internal waters by
• Arctic Ocean
  The smallest and shallowest ocean, capped by sea ice crosses
• Greenland
  The world's largest island, a vast ice-sheet realm in the Arctic eastern approaches pass
• The Arctic
  The circumpolar north, warming four times faster than the world located in
• United States
  A continental superpower of fifty states and astonishing variety regarded as an international strait by
• The Bering Strait
  The 82-kilometer gap between Russia and Alaska, where Asia meets America and today faces tomorrow western exit