MURMANSK, RUSSIA—An Arctic winter storm is a vision of terror for seamen: hurricane force winds battering heaving decks encased in thick ice, an ordeal that can drag on for days cloaked in darkness.

So far north, rescue teams are usually a very distant hope.

The sinking of a Russian oil rig Sunday in a howling gale off the coast of Sakhalin, on Russia’s Far East coast, left 53 crew members confirmed dead or lost at sea, and added a new chapter to the harrowing lore of Arctic navigation.

Yet as the Arctic climate warms, and vast polar ice sheets melt, international shipping companies are eagerly eyeing two routes across the top of the world — one along Russia’s northern coast, the other through waters claimed by Canada.

Russia has a decades-long lead in controlling its Arctic coast. If Canada doesn’t catch up in claiming territory, the country may not have the power to decide who navigates the Northwest Passage through a sweeping archipelago of more than 19,000 Canadian islands.

Losing control over access to the waterway could cost Canada any chance of profiting from escort fees and other tolls if climate change permanently opens the meandering route through often tight channels.

Northerners say Arctic storms, which can blow for weeks, have been getting stronger and more frequent in recent years, and climate experts warn that is likely to become a long-term trend if average temperatures continue to climb.

That jacks up the stakes in the competition to draw international shipping into the Arctic and away from the old warm water shortcuts between Europe and Asia — the Panama and Suez canals.

By far, the most developed Arctic passage is Russia’s Northern Sea Route, which cuts almost a third off the journey between East Asia and Europe through the Suez Canal, a transit that has marked the global economy’s pulse for decades.

The Suez is a growing headache for shippers, with near constant risks of political trouble and unrest, pirates and other hazards that add steep insurance costs to the long list of fees that Egypt and various agents charge.

More than 17,000 vessels paid Egypt’s government a total of $4.7 billion last year for the privilege of avoiding the longer haul around the southern tip of Africa.

Russia is eagerly rebuilding its Northern Sea Route to take as much as it can of that action.

Ships carried a record 757,400 tonnes of freight through the route this year, mostly natural gas, iron ore and fish products, according to Russia’s transport ministry.

Foreign vessels accounted for 88.7 per cent of that total through the passage, which was open more than 141 days, longer than last year by a whole month and setting a record for an Arctic shipping season.

Russia’s great ambitions for its Arctic sea lane include a federal agency to collect the transit fees, said Anton Vasiliev, Russia’s ambassador at large for Arctic issues.

By the end of the decade, Russia expects up to 59 million tonnes of cargo to pass through the route, with another 30 per cent surge by 2030, Vasiliev said.

Increasingly, that cargo will include crude oil carried in supertankers, which environmental activists fear will be too vulnerable to breaking up in the Arctic’s crushing ice and storms.

Murmansk, the largest city anywhere in the Arctic, celebrates its 100th anniversary next year and the Kremlin is planning to make it the hub of a re-energized transportation network.

Murmansk alone expects to receive $10 billion in public and private investment by 2019 for improvements to railways, a renovated airport, new port facilities for cargo and tourist cruise ships, oil and natural gas facilities, and other projects.

“I can tell you for sure that with Putin and (President) Dmitry Medvedev, this is not an issue of ‘whether we should develop the north,’” said Evgeniy Nikora, speaker of the Murmansk region’s legislature and a Putin ally.

“Definitely, all of the necessary decisions have been taken at the federal level for development of the Arctic in Russia. Now, we can instead talk about the competition between Russia’s Arctic regions, as to which can be more attractive to investment.”

Having something to contribute to the success of the Northern Sea Route is one of the best ways to attract the Kremlin’s attention and financial backing.

Sometimes called the Northeast Passage, the route runs through Russia’s coastal territory and has been under Moscow’s undisputed control since the Soviets opened it to commercial shipping in the early 1930s.

Canada lays claim to a possible rival, the legendary Northwest Passage, which only saw its first foreign commercial ship transit in the fall of 2008, a cargo vessel that sailed from Montreal with supplies for four hamlets in Nunavut.

Powerful maritime nations, including the U.S. and members of the European Union, consider the Northwest Passage an international strait open to any who want to risk navigating the ice and narrow channels. But Canada wants to control access.

That’s a costly proposition because, unlike Russia, Canada doesn’t have anything close to the Arctic infrastructure that’s needed, such as ports, 24-hour rescue stations and an ice-class fleet required to patrol the passage.

Canada’s Arctic weakness was obvious to former French prime minister Michel Rocard when he took a six-day Arctic trip on the Coast Guard icebreaker CCGS Amundsen in August.

Rocard, France’s ambassador to international negotiations on the Arctic and the Antarctic, called Canada “too small to finance itself the infrastructure” needed to make the Northwest Passage a viable shipping lane.

“I have the impression that Canada has given up on the competition to attract a large part of the traffic in 25 or 30 years,” Rocard said after his ride on the Amundsen.

In 2006, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government didn’t sound very enthusiastic about the potential for the Northwest Passage when Ottawa declared its northern strategy.

“Although the Northwest Passage is not expected to become a safe or reliable transportation route in the near future, reduced ice coverage and longer periods of navigability may result in an increased number of ships undertaking destination travel for tourism, natural resource exploration or development,” the government said.

By contrast, Putin has staked nothing less than his country’s economic future on the Arctic, and rebuilding the Northern Sea Route is a pillar of his national security strategy.

“We are planning to turn it into a key commercial route of global importance,” Putin told an international forum on the Arctic in the Russian city of Arkhangelsk in September.

“I’d like to emphasize that we see its future as an international transport artery capable of competing with traditional sea routes in cost of services, safety and quality,” he added.

Russia’s Security Council has ordered a new network of 10 emergency response and rescue centres spread across to cover some 5,500 kilometres of the route.

More than $294 million will be spent to build facilities and renovate old ones at the centres, said Emergencies Minister Sergei Shoigu.

The new Arctic security force will include 590 ground and sea-based units and 384 aviation units, according to Shoigu, who did not disclose the number of personnel that would be deployed.

Some in the West fear this as a disguised and destabilizing military buildup. But the Russians insist the units will only guard against terrorists, smugglers and illegal fishers, and other interlopers, as well as rescue welcome seafarers in trouble.

They will also be deployed to man-made disasters, including any in the growing number of oil and natural gas drilling rigs anchoring off Russia’s northern coast.

“Even with very sober eyes, we don’t see any militarization of the Arctic, and we don’t see ourselves as having any part in the militarization of the Arctic. It’s crazy,” Vasiliev said.

It’s only prudent for any Arctic nation to improve security in the Far North because climate change, and along with it rapidly melting ice, are creating openings for intruders and other dangers, he added.

“Anyone could come in and violate the border regime, bring this narco-traffic, illegal immigration and organized crime — whatever you can imagine — all these bad things,” Vasiliev said.

“Don’t we need more armed forces to protect ourselves from that? It’s the same for Canada. Oil rigs in the Arctic Ocean are a potential target for terrorists and need to be protected.”

But Putin’s fresh show of force includes a multi-billion program to build a new generation of nuclear submarines to patrol the Northern Sea Route, he announced last month.

Subs armed with nuclear warheads sound like dangerous overkill, even to critics of Putin inside Russia, where suspicions are running high that the Russian leader cynically stirs up tensions with the West to undermine political opposition at home.

After announcing an order last month for five new Yasen class nuclear subs, at an estimated cost of $1.3 billion each, Putin assured the Russian legislature the Kremlin intends to show some nuclear muscle on the Northern Sea Route.

“We will also beef up our military bases there, and we will certainly increase national security in the north,” he said in a reply to a Member of Parliament’s question.

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The Kremlin also plans to add three nuclear-powered icebreakers, designed to operate in rivers as well as the ocean, and six diesel-electric icebreakers to its fleet before 2020.

Ottawa still hasn’t set a start date for construction of a new Polar class icebreaker promised in 2008.

The U.S. isn’t doing much to challenge Russia’s dominance of commercial shipping in the Arctic.

A huge September storm stopped a barge from delivering 5.7 million litres of winter fuel to Nome, on Alaska’s west coast, and then sea ice closed the only delivery route.

The approach was too shallow for the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Healy to help. Both American heavy icebreakers were being repaired, so the small native community called in the Russians.

They dispatched the double-hulled, ice-class tanker Renda from the eastern city of Vladivostok to bunker fuel in Incheon, South Korea, and then haul it to Nome by year’s end.

Russia is also planning a string of seven floating nuclear reactors to power and heat Arctic mines, remote towns and oil and natural gas facilities.

Each reactor will cost as much as $600 million. Rosenergoatom, the state-run firm that built the first one, says it will test whether the plan makes economic sense.

The company hopes it can sell the floating reactors to other countries, and with steady production, bring down the cost.

The first floating reactor, called the Academician Lomonosov, was launched last year from the Baltic Shipyard in St. Petersburg, only to be held hostage in a dispute between investors.

If it ever reaches Arctic waters, the double-hulled steel vessel, 140 metres long by 30 metres wide, will have two on-board nuclear reactors pumping out 70 megawatts of electricity through undersea power cables to power stations, said Vladislav Sozonyuk, the company’s head of analytics.

That’s enough to power a city of 100,000 people.

“The design is supposed to withstand a strike by an aircraft, and other artificial impacts,” Sozonyuk said.

Russian nuclear experts at Bellona, an environmental group based in Norway, say the floating reactors are an unnecessary, and risky, attempt by Russia’s nuclear industry to save itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

First, it floated the idea of removing missile tubes from discarded nuclear submarines, transforming them into undersea cargo ships able to navigate beneath thick Arctic ice.

That was abandoned as too costly, so planners turned their sites on the lucrative oil and natural gas business, according to Bellona’s research.

Now the plan is to build drilling complexes on the seabed, with floating reactors to supplying the power and heat required to keep the hydrocarbons flowing, said Andrey Zolotkov, chairman of Bellona’s Murmansk branch.

It sounds like science fiction, but “nothing is strange in Russia,” Zolotkov said, with a weary shrug.

“I don’t think we will ever be able to say that nuclear power facilities are absolutely safe,” Zolotkov said. “And a floating power plant, in my view, is even more hazardous than an icebreaker.”

To some, it’s just another step in a complex and dangerous social and economic experiment started in the 1930s, one that has yet to prove that developing the Arctic is cost-effective and safe for a fragile environment.

They back up their argument with numbers on the steady exodus of people from Russia’s Arctic.

In the two decades since the Soviet Union broke up, the population has fallen by some 35 per cent in Murmansk region alone, where a little more than 800,000 people now live.

Even rich incentives held over from the Soviet days haven’t stopped the exodus as state-run factories close because they can’t compete in a capitalist economy.

Russian law mandates subsidies for housing in the Far North, along with higher wages, better pensions and 24 extra days of vacation.

Workers still on the state payroll, who account for roughly half the workforce in Murmansk, get an added bonus: a free ticket out, once every two years, including a 30-kilogram baggage allowance.

Nikora, the regional legislature’s speaker, conceded that improving labour efficiency and attracting young people to the Arctic are two of his government’s biggest challenges.

But private businessman Alexander Lebedev complains he can’t get anywhere with officials as he lobbies for reforms that he says would cut his labour costs and improve profits.

Lebedev, who is trying to sell green-energy technology in a market dominated by state-owned oil and natural gas giants, has lost half his staff in recent years, but was only able to cut his payroll by 20 per cent.

He had to pay his remaining workers more, and boost their benefits, to keep them. Meanwhile, his electricity bills shot up by 50 per cent this year.

Lebedev was born in the Arctic, and so were his parents. His grandparents settled in the Arctic in 1924. Now he’s struggling to keep their legacy alive.

“We realize we have only one option in the Arctic — to fight for it,” he told the Star, sounding unsure how it would all work it out.

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