‘The damn thing melted': climate change sparks scramble for the Arctic

On Monday, a Danish container ship - the Venta Maersk - set off from Busan in South Korea packed with Russian fish and Korean electronics.

A visitor walks past an inflatable model of a TOR-M2DT
Arctic short-range air defence missile system at the
Army 2018 expo in Kubinka, Russia.

On September 22 it will dock at Bremerhaven in Germany.

The bit in between could change the world.

Thanks to climate change, the Venta was able to take a short cut over the top of the globe – the first container ship to do so – through the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska, above the desolate Siberian coast, past worried polar bears, melting permafrost and huge new Chinese-funded gas fields, through Arctic waters that Russia wants to control, and down past Norway, where this week a group of academics, analysts and policymakers were fretting over what it all means.

Read the story from The Age  by Nick Miller - “‘The damn thing melted': climate change sparks scramble for the Arctic.”