Page 194 - NS-2 Textbook

MARITIME GEOGRAPHY 189

Arctic
+
88ring
Ocean
Sea

Ocean
Ocean

140· o·
Arctic Ocean, showing the Arctic seas.

TIle 800-mile trans-Alaska pipeline was completed in Getting oil out of the Arctic is not very easy. The
1977 at a cost of $8 billion. More than a million barrels of frigid cold, prolonged gale-force winds, and icing and
oil now flow south daily from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez freezing of lubricants and equipment make oil drilling
(Val-dez'), Alaska, where tankers take it on board for de- extremely expensive and hazardous. The Arctic Ocean it-
livery to West Coast refineries. self is almost always covered with constantly moving ice
In March 1989 the largest oil tanker spill in u.s. his- floes. Engineers have created artificial islands built from
tory occurred when one of these tankers, the 987-foot seabed sand and gravel dredged up during the brief
Exxon Valdez, carrying 1,260,000 barrels of crude oil taken summer melt, sometimes poured through holes cut in
on at Valdez, ran aground on a reef in the Gulf of Alaska the 7-foot-thick ice. Much of the year the crude oil must
some 25 miles south of that port. Ultimately the resulting be heated in order to flow satisfactorily through the
oil slick from 260,000 barrels lost in the mishap spread pipelines and drilling rigs, because of the extreme cold.
some 470 miles into the gulf. Many formerly clean But the demand for oil in the world is so great that no ef-
Alaskan beaches and tidal basins were covered with fort is spared to solve the problems.
inches of black sludge. A two-year multimillion-dollar Fishing. Only in the Barents and Norwegian Seas
effort was mounted to try to clean up the worst of the can commercial fishing take place. There, huge catches
spill, but the accident nevertheless killed some 10 percent of cod, haddock, redfish, and halibut are made annually
of the area's bird population, along with thousands of for the fresh-fish markets in Europe and the former
sea otters and seals. The cause of the accident was later Soviet states. Annual catches average over 2 million
determined to be incompetent navigation by the tanker's tons. There is evidence of overfishing in these Arctic
captain and crew. seas, so quotas have been set by the fishing nations.
Large oil deposits have also been fOlmd in the conti- Some whaling is done in the area by a small Icelandic
nental shelf off the Beaufort (Bo'-furt) Sea coast of whaling fleet.
Canada, some 400 miles east of Prudhoe Bay. Large nat- Ports and Naval Bases. Only Murmansk, Russia, and
ural gas deposits are now being tapped in the area of Narvik, NOlway, are important ports in the Arctic. The
Melville Island in the Queen Elizabeth Islands. former we have already identified as a naval base for the