ANCHORAGE, Alaska --- Global warming has melted so much Arctic ice that a telecommunication group is moving forward with a project that was unthinkable just a few years ago: laying underwater fiber optic cable between Tokyo and London by way of the Northwest Passage.
The proposed system would nearly cut in half the time it takes to send messages from the United Kingdom to Asia, said Walt Ebell, the CEO of Kodiak-Kenai Cable Co. The route is the shortest underwater path between Tokyo and London.
The quicker transmission time is important in the financial world where milliseconds can count in executing profitable trades and transactions.
The project, while still facing many significant obstacles, also serves as an example of how warming has altered the Arctic landscape in profound ways.
Summer sea ice melted to its lowest recorded level ever in late 2007, and most climate modelers predict a continued downward spiral.
The result is a path through the Northwest Passage, the Arctic route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific that has fascinated explorers for centuries.
"That opens up the construction window to actually do something like this without the need of heavy icebreakers," Ebell said.
But the project, called ArcticLink, is not without hurdles -- namely the estimated construction price of $1.2 billion, said Alan Mauldin, the research director at TeleGeography Research, a Washington, D.C.-based telecommunications market research company.
By comparison, a line beginning service next month between Japan and the U.S. West Coast was built for $300 million, he said.
The leaders of the project will need to persuade telecommunications companies to buy a piece of the capacity created by the cable. Telecom companies will make that decision largely based on demand from financial companies.
The cable will cut a 10,000-mile path across half the world: It would be laid in deep water from Japan to the Aleutian Islands, then traverse north through the relatively shallow waters of the Bering Sea.
The line would need a regeneration station -- essentially a booster of the signal to compensate for the long distance -- on the northern coast of Alaska, probably at Prudhoe Bay.
From there, it would wend its way through the Northwest Passage, then dip around the southern tip of Greenland and across the North Atlantic to the United Kingdom.
Branches off the line would provide access to the East Coast of the U.S., ensuring quicker transmission times between Tokyo and New York, Ebell said.
"It will provide the domestic market an alternative route not only to Europe -- there's lots of cable across the Atlantic -- but it will provide the East Coast with an alternative, faster route to Asia as well," he said.
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