The Northwest Passage

Genesis 8:22
“While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.”

The Northwest Passage is, in many ways, the stuff of legends. It is the idea that there could be a shipping route around the North Coast of Canada. This would provide a much quicker route, than existing routes, for ships to get, for example, from Europe to India and China. For centuries, explorers have tried to find this route. For example, during Elizabethan times, English privateer Sir Martin Frobisher undertook three voyages to try to find it.

The reason that such explorers could not sail around the north of North America is because of the ice covering most of the Arctic Ocean. However, in recent years, there have been a couple of occasions – notably in 2007 and 2008, when the passage has been open to shipping, as ice has melted. For Climate Change Alarmists, this causes mixed feelings. On the negative side, they are concerned that the Arctic Ice has melted, because of carbon dioxide, produced by human industrial activity – the so-called Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). On the positive side, they recognize that the commercial exploitation of such a route would considerably shorten many of the world’s shipping routes, and save large amounts of the fossil fuels which most concern these Alarmists.

Perhaps the desire to find this fabled route was fueled by a real history of earlier navigators actually using the route. Such a history would be difficult for Alarmists to accept, but would make sense to biblical scholars, convinced that there are natural cycles of warming and cooling, as God maintains the world in which we live.

Prayer: Thank You, Lord, for the provision that You have given us in this world. Help us to use wisely the resources, which You have put under our control. Amen.

Author: Paul F. Taylor

Ref: Roach, J. (2007), Arctic Melt Opens Northwest Passage, National Geographic, , retrieved 3/21/2017
Image: aerial photograph of NW Passage, 2016, Jeff Schmaltz for NASA, Public Domain.

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