Northwest Passage Open: Natural Hazards

For over 500 years, Arctic explorers have sought a passage between the North Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Such a passage, often called the Northwest Passage, would connect Europe to Asia via shorter routes than the long voyage south around Africa. In 1497, English King Henry VII sent Italian explorer John Cabot to look for this hypothetical route and expeditions from some of the most famous explorers in the centuries that followed--Sir Francis Drake and Captain James Cook among them--met with failure. The combined efforts of a number of explorers eventually uncovered a winding path from the Atlantic to the Arctic and Pacific Oceans through the ice-bound islands of northern Canada. Even in modern times, navigating from the Atlantic to the Pacific through Canada's Arctic islands has been difficult. The summer of 2007, however, melted enough sea ice in Canada's far north to open up this long-sought passage.