Arctic Shipping Routes Under Retreating Sea Ice
AIS vessel tracks and sea ice extent in the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans.
Summary. As Arctic sea ice retreats, previously ice-locked shipping lanes become viable for longer stretches of the year. This project joins AIS (Automatic Identification System) vessel-position data for the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans with sea ice extent records, then applies spatial clustering to vessel routes across time to see whether, and how, shipping patterns shift as ice cover changes.
DSAN 5550, Georgetown University.
The question
Sea ice extent in the Arctic has been declining for decades, and that has a direct, practical consequence: routes that were unusable or required icebreaker escort become navigable for more of the year. Does the AIS record actually show vessels moving into those routes as ice retreats, and can spatial clustering pick out when and where that shift happens?
Approach
The core of the project pairs two time-indexed datasets: AIS vessel position tracks for the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, and sea ice extent/concentration data over the same period. Vessel tracks are clustered spatially and compared across time slices, the goal is to see whether route clusters shift northward or through previously ice-covered corridors as extent drops, rather than assuming it from ice data alone.
Status
This one’s still in progress, the repo currently holds the early data-processing scripts rather than a finished write-up. I’ll fill in the methods, findings, and results table here once the analysis is further along.