Canada's mild winter disrupts Arctic ice road

Bangkok Post Group

An unusually warm winter in Canada has delayed the opening of a 250-mile (400 km) ice road that is rebuilt every year as the main conduit for diamond mines in a remote Arctic region. Tom Hoefer, senior advisor to the NWT and Nunavut Chamber of Mines and Paul Gruner, CEO of the Indigenous corporation Tlicho Investment Corp & Group of Companies explain the impact. - REUTERS

Transcript

00:00 [wind]

00:08 And you can see the ice road again going off in the distance here

00:12 behind my truck.

00:18 This is a really underdeveloped region and any mine that gets

00:22 discovered up here is generally going to be off of the roads or off of power lines

00:26 and out in the middle of nowhere. So these ice roads are just a natural

00:30 because of course Mother Nature helps us make the ice

00:34 and so it gives us a relatively inexpensive way of

00:38 accessing remote areas. It's a blustery day, the wind

00:42 is blowing very fiercely from the north. Building those

00:46 winter roads like what we've seen this year can be a bit challenging when you've got

00:50 changes with weather, climate change, etc.

00:54 Which resulted in a late start construction

00:58 and then a risk that we'll have an early

01:02 finish here in the spring. So we saw temperatures

01:06 at zero degrees in December, which for the Arctic, that's pretty

01:10 unheard of. And very clear, beautiful ice here, it looks like

01:14 about a metre thick.

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