Beneath the Aurora Borealis an oil tanker glides through the night past the Coast Guard ice breaker Amundsen and vanishes into the maze of shoals and straits of the Northwest Passage, navigating waters that for millennia were frozen over this time of year.
Warming has forced a retreat of the polar ice cap, opening up a sea route through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans for several months of the year.
Commander Alain Lacerte is at the helm as the vessel navigates the Queen Maud Gulf, poring over charts that date from the 1950s and making course corrections with the help of GPS.
"Where it's white (on the chart), it means the area hasn't been surveyed," he explains - leaning over a map that is mostly white. "Most of the far north hasn't been surveyed, so our maps are unreliable." The crew constantly take radar and multi-beam sonar measurements and check their position.
"We don't want any shoals named after us," says the old sea dog from behind his spectacles.
Almost the size of the European Union, the Canadian Arctic seabed remains largely uncharted. The waters are also shallow and navigating unknown parts can be deadly - even when the north is ice-free.
Today, taking this route cuts 7,000 kilometers (4,350 miles) off a trip from London to Tokyo, saving time and fuel.
Since the 15th century there have been a dozen expeditions seeking a faster shipping route from Europe to Asia through the north. The Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen was the first to cross the Northwest Passage, on board the Gjøa, in an expedition that took three years, finishing in 1906.
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