A luxury cruise ship is about two-thirds of its way through its historic and controversial voyage through the Northwest Passage, the first time a non-reinforced passenger ship has sailed the Arctic Ocean.  And it's made possible by man-made climate change.

The 1,070-passenger Crystal Serenity ship left Seward, Alaska on 16 August on a month-long journey in the waters north of Canada which will conclude in New York City on 16 September.  The ship is being accompanied by an icebreaker, but the back-up vessel has not been needed - there hasn't been any significant ice, and the ship was able to avoid two icebergs seen adrift in the Arctic Ocean.

It's controversial, but it opens the commercial possibilities of something that isn't even supposed to be happening.  Indeed, a few years ago, taking the route that killed hundreds of explorers over the centuries wasn't even possible until now.  But it's not just cruise lines hoping to take retirees out to take pictures of places where Polar Bears used to be - shippers are looking to take advantage of the new short cut between Europe and the Pacific Rim.

"The reduction in summer sea-ice, perhaps the most striking sign of climate change, may also provide economic opportunities," said Dr. Nathanael Melia of the UK's University of Reading.  "There is renewed interest in trans-Arctic shipping because of potentially reduced costs and journey times between Asia and the Atlantic.  So far only a few commercial vessels have utilized these routes as they are not currently reliably open."

And that's probably going to change.  The Reading researchers have drawn up maps of Arctic Ocean shipping lanes, with non-reinforced vessels hugging the Russian and Canadian coasts, and ice-strengthened vessels going over the top during the summer.  By the year 2050, more non-reinforced ships will be able to move out into the open water.

But short-term profits for shipping are actually going to be a disaster for pretty much everyone else and everything else in the ocean ecosystem.  A report released by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) this week finds that the effects of global warming on oceans are happening right now, and not just on bleached coral reefs.  The IUCN report details a "rapidly growing list of alarming changes across species at ecosystem scales, and across geographies spanning the entire world". 

Species such as plankton, fish, jellyfish, turtles, and seabirds have been driven up to 10 degrees of latitude towards the Earth's poles in order to stay within the environmental conditions to which they’re adapted.  But they've lsot their traditional breeding grounds in the migration, which is already showing in the populations to birds and sea mammals. 

"We now know that the changes in the ocean are happening between 1.5 and 5 times faster than those on land," the IUCN said. "Such range shifts are potentially irreversible, with great impacts on ecosystems.  What this will result in, decades down the line, is less clear.  It is an experiment where, rather than being a casual observer in the lab, we have unwittingly placed ourselves inside the test-tube."