By Yereth Rosen
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – A Pacific storm of record proportions swept a remote stretch of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands chain on New Year’s Eve, battering a region used heavily by commercial shipping with hurricane-force winds and seas five stories high.
“It’s the most intense storm ever recorded in the North Pacific, excluding typhoons,” said Brian Brettschneider, a NOAA research scientist with the National Weather Service.
The center of what forecasters refer to as “bomb cyclone” was measured at a record-low barometric pressure of 921 millibars, equivalent to the eye of a Category 4 hurricane and the lowest documented over the Aleutians as far back as the 1950s, Brettschneider said.
The storm unleashed seas as high as 54 feet (16.5 meters) and winds topping 80 miles per hour (120 kph) – a force of Category 1 on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale – in the western Aleutians, the weather service said.
The storm was too far from large populated areas to pose a direct hazard to many people besides those traveling in the region by aircraft or vessel, Brettscheneider said.
The Aleutian island of Shemya with a small air station and a few personnel was in the epicenter of the storm, about 1,450 miles southwest of Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city. Most of the Aleutian Islands are uninhabited.
The waters, however, are heavily used by cargo ships traveling between Asia and North America. Thousands of vessels a year ply a shipping corridor known as the North Pacific Great Circle Route. The area is also important for commercial fishing.
The storm also caused some erosion of Bering Sea winter ice, already at some of its thinnest levels on record for this time of year, further disrupting a frozen landscape that walruses and some species of seals depend on.
“This may kind of set back ice formation,” Brettschneider said, adding that it would likely take five or six days for the winds to calm and for cold northern air to flow back in, allowing the Bering Sea to regain some ice. (Reporting by Yereth Rosen; Editing by Steve Gorman and Neil Fullick)
<em>(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2021.</em>
Join the gCaptain Club for curated content, insider opinions, and vibrant community discussions.
Join the 108,761 members that receive our newsletter.
Have a news tip? Let us know.
Some shipping companies are discreetly moving operations out of Hong Kong and taking vessels off its flag registry. Others are making contingency plans to do so.
The South Korean containership SM Portland has reported significant cargo damage and container losses while transiting to Vancouver through the Bering Sea. According to a March 5th customer alert from...
Hong Kong's edge as a financial hub will erode further as the city becomes embroiled in China-U.S. tensions, with the flash sale of a Hong Kong-owned global ports business highlighting geopolitical volatility, executives and analysts said.
Maritime and offshore news trusted by our 108,761 members delivered daily straight to your inbox.
Essential news coupled with the finest maritime content sourced from across the globe.
Sign Up
Join The Club
