BERING STRAIT - PRINCE OF WALES CAPE

The Prince of Wales Cape is the westernmost point of the American continent and is located on the Seward Peninsula near Wales. It marks the separation between the coasts of the Pacific and the Arctic, and points the tip of its nose into the Bering Strait: 85 kilometers of sea that separate Alaska from Siberia.

Geography. The Bering Strait connects the Chukchi and Bering seas to the north and south, in the middle of which two small islands emerge: the small Diomede, the American, and the large Diomede, the Russian.

Beringia. The shallowness of the strait is one of the keys to the story. Was the sea always there? You will hear about the Beringia land bridge. Indeed, about 21,000 years ago, this area was land. The sea level was then 120 meters lower than today, providing a passage between the American continent and Eurasia. Man came from Asia and gradually colonized the American continent through Alaskan Siberia. The land bridge then disappeared, about 11,000 years ago.

Vitus Bering. In the 18th century, a Danish explorer, Vitus Bering, undertook a voyage across the strait, with the aim of mapping the region for the Russian Empire. During one of his expeditions, he discovered the coasts of the American continent and returned with otter skins, arousing the interest of Russian merchants. The latter then launched new expeditions to bring back furs to Russia. As colonization progressed, the present-day Alaska became part of the Russian Empire: it was referred to as Russian America, even though there were only a few of them in the territory. But little by little, the tsarist power lost interest... Fur is becoming scarce, because otters have been decimated, climatic conditions complicate colonization, relations with local populations are difficult, sometimes violent. Then in 1856, Russia lost the Crimean War against the United Kingdom and feared them in Canada. For all these reasons, in 1867, Russia sold Alaska to the United States for a paltry sum. Since that date, the Bering Strait has become a border between two countries.

"Ice Curtain". During the Cold War, the Bering Strait was one of the few places in the world where capitalism and communism faced each other directly. Like the Iron Curtain in Europe, it was named the Ice Curtain. In March 1948, the USSR decided to close the border. The indigenous populations living on both sides of the strait, the Yup'ik, found themselves deprived of relations with their relatives on both sides of the border. With the current war in Ukraine, the Bering Strait is under heavy scrutiny.

Global warming. From peripheral, the Bering Strait could become central. The melting of the ice pack, linked to global warming, is progressively allowing ships to navigate inside the Arctic Circle, creating, in the long term, two new maritime routes through the Bering Strait: the Northeast Passage and the Northwest Passage. They allow to reduce considerably the distances between Europe, America and Asia, compared to the traditional routes.

The Northeast Passage. This maritime shortcut reduces the distance between London and Yokohama, for example, from 21,000 km via the Strait of Malacca and the Suez Canal, to 14,000 km via the Northeast Passage of the Bering Strait. As a sign of the changes taking place, traffic in the Bering Strait is expanding. If in the past ships were escorted by icebreakers, today, even if the sea route remains impassable for a good part of the year, global warming and the break-up of the ice pack have made it more accessible.

The Northwest Passage. Proof that these new maritime routes do not only attract large industrialists, the explorer Anne Quéméré has set herself a new challenge: to leave for the Great North and travel 3,500 kilometers on a solar-powered boat, equipped with 10^m2 of solar panels. If her first attempt to cross the Northwest Passage through the glaciers was unsuccessful, she will try again soon. Anne Quéméré has already traveled in the Great North, but she wants to bear witness to the upheavals suffered by the environment and the people: "I want to tell stories, I want to feed the curiosity I have about the Inuit people," she said in an interview for France 3 Région.

But the story of the future does not stop there... Russia has considered again in 2011 to build a tunnel under the Bering Strait, after more than a century of an idea that exists since the nineteenth century but has never succeeded. More than 100 km long, twice the length of the Channel Tunnel, it would link the American and Russian shores. Obviously, the current war situation in Ukraine does not allow to consider any tunnel project at the moment.

Can we get there? Only people who have a sailboat or want to venture out with the crew of a fishing boat are the ones who will see the strait up close, but there are no scheduled tourist visits. The only way to "discover" the strait is still to fly over it by seaplane.