Summer can’t come fast enough for the frozen northeast.
It was minus -4C in Dalian this morning, or 25F for the metrically challenged. The highest temperature the Bohai Rim port city is going to reach in the next five days is a balmy zero degrees.
The temperatures are way better than the deep freeze that has made Europe miserable for the last couple of weeks, but Northeast China is a bleak place at this time of year.
And the last couple of winters have been taxing, especially for shipping. Bohai Bay is home to the largest ports in the region, such as Dalian, Tianjin, Qingdao, Qinhuangdao, Rizhao, Yingkou and Yantai.
Tianjin, Qingdao and Qinhuangdao are in the world’s top 10 ports and handle enormous quantities of coal, ore or containers. Tianjin is basically Beijing’s port, situated just a couple of hours down the highway.
The snowman has Bohai ports gripped in an icy fist, just like it did last winter. Mainland officials estimate that one third of the bay is choked with ice up to half a metre thick, and something called the Oceanic Administration has a “blue sea ice” alert in force.
It is apparently the worst it has been in decades and the ice last week grew past 36,000 square kilometres (14,000 square miles), which is a lot of ice to have in the way when trying to navigate a large cargo ship.
Without strengthened hulls, attempting to break through sea ice is not advisable, and China does not have the icebreakers on hand to carve a passage to the ports. Anyway, much of the ice is floating free of the coast, so any path made would soon close up.
The Bohai Sea is one of the busiest routes in China, second only to the Yangtze and Pearl River port clusters. Heavy manufacturing depends on the shipping of machinery and parts, as does the electricity generating business. Coal fired power plants require a steady supply of coal, and much of it comes in via Qinhuangdao, which had to be closed. The port handles around 250 million tonnes of coal a year in both import and export, and its closure last year was estimated to have disrupted 80 percent of the coal transported in China by sea.
A marine official told Xinhua that the amount of sea ice caused by the “cold snap” is greater than that of last year. In fact, the water froze so fast that it caused a new cargo ship to be trapped by the ice on its maiden voyage.
Roll on summer.