The decrease in ice coverage, particularly in the summer, has been well documented. The future reduction of ice extend, and the extended ice free season will increase the number of vessels transiting from Europe to Asia via the Northern Passage and the central Arctic Ocean. In an effort to begin to quantify this impact, and to evalute metrics for it's impact upon sensitive and endangered sealife, the Arctic Council (Protection of the Arctic Marine Environment), the World Wildlife Fund, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Transport Canada, funded a study to develop an economic model for shipping forecasts, an environmental model for ocean/ice cover and to feed this into a global soundscape model to compare sound pressure levels in various acoustic bands for 2030 and 2019. These results were published by PAME in May 2024 (https://oaarchive.arctic-council.org/bitstreams/99cf703f-cbf4-4049-a470-939111a33eaa/download). We present the shipping and acoustic models and analysis methodology and the results of this study.
Heaney et al. (2025) studied this question.