Research on the Current Status and Trend of Transit Vessels in the Northern Sea Route

The rapid melting of sea ice has made more and more commercial interests in sailing through the Northern Sea Route (NSR) in the Arctic. However, there is currently a lack of relevant researches on the characteristics of Arctic transit merchant ships, and the existing research is not comprehensive enough for ship data processing and analysis. In order to enable the government and enterprises to have more detailed understanding on transiting merchant ships, and ensure the safety and navigation planning. In this paper, the data mining analysis is performed based on the existing ship traffic data, to comprehensively process and analyze the shipping activities in NSR, and extract the characteristics in terms of ship type, ship ice class, ship gross tonnage, flag state, sailing days and ship trajectories of ships in the NSR. Based on the statistical analysis of the historical data, it is found that bulk cargo ships accounted for 56.06% of transit ships. With the exploitation of oil and gas, oil tankers are expected to increase by 5% to 10
^%
in the next five years. The flag states are dominated by Russia (45.71%) and China (10.86
^%
). In recent years, the total amount of cargo transported through the NSR will show a growth trend.