Bathymetry- and Sea-Ice-Constrained Feasibility Screening for Trans-Arctic Navigation

Abstract

: Arctic route planning requires an initial assessment of whether candidate corridors are physically navigable before detailed voyage optimisation, vessel-performance modelling, or operational risk assessment is attempted. This paper presents a reproducible feasibility-screening workflow for trans-Arctic navigation under bathymetry and sea-ice concentration constraints. A regular pan-Arctic routing grid is constructed over 40 –85◦N and 20◦W–180◦E for a Rotterdam – Yokohama case study. GEBCO 2024 bathymetry is used to exclude land and shallow-water cells, while CMEMS Arctic sea-ice concentration fields are used to exclude cells above selected ice-screening thresholds. The remaining feasible cells are represented as a graph, and A-star search with geodesic edge costs is used to compute shortest feasible routes. The contribution lies in the transparent integration of bathymetry and sea-ice screening into a reproducible navigation-feasibility workflow, rather than in proposing a new shortest-path algorithm. The case study evaluates a bathymetry-only baseline, date-dependent sea-ice feasibility maps, seasonal route-distance behaviour, and sensitivity to sea-ice concentration thresholds. The results show how route availability and route-distance ratio vary with the selected environmental screening assumptions. The workflow provides a practical pre-routing layer for Arctic navigation studies and can support later integration with vessel-performance, risk, and voyage-planning models.