Road and rail acess in the arctic.

 

Road and rail access in the arctic.

Ths is actually a serious problem and cannot be done using conventional thinking even spending money like a drunken sailor.

what i do know is that it is possible to drill permafrost and set charges in the dead of winter.  Ideally you can drill down to river gravel if you are in a valley and blast a strip.  The broken permafrost can be then removed safely enough without complications.  This opens up a deep trench which is ideal for a road bed.

however, you still want to pass through a summer to allow refrosting to take place in the bottom of your trench to ensure drainage.  Then the next winter it is easy enough to haul in rip rock and largely back fill your trench for a roadbed...  That summer is then available for finishing the roadbed and even llaying track and all that.  That is a minimuum two year cycle.

I do bring this up because Canada needs to drive road and rail connectors through this crap without producing runaway budget costs through impossible schedules as often happens when ignorance meets either permfrost or muskegs.  and i only know this because of an experienced dirt mover who opened up a gravel bed covered with permafrost.  So it has been done.

Once you are sure this can be done, then we need to run a rail and road connector down the Mackenzie valley to the Arctic Ocean and over to Alaska North Slope.  The flow of the Mackenzie is similar to that of the St lawrence and about half of the Mississippi.

I consider the valley to be highly prospective for massive conventional oil and gas but without real access, it may as well be on the moon. winter roads to diamond mines notwithstanding..