Northwest Passage?

[Irishman]

Question about the Northwest Passage - is that label used for a particular route through the waters north of North America? Is it applied to any path, or the collection of possible routes?

I learned the Northwest Passage as the route that people were trying to discover, a consistent path to go through the islands and ice of the north to get around the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The context of defining a specific route out of all the possibilities.

But here is a website using it in a different context, as if it actually exists, or else as if it is the sum of all the possible routes or something.

Approaching the 2011 Arctic Sea Ice Minimum

The final image in the series, shown above, shows the sea ice at it lowest point so far this season. Most notably, the Northwest Passage, the sea route that threads through the islands of northern Canada to link the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, is entirely ice free. Twice-daily images provide glimpses of the open water in the Northwest Passage throughout September.

This usage doesn’t seem right to me. Thoughts?

[septimus]

From Wikipedia:

In 1906, Roald Amundsen first successfully completed a path from Greenland to Alaska in the sloop Gjøa. Since that date, several fortified ships have made the journey.

From west to east the Northwest Passage runs through the Bering Strait (separating Russia and Alaska), Chukchi Sea, Beaufort Sea, and then through several waterways that go through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. There are five to seven routes through the archipelago, including the McClure Strait, Dease Strait, and the Prince of Wales Strait, but not all of them are suitable for larger ships. The passage then goes through Baffin Bay and the Davis Strait into the Atlantic Ocean.

[Northern_Piper]

I think the Northwest Passage is usually used to mean the entire route, even though there can be variants at certain points. (On a more common example: we refer to the Trans-Canada Highway, even though there’s more than one TCH section in Ontario.)

[Skammer]

The NWP used to be pretty much unnavigable unless you were in an icebreaker or something. However in recent years the ice shelf has receded enough to make the path pretty ice-free at least part of the year.