GLOBAL warming and melting ice caps are generating very good business for an elite band of Arctic entrepreneurs. But perhaps none has reason to celebrate more than Pat Broe.

Mr Broe, a US railway magnate, bought the frozen and forlorn sub-Arctic Canadian port of Churchill, Manitoba, in 1997, for $7 (£3.90).

Now he stands to make hundreds of millions of dollars as the retreating ice unlocks passages, opening the prospect of a longer shipping season.

Mr Broe has become part of an Arctic land grab among businessmen, governments and developers who realise that the melting ice, a source of concern for environmentalists, is a boon for them.

Potential winners include Norway and Russia, according to The New York Times, which published an analysis yesterday of what one expert called “the Great Game in a cold climate”.

The latest study of the Arctic ice cap showed that this summer it shrank to its smallest recorded size.

For Mr Broe, 57, from Denver, Colorado, the ice melt opens up the possibility of an “Arctic bridge”, a regular shipping lane from Murmansk, in Russia, to Churchill, a far shorter route from northern Europe to the North American continent than any other.

The normal route from Murmansk to Canada ends in Thunder Bay, Ontario. That usually takes 17 days. Murmansk to Churchill can take only eight days.

Currently, the shipping route from Murmansk to Churchill is open only from July until October, because the Hudson Bay ices over for the rest of the year. But Mr Broe and the Russian Government hope that the warmer weather will open the port for much longer — potentially up to eight months a year.

In recent years Churchill, which has 1,000 residents, could count on income only from several thousand tourists a year who visit to view polar bears and beluga whales. But in January, George Mamedov, the Russian Ambassador to Canada and a proponent of the Arctic bridge, visited, as have industrialists, shipping experts and grain producers.

Mr Broe brought Churchill almost as an afterthought. Having paid $11 million for 810 miles of denationalised railway tracks in Manitoba, he acquired the port at auction from a Canadian Government eager to rid itself of a money-loser. Since then, his company, OmniTrax, has spent $50 million dredging the port so that it can accommodate bigger ships and tankers.

The ice melt could soon bring $100 million a year to Churchill. Ron Lemieux, the transportation minister of Manitoba, told The New York Times: “It’s the positive side of global warming.”

Times recommends

• Dubai cheaper than Doncaster as room rates tumble
• World Cup 2010 - how to follow England
• Copenhagen: Europe's greenest city