Global warning

The Arctic’s rapidly melting glaciers threaten the release of vast amounts of methane, mercury and other harmful substances into the atmosphere, the outcome of which could be devastating. Global warming is also moving far faster in the region than it is elsewhere in the world, though monitoring these changes is impossible without access to the climate observation stations where the necessary data is collected, many of which are in Russia.

Warming up

Temperatures in the Arctic have risen by one degree every decade for the past 40 years. One degree of warming melts 4 million square kilometres of permafrost, causing serious climate change due to the release of large amounts of carbon. Indeed, NASA estimates that the Arctic ice sheet has shrunk by an astonishing 12.6% over the past decade alone.

But permafrost also contains other hazardous substances, the sudden release of which could potentially cause environmental havoc. In 2024, scientists at the University of Southern California (USC) concluded that entire ecosystems were under threat from the release of mercury from the melting Arctic.

“Permafrost soil contains more mercury than all the other soil on the planet, plus all the oceans, plus the atmosphere. It has that sense of a bomb that’s going to go off,” Josh West, a professor of earth sciences and environmental studies at USC, told independent environmental journal Grist in August.

But aside from the release of hazardous compounds, melting sea ice also allows much easier access to new reserves of oil, gas and other raw materials. In 2008, the US Geological Survey estimated that the Arctic region contained more than 400 billion recoverable barrels of oil, roughly a quarter of the world’s total reserves.

At the same time, fuel production is hampered by the commitment of countries to leave Arctic oil and gas in the ground in order to meet climate goals. Even without that brake on exploiting new reserves, environmentalists have repeatedly warned that there is simply no safe way to drill through permafrost, as the risk of accidents and oil spills is too high, and the harsh environmental conditions would make clean up efforts extremely difficult.

Council of war

The Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum formed in 1996, deals with the problems of sustainable development and environmental protection in the region, among other matters.

The council consists of eight member states with territory in the Arctic: Russia, the US, Denmark, Sweden, Canada, Norway, Finland and Iceland. Organisations representing the interests of the indigenous peoples of the North, including the Aleut International Association and the Saami Council, also participate.

As the Arctic Council lacks its own budget, all its initiatives are funded by one or more Arctic states or organisations on a voluntary basis. The participating countries do, however, pay annual contributions to support the work of the secretariat of about €100,000 each per year.

In late May 2021, with tensions over Ukraine high, but before the full-scale Russian invasion had begun, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met with his fellow delegates to the council in Reykjavik as Russia took over chairing the body.

By March 2022, however, all other council member states had refused to participate in events chaired by Moscow in protest at the war. As a result, some two thirds of the more than 120 projects in which Russia was involved were frozen.

Among them was the Biosecurity in the Arctic Project, which aimed to combat the spread of parasites, biotoxins and pathogens including anthrax, which could easily be released at any time from retreating permafrost.

Later that year, the council announced that it would resume work on projects that didn’t involve Russia, a decision Moscow called “political” before refusing to pay its annual fees to the organisation in early 2023. Nevertheless, the Russian Foreign Ministry said at the time that leaving the organisation would be out of the question.

By the time Russia passed its chairing of the council to Norway in May 2023, its representative Nikolay Korchunov admitted that the prospects for further cooperation looked “very uncertain” and didn’t go as far as ruling out Russia leaving the organisation altogether.

Ice curtain

Arctic researchers say the lack of cooperation with Russia has made it increasingly difficult to study melting permafrost and its consequences, since Russian data was central to building climate models.

While Paul Aspholm, a scientist at the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research, has spoken to his Russian colleagues on a daily basis for almost 30 years, he now says that there is an “ice curtain” between them.

The EU immediately pulled its funding of projects involving Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, and both Finland and Norway called on their universities to freeze ties with Russian institutions and to suspend any existing projects. The US has also instructed its institutions to curtail all scientific cooperation.

US restrictions have made joint field research funded from the US budget impossible, according to Vladimir Romanovsky, a professor of geophysics and the former head of the Permafrost Laboratory at the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

“All those projects have stopped as American scientists cannot travel to Russia, partly due to the … risk … of persecution,” says Romanovsky. However, he says that there is still cooperation between the US and Russia at university level, and that individual Russian scientists still come to work in the US.

Romanovsky has been researching the dynamics of permafrost in the Russian Arctic for more than 15 years, but his project is due to be shut down due to both a lack of funding and an end to data exchange between Russian and non-Russian researchers. Western researchers have left some joint observation stations, so it is now impossible to track data collection, or to know if it is being carried out at all.

Romanovsky says that remote monitoring systems, such as satellites, cannot fully compensate for the lack of data from other sources, since on-the-ground verification of data is often essential. For its part, Russia faces a different problem: many of its data stations rely on Western technology and financing, neither of which are currently easily obtainable.

Staking a claim

The political situation doesn’t only affect scientific cooperation in the Arctic, but also increases the risk of military conflict in the region. For instance, changes to Russian foreign policy introduced in February 2023 envisioned a switch in focus to cooperation with non-Arctic countries in the region. One such country is China, which has long been hungrily eyeing up the Arctic’s natural resources and even positions itself as a “near-Arctic state”.

In March 2023, Moscow and Beijing announced the creation of a joint working group to develop the Northern Sea Route, which connects the eastern and western parts of the Arctic Ocean and is increasingly used to transport Russian crude oil exports to China, which in 2023 alone registered 123 new companies to operate in the Russian Arctic.

In June, the Pentagon spoke of “increased geopolitical tensions” in the Arctic region due to the conflict in Ukraine, heightened cooperation between Beijing and Moscow in the Arctic, and the fact that two Arctic countries — Finland and Sweden — have joined NATO in the past two years.

Of the Russian Navy’s three fleets in Europe, only the Northern Fleet retains access to the Atlantic and has the potential to be used in open conflict. Since the Baltic Sea is now almost completely surrounded by NATO countries, and Russian ships are blocked from leaving the Black Sea via the Bosphorus Strait in Türkiye, the Northern Fleet is likely to become even more important to Russia. Based in Severomorsk, near Murmansk in the European Arctic, it is now home to the largest number of Russian nuclear missile carriers and strategic submarines.

China’s military strategy has openly flagged the Arctic as a potential arena for rivalry, predicting that the “game of great powers” would “increasingly focus on the struggle over and control of global public spaces,” such as the Arctic and Antarctic, and stressing that China could not “rule out the possibility of using force” in this “scramble for new strategic spaces”.

At a glacial pace

While climate scientists are doing everything they can to facilitate a return to international cooperation, they find themselves hampered by international sanctions on Russia as well as a raft of recently introduced Russian laws that potentially criminalise the sharing of research data or any form of cooperation with foreign entities, Heininen explains.

“We will not return to the situation that existed before February 2022. It will be a different situation and a different context. Building new connections may take more time,” Heinimen says, though he’s keen to stress that time is of the essence, given that the Arctic is heating three to four times faster than the rest of the world: “We visited the Norwegian Arctic in mid-November. Even the mountainous regions were snowless.”

But the main thing, Romanovsky says, is that climate scientists on both sides of the geopolitical divide are keen to cooperate again. “There’s great interest. I am still in touch with several colleagues from Russia I’ve worked with before,” he says, adding, though, that there had so far been no discussion of funding, “since Western financing, including field work, could be a big problem in Russia, given that the country has the concepts of ‘foreign agents’ and ‘undesirable organisations’”.

“But don’t expect much change until the war is over, or rather, until the regime changes in Russia,” Romanovsky continues, “After all, scientists who dealt with Arctic issues during the Cold War are still alive and working, and they suggest learning from their experience.”