Decades of scientific cooperation across the Arctic are at risk if political tensions between Europe and the US worsen over trade and defense. For more than 30 years Arctic nations have collaborated across the physical, biological and social sciences to monitor one of the fastest-changing regions on Earth. Since the late 1970s, the Arctic has lost roughly 33,000 square miles of sea ice each year — an area similar to Czechia.
Even during the Cold War, researchers from the US, Russia, Canada, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Finland and Sweden worked together. The Arctic Council, set up in 1991, furthered that cooperation. But ties frayed after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, freezing decades of shared science in the region. That situation could be compounded if Europe-US relations continue to deteriorate.
Greenland matters for science and the world. About four-fifths of its land is an ice sheet that is a climate tipping point: its ongoing melt is driven by rising human carbon emissions and could expose mineral deposits coveted by resource-hungry economies. A total loss of the Greenland ice sheet would raise global sea levels by about 7.4 meters, imperiling millions in coastal areas. The ice itself is a research archive: deep ice cores trap ancient air bubbles and carbon deposits that let scientists reconstruct Earth’s atmospheric history.
Researchers have long worked together to study environmental change, ice-sheet and glacier loss, and Arctic land and marine ecosystems. Greenland has yielded major discoveries — from the massive York meteorite to ancient rocks whose magnetic properties helped extend the known age of Earth’s magnetic field to 3.7 million years. Social and health research is also key to understanding the cultures and well-being of Indigenous Arctic peoples.
“It’s such a cliche, but what happens to the Arctic has a global impact,” said Maribeth Murray, a Canadian environmental archaeologist and Director of the Arctic Institute of North America. “It’s too big for any one little institution or one country, on its own.”
Despite the cooling of high-profile political interest in Greenland, scientific unease remains. Murray said tensions have left parts of the research community wary of future projects in the region. “We’re feeling pretty uncomfortable,” she said.
Geopolitics has already harmed Arctic science. Russia’s war in Ukraine ended long-standing scientific links and froze fruitful exchanges, notably affecting the INTERACT project. INTERACT was created as an Arctic-wide program to share research and provide transnational access to dozens of field stations. Through EU funding, European teams could work in Russia, Russian data flowed to European centers, and later US and Canadian researchers exchanged work with European peers.
Margareta Johansson, a cryosphere scientist and former INTERACT coordinator, said that in February 2022 those possibilities disappeared. The pause of 21 Russian stations from collaborative networks has had profound consequences. A report co-written by Johansson said a mix of national and institutional policies, and personal moral judgments, led to the effective exclusion of Russian science from INTERACT and closed science-diplomacy channels. “If you remove all of the Russian stations, we basically don’t really know what’s going on in the Arctic,” she said.
Arctic research and programs like INTERACT are examples of science diplomacy — using science to build international relations or advancing science through diplomatic engagement. Paul Berkman, a science diplomat affiliated with Harvard, argues science diplomacy can create shared interests and ease hostilities, offering pathways to address urgent challenges from conflict to climate change. “The Arctic is a double-edged sword,” Berkman said. “It is a region, potentially, of global conflict. It’s also potentially a source of global peace. The convergence that exists in the Arctic — China, Russia, the United States, Europe, and increasingly other states — is an opportunity to facilitate dialogue.”
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany