War in Ukraine causes disruption to Arctic research
This week marks two years since Russia’s major escalation in its conflict with Ukraine. In addition to the devastating losses of life and the displacement of millions, the conflict has had a chilling effect on international relations, including collaborative Arctic research.
The Arctic’s climate has been warming nearly four times more quickly than other parts of the globe. Russia is geographically the biggest Arctic nation in the region, accounting for nearly half of the landmass in the Arctic. A stalling of collaboration with colleagues in this vast area means some scientists are lacking crucial data and struggling to put together a holistic picture of the massive changes occurring.
A group of European researchers published a study in the journal Nature Climate Change last month, claiming that a lack of data from environmental monitoring stations in Russia has led to an increasingly biased view of the region’s changes.
This group of scientists, led by Efren Lopez-Blanco, of Aarhus University in Denmark, looked at the observations of a territorial network called INTERACT.
The network was started in Europe more than 20 years ago but has more recently expanded to Russia and North America—including two stations in Alaska, at Utqiagvik and Toolik. INTERACT monitoring stations have been observing variable such as air temperature, rainfall, snow depth, vegetation biomass and soil carbon—all key indicators of Arctic change.
The authors of the study acknowledged that the network had gaps even before the conflict in Ukraine, with warmer, wetter areas over-represented. But this bias has become more pronounced due to the freeze in collaboration with Russia. They are now missing data from 17 of the 60 stations, including stations in Siberia’s large taiga forest, which accounted for half of their stations in the boreal zone.
These on-the-ground stations are gathering information that is not obtainable by remote sensing methods, such as satellite measurements, said Rick Thoman, an Alaska climate specialist the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
“Certainly the loss of the basically all of the Eurasian input, except for Northern Scandinavia, is a big, big deal,” Thoman said. “We know what it means to lose base monitoring. How much snow is falling in Nome this year? We don’t have an answer to that, because we’ve lost that base monitoring capability. We can hope that this information in Russia is still being collected, and that one day, it will become available so to keep those time series going.”
Data freeze
The INTERACT network is just one project affected by the conflict. Over the last two years, the Nugget has heard from a variety of other researchers and resource managers about the freeze in their work with Russian colleagues.
Thoman just edited the 2023 Arctic Report Card, which included a chapter on tundra greenness, a marker of how much vegetation and shrubbery is expanding north. That greenness is typically measured by remote sensing, but it also requires a lot of ground-truthing for researchers to understand why some areas are turning green and others are still brown.
“Obviously, we’re not getting that out of Russia,” Thoman said.
Other scientists are starting to see gaps in information about what’s happening below the surface.
Vladimir Romanovsky, a permafrost researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute, said researchers in Russian developed robust expertise in permafrost studies during the Cold War-era as the nation began developing the Arctic at a rapid pace. It was only in the last three decades that they were finally able to share that knowledge and work with col
leagues in the U.S., Canada and Europe.
“Because of the openness in 90s and early 2000s, we developed very strong connections with, with Russian scientists for permafrost research,” Romanovsky said. “And we had several big cooperative projects between Alaska and Russia.”
The wave of problems caused by the conflict took a little while to affect this collaboration, Romanovsky said. The U.S.-based researchers had already gotten used to not being able to travel because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and to adapt, they established strong partnerships with researchers in Russia to collect data on the ground. At the start of the Ukraine war, they continued to work with their colleagues remotely. But now that type of collaboration has become more difficult in the last year, Romanovsky said.
“We were sending some equipment and money for field work for our Russian partners, and last summer, we were not able to do it— not only because it’s difficult technically to do it now, but also because Russian scientists are afraid to receive any funding from abroad,” Romanovsky said.
Russian scientists had at least been sending them data on permafrost temperature and active layer depth for an open-access National Science Foundation database. But now they are afraid to communicate with and send data U.S. colleagues, Romanovsky said.
“It’s kind of coming back to the Cold War situation where we were not getting any data from them,” Romanovsky said. “Hopefully, it’s all temporary and it will change.”
A team of permafrost researchers from Germany’s prestigious Alfred Wegener Institution had long operated out of a research station Samoylov Island in Russia’s Lena River Delta which opens into the Laptev Sea. Russian President Vladimir Putin had even visited this research station in 2010 and praised it as an exemplary model of international collaboration between German and Russian scientists, advocating for more funding. But after the conflict escalated, the German researchers were not able to return. They’ve shifted their field work to focus on Alaska. A team led by AWI researcher Guido Grosse was in Nome over the summer to check on monitoring stations they’ve set up in the region.
Romanovsky said he’s seen an increase in research groups, especially those from Europe, similarly shifting their field work destinations. Many, like the AWI group, are now coming to Alaska and Canada.
But not all scientists can pick up and move to a more politically friendly part of the Arctic to answer their research questions. Some are studying and managing populations of marine species that live in the Bering Strait—species that don’t recognize human-made geopolitical borders.
The conflict has led to new difficulties in research on the population of polar bears that lives in the Chukchi Sea. The Alaska Nannut Co-management Council, or ANCC, has been trying to establish a locally-led management plan for the sustainable harvest of polar bears, which are hunted by Indigenous people on both sides of border that goes through the Bering Strait. The COVID-19 pandemic caused some delays in getting the draft of this plan approved, but then in 2022, the Ukraine conflict has caused a further delay.
Fisheries managers, too, are missing information about specific stocks and how the marine ecosystem is bouncing back after the 2019 heatwave.
“Especially at a time of such change, the gap in information is incredible,” Bob Foy, the science and research director of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center, told the Nugget when he visited Nome last May. “We have 30 percent of our pollock stock that goes back and forth across the dateline. It means that we have to estimate what’s moving back and forth, and we err on the side of caution.”
The new political difficulties also come at a bad time for tracking emerging threats. Harmful algal blooms are a new threat for the Arctic. Warming water temperatures are allowing toxin-producing algae to flourish, which could poison shellfish eaters. Scientists who studied the unprecedented Bering Strait bloom during the summer of 2022 suspect the algae cells that seeded the bloom came from Russian waters, but they are missing data to help establish that connection and planned collaborations and trainings with colleagues on the other side of the border have been canceled.
As Don Anderson, a senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts told the Nugget last year: “We are left trying to put a complicated story together with only half of the information we need.”