Mayra Meléndez-González, a technician at the Toolik Field Station in northern Alaska, collecting water samples for an experiment at a frozen creek earlier this month.
Credit...Jacob Judah

Russia’s Warming Arctic Is a Climate Threat. War Has Shut Scientists Out of It.

Climate science has been stymied as Russia continues its war in Ukraine. The stalled work threatens to leave the West without a clear picture of how fast the Earth is heating up.

by · NY Times

Western scientists studying the Arctic are increasingly lost in the hunt for data, the result of the cutoff in relations with Russia.

Crucial climate science has been stymied as Russia, which makes up over half the Arctic, continues its war in Ukraine. Data flowing between Western and Russian scientists has slowed to a trickle with Western-imposed sanctions and other restrictions, interrupting work on a host of projects.

The stalled collaboration is setting back efforts to monitor the shrinking of the Arctic, which is warming four times faster than the global average and accelerating the planet’s rise in temperature. That threatens to leave governments and policymakers without a clear picture of how fast the Earth is heating up.

“It may be impossible to understand how the Arctic is changing without Russia,” said Alessandro Longhi, an Italian permafrost scientist. He spoke as he trudged through snow earlier this month with a colleague near Toolik Field Station, a research outpost run by the University of Alaska Fairbanks in the northern part of the state. Western scientists, locked out of Russia, have increasingly turned to stations like these to work in the Arctic.

As the researchers headed out to collect readings on how vegetation interacts with the vulnerable permafrost soils, their prints in the snow joined with tracks of caribou, fox and ermine heading in all directions. Dr. Longhi stopped and stepped back as his colleague placed a plastic chamber over a tiny portion of the vast Arctic tundra to test whether gasses released from the permafrost varied by the plants, such as cotton grass, buried underfoot.

“This is the worst-case scenario for what may happen elsewhere,” he said about the changing permafrost around Toolik.

But without windows into Russia, researchers are missing irreplaceable data on the dwindling frost. Recent studies suggest that without such information from Russian research stations, many of which have been suspended from a major Arctic monitoring network, Western scientists’ understanding of Arctic changes is being skewed toward North America and Europe.

“It makes no sense to exclude half the Arctic,” said Torben Rojle Christensen, a professor at Aarhus University and the science director of Zackenberg Research Station in Greenland.

These emerging blind spots matter far beyond the Arctic. Two-thirds of Russia is covered by permafrost, frozen soil that locks up vast quantities of carbon released into the atmosphere as the ground thaws. This can drive further warming. These dangerous Arctic feedback loops make data from Russia crucial to climate models. It will be far harder to make accurate projections without it.

Scientists studying the region’s wildlife have also had projects upended. Paul Aspholm, a researcher at the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research, had been in almost-daily contact with Russian colleagues for almost 30 years. He knows the importance of working together better than most. He can peer across the icy Arctic border between Norway and Russia from both his office and his home. He has received only three emails from researchers in Russia since he was told all contact had to stop after the invasion of Ukraine.

“We have an ‘Ice Curtain’ now,” he said.

The European Union stopped funding projects involving Russia in the immediate aftermath of the Ukraine invasion. European countries, such as Finland and Norway, have encouraged their universities to freeze ties to Russian institutions and suspend existing projects. Russia has imposed hurdles of its own on cooperation with the West.

The United States, too, issued guidance that it would “wind down” scientific collaboration. The National Science Foundation, which funds many Arctic projects across the United States, has told researchers not to include Russian collaborators in proposals.

“They explicitly told us: Do not include Russia,” said Vladimir Romanovsky, a Russian geophysicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He will soon begin working with Canada instead.

Isolating Russia has created an uncomfortable moral dilemma for some climate scientists. “It is like shooting yourself in the foot,” said Syndonia Bret-Harte, the science director at Toolik and a professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who had the Russian side of her own climate-related project suspended last year when the National Science Foundation pulled funding.

While some lost fieldwork can be compensated for by moving elsewhere or by peering down at Russia from satellites, there is much that requires eyes on the ground. “We are doing the best we can, but this is a crisis,” Dr. Bret-Harte said.

Arctic research had been a rare success story in relations with Russia since the Cold War, even as oil-producing Russia has slowed Western efforts to confront climate change. But the networks that helped drive that research forward are unraveling. Many Russian scientists are frightened that dealing with Western colleagues could mark them as suspect. “It is very similar to what it was like in the Soviet Union,” Dr. Romanovsky said. “They have to be careful.”

Dr. Romanovsky oversees a network of permafrost monitoring sites across both Russia and Alaska. He said that his Russian colleagues had become increasingly nervous about receiving funds from the United States that they were owed and asked him to stop wiring them. Many had also stopped sending data the other way. He no longer expects any information from his 130 sites strung out across Russia.

The funding crunch could have longest-lasting effects. Many Russian data stations are reliant on Western projects not only for technology, but also for money that keeps the lights on. Sustaining Arctic research, which requires sending equipment and people to some of the most remote places on earth, is expensive. There are signs that Russia is turning to China to try to fill gaps. A new research station that Moscow had intended as a showcase for international Arctic science cooperation now seems likely to play host to mainly Chinese projects.

Some scientists have joined the outflow of educated Russians trying to leave the country. But Russia may be losing its best and brightest in other ways. Colin Edgar, a research technician at Toolik, described with increasing resignation how former colleagues at one research station had been sent to fight in Ukraine.

“At least one has been killed,” he added. “It is just horrifying.” As Mr. Edgar spoke, the ghostly northern lights began faintly dancing over Toolik.

Dr. Aspholm, the Norwegian researcher, had been running projects on animals, from brown bears to salmon, with his Russian neighbors. Invasive pink salmon have thrived in warming waters in the European Arctic, and are now breeding and dying in such numbers that they are turning once-pristine Arctic creeks toxic. Studying border-hopping wildlife properly without Russian help would be virtually impossible, but he is continuing the work, for now.

“It is better to know something, rather than nothing,” he said.

When the researcher took his team out for an annual bird-counting expedition along the border river, their Russian counterparts showed up on their side of the river, as they have every year for decades. They were not able to speak, but eventually they might be able to compare what they found.

Who will be left to put the pieces together is uncertain. Dr. Aspholm is expected to retire soon.

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