Environmental Storytelling: How the Melting Arctic Ice Affects Geopolitical Power Structures and Its Consequences

Ice cracks, glaciers fall from their pale pedestals into the ocean, blue and all-consuming, hundreds of feet below. There is a splash, a flurry of white spouting like a geyser into the air, and then there is nothing. White flowers bloom in fields as permafrost thaws, their water hydrating soil which has lain dormant, but pregnant with frozen seeds, only now rising, as the warmth of the sun first reaches the soil in the High North. These are the changes of a new Arctic, a world which once stretched for a small infinity, at the roof of the world, come to life. The question of stability in the region is as much geopolitical as it is physical; and the answer is as obvious: Is melting, fracturing ice stable?

The decay of the Arctic, namely the loss of Arctic ice, is seen as an opening window for many great powers; China, Russia, and the United States all seek to capitalize on it. China angles mainly to utilize the Northern Sea Route’s new long-term accessibility due to less and less sea ice.¹ The US, in turn, expands autonomous Coast Guard patrols throughout the region to preserve manpower and funding while icebreakers are under construction to further the push north, where the ice has not yet thawed.² However, the loss of Arctic ice is not simply the unlocking of a new domain of great power competition and resources but also a changing landscape. The environment itself is physically changing beyond simple icebergs melting into the sea; three unique physical processes all shape and restructure the terrain in different ways, which change the physical battleground for great power competition. The thawing of permafrost, the hydrological disruption, and the post-glacial isostatic rebound are all critical changes in a critical region which have thus far gone uncovered in international forums.³ Such strategic variables, however, cannot be ignored to any benefit. The shifting physical change in turn outpaces governance, monitoring, and legal architecture within a region which has for most of human history been treated as a static domain. Additionally, such changes in nature are not equal, and their long-term consequences benefit and harm nations disproportionately; nations must prepare for an inevitable future, and not simply through climate concern but also through strategic action.

The Arctic is contested in domains most easily seen in a simplistic map: trade, resources, and military. The Northern Sea Route provides trade access to China and Russia; in turn, it provides military routes to Russia, which grants the Chinese Coast Guard extensions in the Arctic region.⁴ The United States (US), by contrast, seeks to retain influence by expanding its continental shelf claim to capture resources, an act Russia has strongly contested in international forums.⁵ The ground itself is changing, however, and the competition between these nations does not account for it, at least not visibly. Ice loss fundamentally does not change what is accessible but instead what fundamentally exists in a stable way, and what nation holds authority over it. As such, this paper approaches the three-pronged geopolitical battle (trade, resources, military movements; Russia, China, US) with a three-pronged approach of its own; starting with Permafrost.

In 2016, an anthrax outbreak in Yamal led to the contraction of one documented human case. The outbreak was attributed to permafrost thaw, the result of a heatwave.⁶ As the ice clears sea lanes for shipping, it in turn thaws off ground which it has carpeted for millennia; a biologically inert land coming to life in a resurrection. Flowers may bloom from the permafrost for the first time in millennia (such as the Silene stenophylla),⁷ but diseases do as well. The incident on the Yamal Peninsula, Russia, remains the only reported and confirmed human case of a pathogen re-entering circulation from thawing Arctic ground. Researchers have since found that pathogens, along with other dormant organisms in permafrost, are only revived enough to infect amoebae in laboratory conditions.⁸ Unsettlingly, however, genetic fragments akin to those in smallpox were found in permafrost-preserved remains near the Kolyma River.⁹ There has not been a second outbreak since, and no permafrost-derived virus has yet demonstrated the capacity to infect another human or animal host.¹⁰ Nonetheless, what occurred in Yamal marks the beginning of something humanity does not yet fully understand and cannot replicate effectively in a lab; permafrost is alive as a biological archive, what lies within it is largely unknown, and it is melting faster than it is being understood. The permafrost, which contains potential miracles of life or pathogens as destructive as anthrax, sits largely in Russia, regions where Western research access has nosedived since 2014 and has been grounded since 2022.¹¹ Additionally, no international parties or institutions exist which monitor permafrost pathogen risk, research, or documentation; as far as the world is concerned, science is blind to the largest region of permafrost in the world.¹² Whatever strange science is held in the frozen ground, whatever flowers bloom or bacteria awake as the sun warms them for the first time in thousands of years, may be lost as quickly as they were resurrected. The only party with access to the region- Russia- is also the least inclined to open it to outside verification; in turn, Russia is also the most vulnerable of any nation to any destructive forms of life, such as a novel strain of smallpox, without assistance. There is no oversight with organizations such as the WHO or Arctic Council, which can find themselves involved in Russia; as such, the biological volatility of a region, for better or worse, serves as a complete unknown in any calculations regarding the future of the Arctic and Russia as a whole. The fact of the matter is it is fairly possible there are no miracle forms of life in the permafrost; no lifeforms which kill cancer or can halt dementia; however, it is certainly possible that diseases survived in the permafrost, as evidenced by the anthrax outbreak. Perhaps it is a one-off in history and in nature; regardless, it serves as a concerning omen for the future of the Arctic. Species are lost to climate change and the decimation of their environments. A bullet is fired from a marksman on a helicopter, piercing the clear coat of a polar bear, as it catches the sunlight. Suddenly red erupts from the white scene, like Technicolor coming on for the first time again. The marksman fires again, and the polar bear is slain; the helicopter lands, the bear is bagged in a net, and flown off. This is how hunters claim polar bears; and yet all the same, beneath the feet of people living near and in Siberia, life replacing the polar bear, in some cases even more lethal, may awaken. The cold air sliced by the helicopter, and the strain of bacteria multiplying before it is ever understood, within the human body. Speed is the variable in both. However, time is not on researchers’ side in the Arctic, as permafrost melts and Russia remains inaccessible to most nations. The nation that controls access to the grounds controls the narrative of what the ground contains, a useful form of leverage as well as suppression of the truth, which costs nothing to maintain and requires no outbreak to serve as politically useful. The Arctic’s opacity functions not due to its remote nature alone, but also due to the jurisdictional power of the nation which owns such a territory.

As the permafrost thaws, the ice elsewhere melts. Glacial ice is released not in a slow trickle of freshwater, but instead in rushes, the collapse and shatter of a glacier into shards, sea ice drifting to shore. The result is thermokarst lakes, which swell for years and drain in days; wetlands which destabilize the land through oversaturation; waterlogging it.¹³ Then their absence leaves unstable ground, dry lakes like craters where glaciers once sat, but which shift the regulation of seasonal water tables. For millennia, the ice preserved water tables with consistency of freshwater; now the inverse is true. Communities and infrastructure strategists throughout Siberia and the Alaskan Arctic established an understanding of their world that permafrost served as a stable foundation. Pipelines, water treatment plants, and building foundations were engineered to sit on frozen ground; ground which now cracks and shifts, sinking and turning into mud.¹⁴ The infrastructure established for an Arctic world that is finding its streets turned into rivers is not the result of rising water levels but instead the result of thawing ice and permafrost. The pale ground, which was once a permanent, firm truth; the very ground some cultures and communities were built upon, trickling away as the temperature rises. Once the land was dry and cold, bitter and brittle, and then came the sun, and it was wet; the firm and hard soil turned to mud, the rivers overrun. A trickle at first, from the southern stretches to the sea, and then further and further north, as the ice decreased and the Arctic instead became a cold swamp of glacial ruin. Such is the world to communities embedded in Siberia, northern Canada and rural Alaska.

The problem daunting these communities is twofold. Primarily, it is hydrological: the water which used to arrive in a seasonal rhythm arrives instead in floods, or worse, simply never comes. The subsistence patterns of Indigenous communities established on reading the seasons, on predictable water flow, are now disrupted and unstable.¹⁵ A dust storm in Saudi Arabia picks up dark particles and tosses them to the upper atmosphere; they drift, and fall upon the Himalayan mountains; the dark particles attract heat, and cause the melting of the snow atop the world’s tallest peaks. This shifts the temperature of the wind, and correspondingly the intensity of rain, and where it lands; such is the origin of monsoon season in India.¹⁶ The problem with the Arctic is more direct and much more significant; the ice melts, the towns sink. The permafrost melts, and people get sick. The pattern is true for the rhythm of flooding and drought in the Arctic, and comes directly from the melting ice affecting the water tables.

The second problem is that of infrastructure; a community can be flooded, and all the while lack functional water; the physical systems which deliver and treat water were not built for thawing substrate and, in turn, have nothing to do with the quantity of water but rather the ability to process it.¹⁴ This unique vulnerability rarely stays domestic; contested regions such as Central Asia, Africa, and the Pacific islands have become points of contention between great powers trying to win over populations. China has already involved itself in infrastructure projects within the Inuit communities of the Arctic Circle; such pressure from a water supply issue is exactly the kind of issue China will capitalize upon.¹⁷ A vested interest, a legitimate cause, and a requirement to defend that cause provide a nation full capability to get a foot in a region it has no legitimate claim to. The influence of soft power as well as physical power plays a critical role in what nations hold influence where, and why. Such a subtle thing as the thawing of ice in Inuit communities could prove to be the very thumbscrew which, in turn, allows China greater leverage in the Arctic; and which would redefine the future of competition in the region.

Nations are rarely blessed with an expansion of their land by doing nothing. Greenland was once such a nation; however, gaining a 125-foot outcropping which had never been visible before in 2007.¹⁸ The land was dubbed by an Oxford scholar, Stefan Talmon, as "Stray Dog West."¹⁸ Stray Dog West was unique in that it was not rising land as the result of any volcanic action, plate tectonics, or classical understanding of why rock structures rise from the sea. However, it was a reflection of a warming climate and an input to where a maritime boundary sits; something great nations deliberate over fiercely. There are few ways to obtain more land without violence; most is already claimed. The Arctic and stretches of the world’s oceans remain shared territories, although claims through exclusive economic zones (EEZs) and continental shelf claims take slices out of this common ground and establish ownership. A single rock exposed is not much of a geopolitical story; not the way missiles fired from aircraft carriers or the intrigue of submarines in contested waters are. Nonetheless, such a subtle claim holds great value for the nations of the world in that it allows for an expansion of Greenland’s claim to the Arctic. As ice melts, water may rise elsewhere, but land rises too. The term for such an occurrence is post-glacial isostatic rebound; the rise of land once compressed under the weight of Pleistocene ice sheets.¹⁹ This rise under ice sheets is accelerated as the remaining ice retreats, no longer pressing the crust down, and out of the water, where ice once stood, land emerges. It may not be much land, but land legally is critical. The law governing Arctic maritime claims was not established under the notion that the earth itself would provide or take territory. As such, UNCLOS is anchored to territorial seas, EEZs, and the aforementioned continental shelf claims, which are set to the low-water line and to features which are capable of sustained habitation or economic life.²⁰ These anchors are physical qualities; qualities land possesses. It is such physical qualities that change as features of old coastlines shift, and features of land emerge where they were once buried under ice. There is no spirit of the law for a law established in physical facts, assuming the world’s physical features would not dramatically change, particularly in regard to rising ocean features. Nonetheless, as the world shifts, literally, no new treaties or delegations redraw lines; instead, the lines of territory in the Arctic move on their own. Legal instability is a unique form of the Arctic’s unstable nature, one which nonetheless shifts nations’ claims to the Arctic. Should other formations rise from the waterline, extensions around Alaska- or perhaps an Island chain connecting Russia’s Rudolf Island to the latitude of 89' just outside the North Pole- such would mean Russia holds claim to a majority of the Arctic, simply the result of geography and fortune.²¹ Clearly then, shifting landscapes are critical to understand, prepare for, and to hold legal precedent upon. An inflexible law is a deeply fallible one. As Russia and the US contest one another in the Arctic Council and ISA due to continental shelf claims, the US remains outside of the UNCLOS signatories and as such, holds little legitimacy; such legitimacy and legal cohesion between great powers in the Arctic prepares for and preserves peace when the ice melts and land takes its place.²² While military engagement in the region through NATO or controlling the GIUK-N gap can secure physical chokepoints, the legal risk is present for the resources underlying the ocean.²³

Three physical processes; three uniquely, particularly interested parties, and three bodies of international law and monitoring. There is only one, however, shared failure. It is a lack of institutional influence: biosecurity monitoring, water and infrastructure governance, and updated, flexible UNCLOS baseline law.¹² The jurisdiction as well as practical effects of such changes hold dire consequences. Land can provide docking; floods and swamps can decimate cities and infrastructure; awakened bacteria can cause scientific innovation or a pandemic. Despite the effects of each, which largely remain to be seen, the overall role of legal precedent and international cohesion and order is left, like the ice, fractured. The consequences of unanticipated environmental shifts change not only the dichotomy of the Arctic powers but also their unique strengths and weaknesses. If Alaska’s Indigenous population is vulnerable to coercion by Chinese infrastructure companies, the US has a critical Achilles’ heel.¹⁷ If instead it gains a monumental stretch of rising land from the Arctic, it gains a rich claim to the resources within it; the same is true for any Arctic nation.²⁴ The pattern is singular, despite it’s fractioning into three separate cases; overall, the changing environment lacks an institutional response, which forces nations to neglect such problems until they worsen, or to utilize them as opportunities for expansion into a region where every action counts. A simple infrastructure project domestically undertaken in the High North provides a foothold for later communities to thrive, despite unpredictable water tables- an analysis of bacteria in permafrost awakens concerns of viral outbreaks as well as a deeper understanding of biology and evolution. Biosecurity is national security; land expansion is an extension of sovereignty, and water tables provide life for citizens of a nation, regardless of where they fall within that nation’s borders.

As ice cracks in Alaska, land rises in Russia; flowers bloom and so to does bacteria, exposed to the air once again. The competition of great powers and their interest in a novel region tell a story of greater interest than simply environmental changes and challenges but an overarching connection of institutional fragility. The shifting landscape of what was once a tundra has since bloomed, and with it a unique combination of risks and rewards; what matters most is specifically how these nations play to their strengths and insulate their weaknesses, before more than just the ice cracks.

Notes & References

Notes