| With the longest Arctic coastline of any country at 15,000 miles, Russia is key to global climate research. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine two years ago has disrupted international research efforts, pausing scientific inquiry as the effects of global warming speed up in the Arctic, writes Chelsea Harvey. Over the past two decades, U.S. and Russian researchers working on either side of the Bering Strait have shared vital information about the heat-trapping carbon dioxide and methane released into the atmosphere by the Arctic’s thawing permafrost. U.S. and Russian collaborators traveled easily to visit field sites and establish monitoring systems. And up until about a year ago, an Alaska-based scientist could still communicate and send funding for fieldwork to a counterpart in Russia. But near the start of 2023, the war in Ukraine caught up with climate science. Fear of crossing a line and being labeled a foreign agent in Vladimir Putin’s Russia chilled research. Permafrost science can handle some gaps in data, but a long-term hole from such a significant area of climate study could be a problem, researchers told Chelsea. “Hopefully the gap will be not that long, and everybody hopes it will be ending soon,” said Alaska-based scientist Vladimir Romanovsky. “But nobody knows.” Warming across the Arctic is happening as much as four times faster than the global average. And Arctic air masses that push south over the United States have an outsize role in shaping the continent’s weather patterns. Other Arctic research has suffered from the war in Ukraine, which began two years ago Saturday. In June 2022, the White House said it would “wind down” scientific and technological cooperation with Russia. The National Science Foundation had funded several projects with Russian collaboration, including studies on the Arctic Ocean, permafrost, melting sea ice, marine transportation, infrastructure development, Arctic wildfires and climate resilience in Arctic communities. Some U.S. universities followed suit, and the European Union limited cooperation with Russian institutes. That left a hole for climate monitoring systems like the INTERACT Arctic network, which has paused about half of its research stations because they are in Russia. Cooperation among Russia, the United States and other members of the Arctic Council, which was created to maintain international cooperation in the remote region, including on climate and environmental research, has gotten rockier. Russia last month threatened to abandon the council “if its activities do not correspond to Russian interests.” And under Putin, Russia has maneuvered to strengthen its position in the Arctic, including striking a 2021 deal with China to jointly develop infrastructure in the region.
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