"Not being able to have scientific collaboration with Russia is a huge problem"

“Russia covers approximately half of the Arctic. And the Arctic is a place on the globe that is warming the fastest. So not being able to have scientific collaboration with Russia is a huge problem," Monica Winsborrow, Associate Professor at UiT The Arctic University of Norway.

“I’m trying to set up a project to better understand how ice sheets covered the Russian territory in the past. Now we can only use satellite images. But what we really need is to go to Siberia and acquire rock and sediment samples there”.

“The Barents Sea is where we expect the sea ice to be lost completely first across the Arctic ocean. And half of the Barents Sea is Russian territory, where we have very little opportunity now to acquire data.” Monica Winsborrow.

“Between about 60 to 70% of Russia is on permafrost, and most of it is in the Arctic. Permafrost thaw has the potential to be a really huge emitter of greenhouse gases that impacts climate change”, Rolf Rødven, The Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP).

“That is why we need to talk to local communities, for example, of Russia’s Yamal peninsula: how does climate change impact reindeer herding? Has the migration pattern changed? Is it possible to cross rivers or is the ice too thin now?" Rolf Rødven, AMAP

War stopped cooperation

There is a problem for scientists in Norway when it comes to exploring the Arctic. Data on the Russian part of the Arctic is hard to come by. Scientific cooperation between Russia and Norway has been on hold for almost three years: 

“The Research Council of Norway strongly condemns Russia's military attacks on Ukraine… 

With a few exceptions, all bilateral cooperation between Norwegian and Russian authorities has been put on hold,” the Research Council stated in March 2022.

“The government does not introduce an academic boycott of Russia, but …. all the agreements between Norwegian and Russian institutions … should be put on ice,” the Norwegian Government wrote on the same day. 

Physical oceanographer Arild Sundfjord from the Norwegian Polar Institute has been studying the Barents Sea and the Arctic Ocean for many years. Polar bears - are an essential part of the ecosystem there. The Norwegian Polar Institute's monitoring of this top predator used to involve close cooperation with the Russian side. 

For example, while Norwegian scientists have been counting polar bears, taking their blood samples and fitting them with GPS trackers in the Svalbard archipelago, Russian researchers have been doing the same in Franz-Josef-Land and Novaya Zemlya. 

“Then scientists from both sides would meet to exchange data and produce reports and publications,” Arild Sundfjord explained to the Barents Observer, “But this cooperation is cancelled now after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I fully understand the decision made by the Norwegian government.” 

The problem scientists in Norway highlight is that all data exchanges stopped two and a half years with the full-scale invasion. 

Meanwhile, Arild Sundfjord points out that some of the data from Russia is still needed for Norwegian researchers to understand how climate change is affecting top predators such as polar bears: 

“Today it's difficult to say how the polar bears are handling the reduction of sea ice in the Arctic. Their distribution is affected both by the lack of sea ice and by changes to the snow cover on the land, as they need snow on land to have cubs in winter”.

The trend that experts see is that as the ice in the west of the Barents Sea region melts faster, polar bears are migrating more to the east of the Barents Sea region, meaning that more and more ice-associated species could potentially end up in the Russian part of the Barents Sea.

“We don't anymore have reliable estimates of the full size and the distribution of the polar bear population in the whole of the Barents Sea domain. One of the reasons why we don’t have a full picture - we don't have access to the Russian data,” Arild says, 

but adds that for him as an oceanographer the situation is not that bad:

 “For climate-related parameters in the ocean, we get a lot of information from satellites which record sea-ice cover on a daily basis through the entire Arctic. With the satellites, we also get data about the ocean temperatures and the algae growth in the ocean - the basis for the local ecosystems”.

But whether it is climate change, polar bear monitoring or details of the ocean's surface, the data from Russia's coasts - the Kara, Chukchi and East Siberian seas - would be invaluable: 

“We hope that Russian institutions are still doing much of the work that they used to do. At some point in the future, we can combine the data together,” Arild told the Barents Observer.

Dr Benjamin Boyes, a palaeo-glaciologist at the University of Sheffield, UK, told the Barents Observer that he still maintains email contact with three colleagues in Russia: 

“Because of the whole Ukraine war situation, the official UK government advice is we shouldn't travel to Russia, so, therefore, scientists would not. Nobody will support or insure us to be able to go to Russia,” Dr Boyes told the Barents Observer. “But if we don't have data from a huge region of the Earth, how can we be sure that we’re doing the necessary research to understand the future climate change?” 

Benjamin did his PhD research in 2019 on Russia's Arctic Kola Peninsula. He says the opportunity to do fieldwork helped him to better understand what the glaciers looked like thousands of years ago: 

“After a more consistent mapping approach to the region, I was able to identify that it was not two, but just one ice sheet covering the Kola Peninsula” Benjamin said. “That is now a more accepted view of how the ice sheet evolved during the last glaciation (ice age between 40 to 10 thousand years ago).”

Bureaucrats talk

The ice moved in February 2024 this year, when cooperation with Russia resumed on the Arctic Council, meaning that scientific bureaucrats of all the 8 Arctic nations, including Russia, started talking. While the political cooperation in the Arctic Council is still on hold. 

The Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) is part of the Arctic Council and coordinates a pool of more than 800 experts. Based in Tromsø, its executive secretary, Rolf Rødven, focuses on climate change, among other issues.

“We need to understand how climate change is affecting villages all across the Arctic. On the Russian side, on the Canadian, in Greenland, in Alaska and so on… To do that, you need to have experts on the Russian side,” Rødven says. 

Rolf, who was born in Kirkenes next to the Russian border in the Arctic, has seen the relationship between Russia and Norway change over the decades: 

“When speaking about the collaboration with Russia - we are not naive to the political situation, but being able to keep track of the long-term challenges for the Arctic - we would need to cooperate with Russia”.

Rolf added that monitoring radioactivity in the Arctic was also a key reason for continuing cooperation with Russia: 

“We've been working together with Russia on the radioactivity monitoring since the very beginning of the 1990s”, Rolf said. “We are currently working with Russian experts on the next radioactivity report”.

Although the scientific cooperation with Russia has officially resumed, Rolf says that AMAP is still working out exactly how this cooperation will continue.

- Does it mean that, for example, you would send some members of your team to Russia for fieldwork or a meeting, let's say, next week?

“The restriction right now makes it hard to send someone (to Russia) this week. But we do this step by step. At the moment it's more realistic to have Russian research done nationally so that Russian researchers handled it. We just have to see what the future brings…”, Rolf Rødven answered the Barents Observer.