Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic, Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds, Yale University Press, £20

The frozen Arctic is liquefying. What was once reliable solid sea-ice in the 1970s and 1980s is no longer. By the 2030s, the Arctic may be seasonally ice-free. Nowadays, Greenlanders might use a boat to go fishing in winter rather than dog sleds. As it says in Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic, this is ‘the end of an epoch’.

The authors – Mia Bennett, who is associate professor of geography at the University of Washington, and Klaus Dodds, professor of geopolitics at Royal Holloway – quote another professor, Dirk Notz, who specialises in the cryosphere (the frozen parts of the world, later described in the book as something that is ‘quickly becoming a mirage’). Notz believes that ‘by volume, only a quarter of Arctic sea ice is left’. To drill the facts home to a general readership, rather than a scientific one, sometimes the authors lean on easy-to-understand analogies: ‘Greenland lost close to a total of 4,000 gigatonnes of ice between 1992 and 2018 – enough to bury Miami in a kilometre of ice.’

At the heart of Unfrozen is this question: does the Arctic have a future, and, if so, what does that future look like? It is an incredibly difficult question to answer – taking in resource exploitation, subsea technologies, melting glaciers, political uncertainties, and the fact that over 50 per cent of the land north of the Arctic Circle falls under Russia’s jurisdiction. There, Vladimir Putin is partly powering his war chest with investments from the country’s Arctic oil, gas and mineral resources, while rusting Soviet infrastructure quietly continues its damage: ‘Pipelines choke the lands of reindeer herders while toxic tailings and emissions from mines, many of which trace their origins to the Soviet Union’s Gulag prison camp system, seep into northern rivers and skies.’

Given such challenging environmental conditions, it would make sense for even long-term enemies to work together in a ‘science without borders’ sense, but this isn’t the case. When Russia annexed Crimea in the spring of 2014, by the summer of that year, the G8 (a forum of leaders from the world’s advanced economies) had become the shrunken G7, and their annual meeting took place in Brussels, without Russia at the table, rather than in Sochi as planned. It was then, with Russia increasingly isolated, that Putin’s ‘turn to the East’ (povorot na vostok) intensified, specifically towards China for investment and export markets. China itself is also keen to become a polar power. The country opened an Arctic research station in 2003 on the Norwegian territory of Svalbard and is building icebreakers, some of which were built domestically.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, there was some unity in respect for public health among the Arctic states – the US, Canada, Denmark (by way of Greenland), Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia – all of which, as the authors point out, ‘are far newer entrants to the Arctic than the region’s Indigenous Peoples’. During that period, indigenous representatives, along with policymakers, mounted a regional response to the outbreak. The largest expedition in the Arctic’s history took place, combining 600 people from 80 institutions in 20 countries, with scientists drifting with the ice pack to study it. ‘As the virus shut borders across the rest of the world, circumpolar cooperation breathed new life into Arctic exceptionalism.’ It all collapsed with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022. Since the invasion, ‘at Arctic conferences, security has replaced climate change as the topic de rigueur’.

For centuries, humans have tried to conquer the ice, and now there is simply ‘less and less to overcome’. And this is resulting in unexpected ramifications. It is difficult to effectively police a region with such harsh conditions and numerous borders. Transnational crime networks are taking advantage: mammoth ivory is being dredged out of the Russian permafrost (their defrosting carcasses appear from melting permafrost soils – an unforgettable image) and are shipped to Hong Kong and China; human trafficking gangs are exploiting vulnerable communities in the Arctic, and Russian oil makes its way via shadow fleets. Though smuggling, the authors point out, is nothing new: ‘In 1885, US customs discovered and seized approximately 150 kilograms of undeclared (though at the time, not illegal) opium onboard the steamer Idaho as it was sailing from Alaska to San Francisco.’

Unusually, this is a book written by not one but two experts, and while it is not always clear whose voice it is on any particular page, apart from the occasional foray into the third person, which then jars slightly (‘In 2021 when Mia visited’), it really doesn’t affect the text at all. The subject is so vast and complicated – demanding both depth and readability – that this is a case of two authors being better than one. And while there is something slightly daunting about being met by several pages of abbreviations and acronyms – from AADIZ (Alaska Air Defence Identification Zone) through to the more familiar WWF (World Wildlife Fund) – suggesting scholarly research rather than a book you might settle down with for the afternoon, the overall reading experience is grimly fascinating and feels utterly vital.

There are plenty of brilliant David Attenborough-style facts sewn through. Who knew that the Arctic had ground squirrels? Or that when the snow melts, they emerge from their burrows, ‘raising their super-cooled bodies from a near-catatonic -3 °C – a temperature lower than that of any other mammal’. Or that the Sámi people believe that the ‘aurora shimmer with the souls of the dead’. Or that thawing permafrost is making the surface of the tundra appear like Swiss cheese, or that the trees are moving in the Polar Urals in Russia, ‘spruce, larch and stone pines are advancing higher up the mountains…’

Then there are the marine mammals being trained by Russia and the US for reconnaissance, ‘cheaper and longer lasting than battery-powered UUVs [unmanned underwater vehicles]… and rarely taken for spies’. A sad contrast to the image of the Inuit who, out hunting, would plunge wooden oars into the ocean to listen for whale song, a natural sonar.

Unfrozen includes more than you’ve ever likely wanted to know about the Arctic, as well as many things you probably weren’t yet worrying about but should (such as the increase of marine heatwaves). It is not enough that we know that change is coming to the Arctic, and at speed; we need to act and we need facts because ignorance makes way for destruction, as the authors make plain: ‘Since society… has not yet exercised the responsibility to act by reducing carbon emissions, sea ice is carrying on with its rapid melt.’