The Arctic Is Changing Faster Than We Understand

In 2005, reporter Neil Shea’s editors at National Geographic magazine sent him to a remote Arctic inlet in Canada’s Nunavut territory to investigate how climate change was impacting wildlife.  That sojourn — call it a baptism by ice — was Shea’s first Arctic encounter. Guided by curiosity and compassion, Shea returned some twenty times over two decades, camping, trekking, and living alongside the people and animals of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Norway. He reveals his experiences and impressions in Frostlines: A Journey Through Entangled Lives and Landscapes in a Warming Arctic.

Shea explores this vast region where migrating caribou, walruses, seals, polar bears and muskoxen face a rapidly changing landscape. As the climate transforms the Arctic at an alarming rate, ice melts earlier, the freeze comes later, and tundra and taiga, once secluded and remote, are being hardened by railways, pipelines, and roads. 

Today, the Arctic is pocked by mines, its water blocked by dams, and animal migration routes are disrupted, impacting the Inuit, Tłįchǫ, and other Indigenous peoples whose cultures are based on relationships with their environment. In a region that has been colonized and monetized by industrial and political interests from the south, it’s becoming impossible to predict when a caribou herd will return or when the ice will harden. Indigenous cultures, identities, and livelihoods are being eroded, and with them the knowledge of how to live not within, but as part of a world of snow and ice.

Shea ventured 250 miles (402 kilometers) above the Arctic Circle to Kirkenes, six miles from the Russian frontier and a tense border region where Norway, Finland, and Russia meet. Through his writing, he considers an Arctic where true security means preserving relationships with nature and the ability not just to keep cool, but to stay cold, in a world growing continuously warmer.

On Feb. 27, Neil Shea spoke with Jon Letman for Inkstick Media. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

In your book, you quote Inuit author and advocate Sheila Watt-Cloutier’s book The Right to Be Cold — “What is happening today in the Arctic is the future of the rest of the world.” What happens when we’re not cold? 

To imagine a world where cold does not exist is unfathomable to me. There will always be cold, right? But to imagine that winter is something that we in the south will experience less and less until maybe at some point in my children’s future, it just doesn’t really happen anymore is really disturbing. And for Sheila Watt-Cloutier, her entire world and her ancestors’ world, her relatives’ world, is built in that cold. Cold is what makes her understanding of community and kinship possible. So it’s not just us who may lose something great if cold disappears.

You wrote, “The Arctic I saw in 2005 no longer exists.” What did you mean?

The ice has changed so much since that time. In 2006, scientists had what they call a shock event, when the ice receded to one of its lowest points on record. Since then, the ice has come back some years, but we continue to see ice decrease in the wintertime and a lower summer extent, too. That world of ice and cold changed significantly, and the animals and people are doing different things. The ice is not as predictable as it once was.

What change has struck you the most? 

Like any of us who live below the Arctic Circle, the ways it registers in my life are very different than someone who grew up there. When I hear that grizzly bears are crossing the sea ice and coming onto a northern island that they’ve never been seen on before, that sounds messed up. In Alaska, beavers are moving north, and they’re melting the tundra because they build dams, and the dams attract sunlight. Those stories tend to stick in my mind, but talking to elders in Indigenous communities, they have a much different metric on what it looks like. To them, the ice is not predictable anymore. The routes that they used to take over the frozen sea can’t always be trusted. Spring comes earlier, and the sea doesn’t freeze until much later. 

When you visited Goa Haven, a small Canadian Arctic community in the Northwest Passage, what did people tell you about how increased ship traffic is affecting them?

They’re on part of the new tourist route that’s been opening up over the last ten years or so. More and more cruise ships are coming into the Northwest Passage. I don’t think big boats can pull directly into the harbor so they anchor offshore and send rubber boats in with tourists. What people have described is tourists walking around, and they don’t really know where they are. They don’t know how the town fits into the larger story of the Northwest Passage. 

Maybe tourists will bring more money into the community eventually. I’m not sure that’s happening yet because it doesn’t have the infrastructure to service tourists. There’s this fear that the boats will just cruise over the top of town. There won’t be any contribution to the local community. It’ll be like it was before, where the white explorers were cruising past. 

You said that when you’re camped on a frozen lake, no one wants to talk about climate change. You wrote that your questions “congealed like frozen fat.” Can you explain? 

When I first started going up north, I was still trying to fulfill a role that I thought was important, to ask the questions we ask down south: how do you feel about your world melting around you? They’re not necessarily bad questions, but in the wrong context, they sound like an observer who just came up and is trying to scientifically inspect life, but that’s never really how it is. I was learning on that trip to ask fewer questions and to try to make my questions better and more responsive to the people I was with. One of my hosts told me one day, “Our way of learning is not to ask so many questions.” It was his very polite way of telling me to knock it off. 

When you’re camped out on a frozen lake, nobody wants to hear the term melting, because that is almost like calling a bad omen, right? Your life depends on this ice not melting. So, to talk about it in those terms in that situation was just sort of tone deaf of me. 

You describe Inuit recalling ‘the igloo times’ and loss of their way of life. How is cultural knowledge being preserved as elders pass away?

There’s a renewed interest to try to preserve and use traditional ways of surviving in the north, and that includes language, trying to get the kids to — if not be completely fluent in Inupiat or Inuktitut — then at least be conversational, understanding the language and vocabulary, but also skills like hunting—being able to butcher a caribou or use a seal in the traditional way. One thing I describe in the book is in Anaktuvuk Pass in Arctic Alaska. One day, I met two teenage hunters as they dragged a dead caribou into the classroom, put it on cardboard, and left it there overnight. The next day, the entire school assembled around the body of this caribou, and an elder from the community led a workshop on how to butcher the caribou using traditional tools and how to name the different parts of the caribou using the traditional language. 

Did you see people using new technology combined with traditional knowledge?

I did see places where technology had been brought into northern communities to introduce new things. In Goa Haven, they have shipping containers that have been turned into greenhouses. They’re experimenting with how to grow vegetables using wind and solar power in a community completely isolated from modern food systems. And I was with Indigenous people who use drones to look at caribou, monitor fish movement, and record themselves while they’re hunting. 

There’s a program to measure ice densities and track ice safety called SIKU. Hunters would affix this device to their sled and then drag the sled across the sea ice with their snowmobile. This was a way to keep the community safe by monitoring the thickness of the ice so that you could travel back and forth safely between different communities. 

The Arctic is frequently in the news these days. When you hear people talking about the Arctic in terms of geopolitical struggle, control of resources, national security, and defense, what goes through your mind?

The conversation has shifted, and I think a large part of it is that global warming has changed things up there. But also, Donald Trump has turned up the volume on this idea that there are places in the Arctic that you can still just take. I don’t think there’s any unclaimed territory in the Arctic. There are places that countries are disputing who owns it, but those are proceeding through normal international legal compartments like the International Court of Justice. 

It’s not like China and Russia are about to take Greenland the way Trump once framed it. Russia is not trying to take parts of Canada. It’s not really threatening Arctic Alaska. That conversation feels very overblown to me. It seems pretty clear that politicians are not basing their discussion in reality. They’re trying to drum up some other kind of feeling for some other end.

Recently Trump described Greenland as a cold, poorly located “large piece of ice in the middle of the ocean.” Other US politicians have spoken very disparagingly of Greenland. What would you like them and others to understand about this part of the world?

I’d like any audience to know that Greenland belongs to the Indigenous Inuit people. They have lived there for a very long time. Not even Donald Trump is contesting that. He’s saying that he wants to take it from them. I think we’re well past the point where anyone can try to justify taking land from Indigenous people. The future of Greenland rests with the people of Greenland. They’ve made it very clear that they do not want to join the United States. 

Your book examines how different peoples converged in Greenland. First, the Tuniit people, then the Norse from Iceland, and later the Inuit who live in Greenland today. What lessons can we learn from those who settled this place?

The thing to think about here is adaptation and resilience, and that echoes in our time. Greenland is a place where a culture has to be resilient. It has to be adaptable, flexible. The Norse did this for a while. They were able to adapt to the harsh conditions and climate change once it began to occur. They were able to change their ways of eating, their ways of living, and their way of hunting. But at a certain point, they couldn’t adapt any further. I think that’s the lesson that echoes most with us today. 

The Norse faced a raft of similar problems, like climate change. Theirs was global cooling, but it was still climate change. It was fast. They were isolated from trade networks and they were being pressed by this new group of people who were moving into their territory. And there might have been a pandemic. There was plague in Europe. We don’t know if it actually came to Greenland. 

Those are all things that we face now in different ways. We have Covid, climate change, and disrupted global trade networks. Can we keep making micro adaptations to survive these problems? Will we refuse to change our culture if that becomes necessary? 

It looks like the Norse refused to change their fundamental identity, and that may be what led them to ultimately die out. You can see us getting into that same problem, right? In America, we want what we want when we want it. Are we willing to tone that down in the face of climate change or extreme political stress? It doesn’t seem like we want to.

In the last chapter of your book, you visit Kirkenes in Norway, on the border of Russia, where you met journalists at The Barents Observer. Are you following changes in that community, and if so, how?

Mostly through reading The Barents Observer. The two guys I feature in the book are still reporting and writing about life up there. They’re increasingly concerned about Russian spies coming in and out of the seaport. Anything Russian has the potential of being compromised. Recently Kirkenes residents marched in support of Ukraine, which obviously would not make the Russians very happy. 

I don’t think anybody’s really concerned that Russia is going to march across the border. They could, but I don’t think that anybody thinks they will. I recently read that quite a lot of the [Russian] Arctic troops had been sent to Ukraine and killed there. So there are not even as many Russian soldiers up in the north as there once were. 

There was a point when the Russians pulled back their strategic bombers and started basing them in the Arctic to keep them safe from the Ukrainians who have figured out how to fly explosive drones toward the Russian airfield. So now the Russian bombers are based up in the Arctic, and they go down each night and bomb Ukrainian cities, and they fly back to the Arctic. This violence is very much connected to the far north, even if we’re not actually fighting in the Arctic itself.

After traveling and writing about these Arctic communities that are quite distinct from one another, what do you see as the throughline connecting these places? 

I think cold is the glue that holds these places together. I don’t know that I necessarily understood that as well when I started writing the book, but now it seems to me to be the thing that threads the top of the world — this idea of cold. I don’t just mean as it’s represented in ice or snow, because that can happen anywhere, right? But this idea of cold binding a place together, sort of physically, mentally, spiritually. That’s one of the few ways I can see that connects a place like Goa Haven in the Canadian Arctic, which is an all Inuit town, to Kirkenes in Norway that has a completely different culture, even though that’s the same latitude. Otherwise, they’re not connected, but the cold is what binds them. If there’s anything unifying, that’s what it is.