Freezing Relations: The Impact of International Tensions on Siberian Permafrost Research
Following Putin’s announcement of a special military operation in Ukraine on February 24, 2022, researchers pulled out of Siberia, stalling research on permafrost, ground continuously frozen for at least two years. At the time, Russia was the chair of the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental group established in 1996 to increase beneficial collaboration, action, and peace in the Arctic region. Arctic Council member states—Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States—have historically rotated leadership of the Arctic Council.
In March 2022—as a result of increased geopolitical tensions due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—the seven other member states on the Council suspended all Council meetings in an attempt to pressure Russia and condemn its actions. Additionally, the European Commission ended financial support and cooperation for all projects involving Russia, and the United States withdrew its scientists. Global climate science has lost key resources without access to Russia’s data, researchers, and Siberian permafrost. Although research continues in other areas of the world, the lack of access to Siberia threatens progress toward combating global warming.
The Basics of Permafrost
First coined by the geologist Siemon W. Muller in 1943 as a shortening of the phrase “permanent frost,” “permafrost” plays a vital role in storing the world’s carbon. While ice is frozen water, permafrost is frozen land containing vast amounts of undecomposed plants, animals, and organic matter. The world’s permafrost is concentrated in Canada, Greenland, Alaska, certain highly elevated parts of the Himalayas, and Siberia. Climate change and increased atmospheric carbon threaten to thaw the world’s permafrost. Although scientists debate the extent to which the thawing of the world’s permafrost has a single “tipping point” at which carbon emissions are irreversible, scientists agree that permafrost thawing is a serious threat in the face of climate change.
An estimated 1.7 million gigatons of carbon are stored within the world’s permafrost—an amount that eclipses the 2,400 gigatons of carbon dioxide that have been emitted into the atmosphere since the start of industrialization in 1850. In addition to carbon, other greenhouse gasses, bacteria, and organisms will be released, posing a threat to humanity. The melting of permafrost has the potential to release deadly ancient viruses and mercury levels, displace almost five million people, upset the balance of ecosystems in the Arctic, and shift the world’s climate. Permafrost thawing is especially dire due to the positive feedback mechanism of warming: as the world warms, more permafrost thaws, releasing more greenhouse gasses, which causes the world to warm further. Since 1978, the temperature of permafrost has increased globally, including in Siberia.
Stopped Science: What has been Lost in Siberia
Roughly 60 percent of Russia’s terrestrial territory is made of permafrost, and nearly half of the Arctic’s permafrost is in Russia. Siberia has historically been a prime location for permafrost research and international cooperation due to the age and high concentration of its permafrost. Unlike other regions’ permafrost, Siberia’s permafrost is continuous and up to 5,410 feet deep. Additionally, Siberia contains the highest amount of yedoma, a type of methane- and carbon-rich permafrost that formed 10,000 to 1.8 million years ago during the Pleistocene. Yedoma is more sensitive to increased warming compared to other kinds of permafrost due to its high ice concentration, and as yedoma melts, thermokarst—the erosion of soil and sinking of land as ice-rich permafrost compresses—occurs, which can severely alter landscapes.
Permafrost research in Siberia has decreased without European and US scientists and funding. The European Union’s International Network for Terrestrial Research and Monitoring in the Arctic (INTERACT) once consisted of 85 research stations around the Arctic. However, INTERACT has put 21 research stations in Russia on pause. All the research done at these stations has been halted completely or continued solely by Russian researchers without EU funding. Similarly, Russia was the original location of the Woodwell Climate Research Center’s US$41 million Permafrost Pathways project, which aimed to better monitor and model the carbon emissions from Arctic permafrost. However, the project has now been relocated to Canada and Alaska.
Direct collaboration between Germany and Russia at Russia’s Samoylov Island Research Station in the Siberian Lena Delta has similarly been paused following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) in Germany, the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St. Petersburg, and the Melnikov Permafrost Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Yakutsk have been collaborating at this station since 1998 and collecting core samples since 2006. In 2021, researchers associated with AWI found the oldest recorded sample of permafrost (650,000 years old) in a Siberian village.
The halting of Siberian permafrost research has exacerbated existing issues in collecting data from this region of the Arctic. Compared to data from other permafrost regions, many researchers consider data from Siberia biased. A study published in Nature Climate Change found that permafrost data collected from INTERACT stations in Siberia are an inaccurate representation of permafrost changes in the region. Due to their tendency to be in warmer and wetter parts of the Arctic with less soil carbon and vegetation compared to the Arctic on average, the data collected by these stations may underestimate true carbon emission levels.
Before the war, efforts had begun to improve data quality. In October 2021, President Vladimir Putin approved a US$21 million project to construct 140 30-meter-deep permafrost monitoring stations across Siberia. However, the data from this project are currently inaccessible. Without access to Siberian data, researchers are forced to estimate or approximate at times, fostering a skewed view of global warming in Siberia.
Pivoting from Siberia: the Continuation of Research Outside Siberia
Historically, Arctic research has been defined by collaboration. Many permafrost researchers have established personal and professional connections across country borders. However, due to the political climate, these relationships of scientific collaboration have been severed or weakened. The scientific loss has been felt beyond permafrost research. Ecologists, geologists, oceanographers, biologists, and researchers in countless other fields have suffered without access to key collaboration and data in Russia. Arctic science has had to adapt, pivoting away from Russia to focus on Canada, Norway, Sweden, Greenland, Finland, the Faroe Islands, and Iceland; meanwhile, Russian collaboration has increased with China. Researchers are making do with the resources they have, but the isolation of Siberia has put Arctic science further behind.
An example of this pivoting is the United States’ increased investment in Alaska. One project is a US$11 million new research building, funded by the US Department of Defense. This building is an addition to Alaska's Permafrost Research Tunnel Facility—which has been operating since the 1960s—to improve core sample analysis. The new facility will enable in-house laboratory processing of permafrost samples and improve real-time data tracking.
Similarly, many researchers are increasing investment in permafrost measurement methods that are less intensive and reliant on fieldwork. Field researchers have attempted to circumvent Siberia by turning to similar climates or—in the case of projects involving sites in Russia and other countries—shifting their focus to non-Russian regions. For example, the Nunataryuk project—which ran from 2017 to 2023 to investigate Arctic coastal impacts of permafrost thawing—removed its site in northeast Siberia and focused more on its other regions of Canada, Greenland, Svalbard, and the Beaufort Sea. Other permafrost projects have been unaffected since they were constructed without Russia, including the FluxWIN project, which ran from 2020 to 2024 to investigate seasonal variations in greenhouse gas emissions in Finland. However, as a whole, the lack of access to Siberia and its data has forced Arctic scientists to rethink their approaches.
What the Future May Hold
Researchers are now attempting to integrate new strategies to monitor permafrost and prevent its further melting. Researchers with the European Space Agency’s Climate Change Initiative (CCI) project are surveying Siberian permafrost from space through snow- and land-cover satellite observations and indirect measurements of land surface temperatures. However, without access to on-the-ground measurements, it can be difficult for researchers to obtain accurate data. Nevertheless, the CCI surveys have been able to map the cover, temperature, boundary, and thickness of permafrost globally, including in Russia. These results show that from 1997 to 2019, areas of northeast Siberia have warmed at a rate greater than 0.2 degrees Celsius per year, which is the most extreme rate of all the permafrost regions.
NASA has conducted similar research relying on satellite data through projects like its Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) focused on Canada and Alaska. Likewise, the French-German Methane Remote Sensing Lidar Mission (MERLIN)—to improve Arctic methane tracking through satellite data—is on track to launch by 2028. Other satellite projects from around the world are in development as well. Many scientists plan to use artificial intelligence to enhance the quality and efficiency of their research.
The Arctic is estimated to be warming between two and three times faster than the global average. As of 2024, the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is 50 percent higher than during the Industrial Revolution. Atmospheric temperatures in the Arctic continue to increase, and scientists agree that permafrost will continue to thaw without significant intervention to combat climate change. In 2020, the Arctic Institute estimated that if the global temperature were to rise by three degrees Celsius, 30 to 85 percent of the Arctic’s top permafrost layer would likely thaw. Despite this threat, it appears unlikely that scientific relations between Russia and its former European collaborators, the United States, or Canada will resume until the end of the Russo-Ukrainian War. In February 2024, Russia paused its payment of annual dues to the Arctic Council and has no public timeline for if or when it will resume its payments.
Arctic research will remain in limbo as long as current geopolitical tensions between Russia and other Arctic Council member states persist. Although permafrost research and other collaborative Arctic projects will likely continue—all parties have some incentive to prevent the complete melting of permafrost—the future is uncertain, and cooperation will likely be split between 1) Russia and China and 2) the United States, Canada, and other Arctic Council allies. The exchange of data, ideas, and research among these countries will be integral to preventing the loss of permafrost and its exacerbating effect on climate change. Still, time will tell how the loss of collaboration between Russia and other Arctic Council member states will affect the long-term future of permafrost and climate change.