Scenes From the New Cold War Unfolding at the Top of the World

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Canada United states

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Louie Palu
Grantee

Canadian soldiers on the ice Sheet near Little Cornwallis Island during a military operation in -57 C weather in Nunavut Canada. Image by Louie Palu. Canada, 2017.

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An examination of the ongoing geopolitical transformation of the Arctic along the old Cold War...

Louie Palu
Grantee

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U.S. soldiers drop over the Donnelly Training Area near Fort Greely, Alaska. In October 2018, the training area hosted some 6,000 soldiers during a war games exercise named Arctic Anvil. Image by Louie Palu. United States, 2018.

On a calm, bright morning in August 2007 a pair of Russian submersibles dropped 14,000 feet to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean and planted a flag made of titanium at the North Pole. It was a bold move, made with drama in mind, and images broadcast around the world of the Russian tricolor standing on the seabed drew quick condemnation in the West.

“This isn’t the 15th century,” said Peter MacKay, then foreign minister of Canada, on CTV television. “You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say, ‘We’re claiming this territory.’”

Frost-faced members of a Canadian aircrew head back to hot meals and showers after enduring a week of temperatures as low as -60°C during an outdoor survival course. Image by Louie Palu. Canada, 2018.

MacKay was technically correct; the Russian stunt held no legal weight. But his rebuke carried a note of petulance, as though he wished the whole thing had been Canada’s idea. Ten years on, MacKay’s reaction is easier to understand. 2007 was, at the time, one of the warmest years on record, and the Arctic summer ice pack—the vast expanse of floating ice that covers the North Pole even through the summer—had shrunk to the lowest levels ever recorded. The frozen polar sea, foil to human ambition for centuries, appeared to be melting, and Russia was staking a symbolic claim on whatever lay beneath the slush.

“The summer of 2007 saw the largest Arctic ice-loss in human history and was not predicted by even the most aggressive climate models,” says Jonathan Markowitz, assistant professor of international relations at the University of Southern California. “This shock led everyone to suddenly understand that the ice was rapidly disappearing and some nations decided to start making moves.”

In the decade since that “shock event,” the Arctic has been transformed by rising temperatures, vanishing ice, and international attention. Countries with Arctic territory—and some nations with no polar borders—have been scrambling for advantage on the Earth’s latest frontier. Entrepreneurs, prospectors, and politicians have all turned north, recognizing that less ice means more access to the region’s rich stores of fish, gas, oil, and other mineral resources.

NATO soldiers and airmen learn how to carve a temporary shelter into drifted snow at the Canadian military’s Chrystal City training facility near Resolute Bay in Nunavut. Image by Louie Palu. Canada, 2018.

Air crews learn how to use emergency flares during cold weather survival training at the U.S. military’s Northern Warfare Training Center in Black Rapids, Alaska. Image by Louie Palu. United States, 2018.

“Predictions about the Arctic Ocean have been wrong,” says Michael Sfraga, director of the Polar Initiative at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. “And now there’s an ocean opening up before us, in real time. This hasn’t happened before.”

But Arctic investment has been uneven, and some nations are vastly outperforming others. Russia and Norway have been the most proactive Arctic nations, according to Markowitz, spending heavily on natural gas and oil infrastructure. Russia’s ice-capable fleet is the largest in the world, numbering some 61 icebreakers and ice-hardened ships with another 10 under construction. Norway's ice-hardened fleet has grown from 5 to 11 ships. South Korean shipyards are busy building ice-hardened cargo vessels, and China has invested billions in Russia’s liquid natural gas network.

The Chinese are more than passive investors, however, and their Arctic maneuvers tend to generate some of the loudest headlines. In 2016, a Chinese mining company tried to buy an abandoned naval base in Greenland. In 2017, the first Chinese icebreaker sailed through the Northwest Passage on a scientific survey. And in 2018, the Chinese government published a white paper outlining its Arctic plans—and its intention to play a greater role in the region.

Six nations—the U.S., Canada, Russia, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark—have land borders above the Arctic Circle. In recent years, the receding ice has allowed increasing amounts of international shipping traffic to move between the Atlantic and Pacific. Image courtesy of National Geographic. United States, 2018.

Other Arctic nations, including the United States, Canada, and Denmark, lavish far less attention on their northern territories. Sfraga and others have called the U.S. a “reluctant Arctic power,” and Markowitz points out that although Canada often talks about raising its northern game, there’s little behind the words.

“National interests are largely a function of income and revenue,” Markowitz says. “What states make influence what they take, and states that make things—like the U.S.—are much less interested in securing Arctic resources. The Russians, on the other hand, don’t make much. They don’t have a Silicon Valley or a New York City and they view the Arctic as their strategic future resource base.”

A long-range radar installation rears up from the tundra in Hall Beach, Nunavut, Canada. The radar is one of 50 unmanned surveillance stations that keep watch over North America’s northern frontier, stretching from Canada’s eastern coast to the west coast of Alaska. Called the North Warning System, the radar line is jointly operated by Canadian and U.S. forces under NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command. Image by Louie Palu. Canada, 2018.

Canadian army Corporal Stewart Hickman keeps watch over two immersion heaters—devices used to melt snow and ice to make water—at an Arctic training camp in Hall Beach, Nunavut. Crucial for survival, water can be difficult to obtain during winter military operations, and large amounts of fuel are necessary to continuously melt snow and ice. Image by Louie Palu. Canada, 2018.

Canadian soldiers disembark from a CC-117 cargo plane during a training mission in Hall Beach, Nunavut. Image by Louie Palu. Canada, 2018.

A U.S. Air Force F-16 refuels over Alaska. The fighter is part of the 18th Aggressor Squadron, a unit that plays the role of an attacking enemy—often Russian—during combat training exercises. Image by Louie Palu. United States, 2018.

By punching a hole through thick pack ice, the U.S.S. Connecticut, a nuclear attack submarine, is transformed into a temporary floating platform during an exercise in the Beaufort Sea. With no bases in Alaska above the Arctic Circle, the U.S. relies heavily on submarines and aircraft to patrol its northern territory. Image by Louie Palu. United States, 2018.

Thick brush, deep snow, and unfamiliar gear, including snowshoes and bulky “Mickey Mouse” boots—so called because they resemble the feet of the famous Disney character—conspire against U.S. soldiers training for Arctic battles at the Northern Warfare Training Center. Image by Louie Palu. United States, 2018.

U.S. Army troops practice defensive tactics at Fort Greely, Alaska. The fort is a launch site for interceptor missiles that are designed to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles—like those North Korea has said it now possesses. Image by Louie Palu. United States, 2018.

A soldier waits by his radio on the tundra near Blue Fox Harbor on Banks Island in the Canadian Arctic. The soldier was part of Operation Nanook, an annual “sovereignty operation,” in which Canadian forces patrol the nation’s northern territory. Image by Louie Palu. Canada, 2018.

The disequilibrium in Arctic approaches has worried some observers and led to news headlines that regularly describe the Arctic as a kind of Wild West, or as a frigid theater where nations will square off in the next Cold War. Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 and China’s ongoing play for military dominance in the South China Sea have intensified anxiety.

Markowitz, who has been tracking military development in the Arctic for years, says that Russia maintains 27 operational military bases above the Arctic Circle, more than double the number it had before the “shock event” of 2007. The U.S., in contrast, keeps just one base in the Arctic, an air force installation on borrowed ground in Greenland. Canada, which is second only to Russia in the size of its northern territory, has only three small Arctic bases.

Canadian and American forces do operate bases just south of the Arctic Circle, though, in Alaska and the Northwest Territories, and Sfraga said both nations are capable of rapidly dispatching aircraft, troops, and submarines into Arctic territory. The two nations are also slowly expanding their cold-weather military infrastructure. Canada is building a naval refueling base on Baffin Island, and the U.S. announced plans earlier this year to re-establish the Navy’s Second Fleet, which will counter Russian activity in the North Atlantic.

In the meantime, Canadian and U.S. forces, along with other members of NATO, continue to regularly train for cold weather conflict. Today, in Norway, NATO opens its largest training exercise since the end of the Cold War—two-weeks of war games involving 50,000 troops from 31 nations. The massive operation, called Trident Juncture, imagines a scenario in which northern Norway is invaded, prompting allies to rush to its defense. The gallery here reveals how extreme even practicing for a war in the north can be.

While the imaginary enemy in Trident Juncture isn’t named, Norway shares Arctic land and sea borders with Russia, and tension between the two nations has risen in recent years. Some observers worry that future disputes between the neighbors over fishing or mineral rights could pull the NATO alliance into a conflict for which it is unprepared.

In the frigid temperatures of the High Arctic, survival means finding shelter—or making your own. Here, at a survival course held at the Crystal City training facility on Resolute Bay on the Northwest Passage, Inuit instructors Jolie Qaunaq (left) and Andy Issigaitok teach soldiers and pilots from Canada, the United Kingdom, and France how to build an iglu from blocks of snow. Image by Louie Palu. Canada, 2018.

Waiting for help during a search-and-rescue training exercise, a Canadian Ranger lies in a pool of melted ice near the Clyde River community on Baffin Island. The Rangers are a volunteer reserve group mostly from Native communities across northern and remote regions in Canada. Image by Louie Palu. Canada, 2018.

Still, the Arctic remains one of the world’s calmer regions, where contact between nations is relatively open and stable. Russia, Norway, the U.S., and five other Arctic countries are all members of the Arctic Council, a group formed in 1996 to encourage communication and cooperation across the pole. Even as NATO forces gather in Norway, the council continues coordinating meetings on Arctic science, environmental issues, and search-and-rescue operations.

Sfraga and Markowitz agree that the Arctic Council, operating outside the military framework of NATO, offers one of the best paths forward for easing strain. Some experts also point to the south pole—where an international treaty has preserved Antarctica “for peaceful purposes only”—as a model for what could be possible in the Arctic.

For now, many military and political analysts consider the Arctic an unlikely battlefield. Global warming has begun transforming the region, but the qualities that have frustrated human ambition and desire in the north for hundreds of years remain powerful.

“Keep moving” is a key principle in Arctic military operations, when anything—or anyone—standing still long in subzero temperatures risks freezing in place. Here, Canadian Captain Wayne LeBlanc and Master Corporal Jeff Valentiate walk north on Cornwallis Island. Image by Louie Palu. Canada, 2018.

“If it came to war in the Arctic, you’d really be fighting two enemies,” Brigadier General Mike Nixon said last year at the headquarters of Canada’s Joint Task Force North, in Yellowknife. “And the more dangerous of them would be the cold.”

Nixon was careful to say that Russia’s Arctic military activity remains well below Cold War levels, and he dismissed the idea of potential land grabs or invasions. The cold is too intense, he said, the ice pack still vast and thick, the polar distances enormous. Planting a flag at the bottom of the sea is one thing. Sending troops across the ice is quite another.

“If someone actually decided to launch an attack over the pole,” Nixon said, “it would quickly turn into the largest search and rescue operation the world has ever seen.”