Invasion of Ukraine halts scientific exchange in the Arctic

The war that began with the Russian invasion of Ukraine left an important indirect casualty: knowledge. a Stady The magazine published it on Monday The nature of climate change Alert from Loss of data and understanding of what is happening in half of the Arctic territory Since the conflict began in February 2022.

At the beginning of the war:Data, information, visits and cooperation, which had been common until then, between Russian scientists and other nationalities stopped flowing“Says the Spaniard Efren Lopez BlancoOne of the study's authors is a researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark.

Lopez Blanco points out that since the beginning of the conflict, non-Russian researchers have not been able to access 17 out of 60 scientific stations located in the high Arctic latitudes, and vice versa. The Arctic includes parts of Russia, the United States, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, the Lapland region of Sweden, Norway, Finland, and the Svalbard Islands, as well as the Arctic Ocean.

In short, the two-year scientific exchange was “paused” at a vital time for understanding processes such as the impacts of climate change and mitigation in the Arctic, an area of ​​the planet that is warming at a rate of between two and four. times faster than the global average, which could have global consequences.

“Since the beginning of the invasion, we have only been able to prepare part of the soup, so to speak, and we lack the ingredients to prepare it completely,” explains the Galician researcher.

This lower ability to obtain and study information also translates into scientific conclusions with some bias and into management and conservation strategies for the area based on lower abilities to understand what is happening.

Using sample data from INTERACT (an international network of Arctic research stations) sites located at high latitudes, the authors quantify the potential impact of excluding Russian sites on the perception of change in the Arctic.

The result is that the invasion of Ukraine created a significant “knowledge gap” in the Arctic and, consequently, Lack of scientific understanding of the most vulnerable area on the planet. A gap that affects data such as average annual air temperature, total precipitation, snow depth, soil moisture, plant biomass, soil carbon, and others.

In 2022 a Published study In the magazine Earth and Environment Communications He warned that the temperature in the Arctic has been rising almost four times faster than the global average over the past four decades.

Last year, research based on observations from NASA and European Space Agency satellites and a sophisticated climate model predicted that between 2030 and 2050, there would be the first ice-free September in the Arctic. The researchers explained that if the Arctic continues for several months without ice, climate change will accelerate, as the sea enriched with oxygen from fresh water becomes darker, absorbing more solar energy.

To overcome this current knowledge gap, researchers believe that It is urgent to improve the infrastructure of non-Russian scientific stations and open new ones In places it can provide data similar to that obtained from Russian stations.