Climate change is making Arctic military operations harder, not easier, researcher warns
A widely held assumption that a warming Arctic will simply open the region up to military and commercial activity rests on a misreading of what climate change actually does to the ice, land and sea, according to a Danish researcher whose work cuts against the prevailing narrative.
In a new policy brief for the Danish Institute for International Studies, Lin Mortensgaard argues that climate change is making operations in the Arctic more complex, not less and that security actors planning for the region risk serious miscalculations if they treat melting ice as a straightforward path to easier access.
“A warming and melting Arctic may make some parts of the maritime Arctic more accessible at certain points of the season, but this is not a guarantee that can simply be applied across the Arctic,” she told Arctic Today.
The brief lays out several types of change reshaping the region at once. Declining sea ice does not translate neatly into open water: ice can appear out of season, or be thinner or absent when it would normally be expected, while the loss of its protective cover can drive storm surges and coastal erosion. As the brief puts it, “to conclude that declining sea ice makes navigation through the Arctic easier is a serious miscalculation.”
The physical state of land and sea is shifting unpredictably too, as ice and frost thaw and refreeze at different speeds, destabilising the permafrost beneath much of the region’s military infrastructure. The topography itself is changing; glaciers shrinking, coastlines collapsing, and permafrost craters opening up, with landslides capable of triggering tsunamis that threaten communities and installations alike.
Even in an ocean with less and thinner ice, Mortensgaard notes, sea ice can still appear unexpectedly and a more open Arctic Ocean means more civilian traffic alongside naval activity.
“I’m not sure that’s easier to operate in for navies,” she said.
The maritime picture is only one part of it. Thawing permafrost across Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Siberia threatens the bases, radars and landing strips built on it, while glacier and ice-sheet melt alters salinity and ocean currents and pushes icebergs into shipping lanes.
“There’s nothing simple about this and no simple formula for understanding how climate change will affect operations in the Arctic,” she said.
The limits of ‘threat multiplier’ thinking
The brief takes aim at the “threat multiplier” framing common in military circles, which treats climate change as something that amplifies existing, known threats. The problem, Mortensgaard argues, is that the phenomenon resists that kind of arithmetic. When she asks climate scientists to define climate change, some of them hesitate or cannot give her an answer — not from incompetence, but because what they study is too multi-faceted to pin down in a single term.
“How should militaries be able to ‘multiply’ with something that the phenomenon’s own experts cannot easily define?” she said.
Greenland sits at the centre of the problem, with the US Pituffik Space Base built on thawing permafrost and a coastline that has seen deadly landslide-triggered tsunamis. Whether that instability is being taken seriously depends on which part of the United States is involved, according to Mortensgaard.
The military’s Arctic engineers and researchers, who have worked on permafrost in Alaska and at Pituffik for decades, are “extremely clear-eyed about the realities of Arctic climate change and just how powerless even the most powerful military in the world is in the face of Arctic climatic changes,” she said.
The current political leadership is another matter. President Donald Trump rejects climate change, and his administration is dismantling US climate science.
“So it’s a full-spectrum of climate deniers to climate realists,” she said.
Planning around the unknowns
Mortensgaard does not argue that planners should abandon the effort to anticipate change, but that they should engage far more closely with the scientists who study it and accept what those scientists themselves cannot yet know. Decisionmakers far from the region, she argues, need to stop thinking of the Arctic as a single landscape that is uniformly melting.
“Climate scientists do not have a god-like view of the Arctic and what is to come,” she said. “What they do have is state of the art knowledge, many years of experience and the best estimates we will get.”
She likened it to Europe, where no one would claim the continent is simply being submerged by sea-level rise. What threatens the Netherlands and Denmark is not what worries Italy, Spain or Greece, and the Arctic, with its distinct geophysical mechanisms and many forms of thawing ice, frost and snow, demands the same granularity.
“So let’s do our best to understand that complexity and all its unknowns,” she said.
