The roots of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine go back decades and run deep. The current conflict is more than one country fighting to take over another; it is — in the words of one U.S. official — a shift in “the world order.”Here are some helpful stories to make sense of it all.
Lack of data about conditions in the Russian Arctic is already hampering climate science, and will cause ever-growing gaps in our understanding of how climate change affects the fastest-warming region of the planet, scientists warn.
The Arctic is warming four times faster than the Earth as a whole. And Russia has more Arctic territory than any other country. But since Russia invaded Ukraine, it’s becoming increasingly complicated for Russian weather scientists to collaborate or share knowledge about situations in the vast country. icy areas.
That includes basic measurements of temperature and snowfall in the Russian Arctic, as well as more sophisticated details about greenhouse gas emissions and what’s happening to plants and animals in the region.
Excluding this data from weather models makes it less accurate, and the challenge will get worse over time, a new study warns. “By neglecting Russian sites, we reduce our chances of mitigating the negative consequences of climate change,” says Efren Lopez-Blanco of Aarhus. University of Denmark, one of the authors of the paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
To build weather models that can anticipate what will happen in the Arctic in the future, scientists need measurements of the entire Arctic. If the available knowledge is concentrated in a few places, such as Alaska, Canada and Scandinavia, and excludes Russia’s vast expanses of Arctic land, the models will become increasingly inaccurate, according to the study.
“It’s a huge landmass,” says Ken Tape, an ecologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. “We can’t forget about her. “
Western scientists have denied beavers
Tape is already seeing the negative effects of the war on his area of research. He studies beavers, which are moving into the tundra and are often unpopular neighbors.
“It’s like an intruder,” he says. The positive connotations, you know? Especially if fish is a vital resource for you, you’re going to be very skeptical of someone coming in and blocking streams full of fish. “
Scientists like Tape are reading where beavers are showing up and trying to determine how far the population will move north, at what speed and at what scale. These studies can help local communities manage the animals: beavers have been known to turn streams into peatlands, for example. For example, it can affect water quality for nearby humans.
The studies are also vital because when beavers build dams, they can disturb frozen ground, which can release greenhouse gases trapped in the melting snow.
A few years ago, Tape helped create the Arctic Beaver Observation Network, so that scientists from across the Arctic could collaborate and share data. But with the invasion of Ukraine, the dream of Russian collaboration on the project came to an end, he says. “We have an assembly at the end of February,” he says, “and it’s going to be Alaska, Canada, and Scandinavia. No one will come from Russia. “
In addition, Western scientists no longer have to delineate sites in Russia, he says. Instead, they have to rely on what they can see from space, on satellite photographs of beaver dams. “You can do a lot of things from space, but you have to have boots on the ground to check what you’re seeing,” Tape says.
For some, it is a reminder of Cold War science.
For Russian climate scientists who started their careers in the Soviet Union, the current situation can feel eerily familiar.
“In the afterlife, as in the afterlife of the Soviet Union, knowledge of this part of the world is also limited,” says Vladimir Romanovsky, a Moscow-trained permafrost expert at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. In the mid-1970s, young scientists had virtually no contact with Western collaborators, he recalls.
But when things opened up in the 1990s, he says, his box exploded. “During this period, a lot of knowledge about Russia’s permafrost regions could be acquired,” he recalls. International scientists have begun collaborating with Russian scientists to examine the evolution of permafrost.
And the effects of the studies were explosive. Permafrost is the permanently frozen surface found in the Arctic. As it melts, it creates enormous disruptions to the infrastructure built on top of it, causing road deformations, cracks in structures, and damage to pipes. .
It can also release massive amounts of planet-warming gases trapped in the icy earth. Scientists now warn that virtually all surface permafrost could disappear from the Arctic by the end of the century.
But today, knowledge about permafrost is drying up, Romanovsky says.
In the past, he and other Western scientists obtained temperature and soil measurements from Russian research centers. “There may be no data this year,” he says. If this continues into the future, eventually there may also be an effect on our understanding [of permafrost changes]. “
Romanovsky is also concerned about the fate of young Russian scientists who play a vital role in long-term meteorological studies in the region. “It’s very discouraging,” he says. In the end I think we will speak boldly again. “