ARCTIC: Denmark Against the US & more – 6th Jan 2026

Hei from Oakley! This is the Rorshok Arctic Update from the 6th of January twenty twenty-six. A quick summary of what’s going down North of the Arctic Circle!

Happy New Year from around the Arctic!

While we hope for a year of peace and prosperity, Greenland looks like it is in for another year of political conflict. On Thursday the 1st, Mette Frederiksen, the Danish Prime Minister, used her New Year’s Day address to defiantly stand firm against Donald Trump’s plans to annex Greenland.

She delivered a strong message but it wasn’t enough to deter further provocation from the US. Just a few days later on Saturday the 3rd, Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, posted an image to social media of a map of Greenland covered in a US flag, captioned with the word Soon.

Within the current US Arctic borders, rural Alaskans could soon see a big boost to their healthcare possibilities. On Monday the 29th of December, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced it had received $50 billion US dollars in federal funding to support rural health programs. Alaska will be granted the second-highest funding package of any US State, below only Texas, receiving over $1.3 billion US dollars over the next five years.

This marks the single biggest healthcare investment in Alaska’s history, and aims to turn a fragmented health system into something that Alaskans across the state can rely on.

Meanwhile, the Russian Arctic is using more illegal means to move money in the north. According to the shipping news agency, gCaptain, Russia’s Arctic shipping lanes have become a corridor for a global shadow fleet of sanctioned oil and gas tankers. In twenty twenty-five, one-third of all marine traffic using Russia’s northern sea route were part of this dark fleet, which sails without insurance, ice protection, and GPS tracking, making them a serious health hazard for the environment and other vessels.

Russia once tried to advertise the northern sea route as a legitimate shipping lane for the world’s traffic. However, with sanctions and war harming Russia’s international standing, the country is using the Arctic to make money any way it can.

To know more about this story, check out the Rorshok Ocean Update with the link in the show notes!

The number of ships in the Arctic isn’t the only thing rising. On Tuesday the 30th of December, the Icelandic Met Office reported that Iceland recorded its hottest Christmas Eve ever, with the eastern town of Seyðisfjörður reaching almost twenty degrees Celsius, about sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, much higher than the national average December temperature, which is normally around freezing.

Iceland had a twenty twenty-five of temperature records, with a May heatwave causing ninety-four percent of the country’s weather stations to set new highest ever heat levels. After a twenty twenty-four of volcanic eruptions and a twenty twenty-five of heat records, Iceland will hope for a much calmer year to come.

Life is getting tough in northern Norway too. According to a story by state broadcaster NRK published on Thursday the 1st, the northern regions of Finnmark and Troms are vulnerable to food shortages, and only have about a week of food stocks available in case of an emergency.

The Arctic Norway simply doesn’t grow enough of its own food, and a project by the Fridtjof Nansen Institute, a major research body in Norway, is looking into which vegetables can thrive in the north to alleviate this problem. Potatoes and root crops seem to be the way forward, but Norway also needs to improve supply lines to ensure its northerners don’t get cut off in a state of emergency.

Norway’s polar bears might struggle to find food soon as well. According to an article on NRK from Friday the 2nd, two of the major seal species on the islands of Svalbard, the ringed and bearded seals, have declined in the past year.

Two reasons have been identified: First, the melting of sea ice, which reduces the number of places that the animals can use to raise their young and hide from predators. The other reason is the recent increase in walruses on Svalbard, which outcompete the smaller seals for the same fish, and have even been known to eat seals.

Interestingly, harbour seals have seen a large population increase; they thrive in the open ocean rather than on the sea ice, and are taking advantage of Svalbard’s rapidly melting ice.

Amid changes in Norway’s north, keeping the smallest cultures alive can be very hard. In an essay published on NRK on Thursday the 1st, journalist Ingvild Vik wrote about the fight to save one of Europe’s most endangered languages, Kven, spoken by the Indigenous Kven community in Northern Norway.

Speaking Kven was banned in some places in Norway from nineteen thirty-six to nineteen eighty, and the number of speakers suffered a severe decline as a result. However, recent momentum is giving hope of a revival. Only Tromsø University offers a Kven language course, but it has seen a sharp increase in applicants in recent years, and the government is funding Kven language classes for a small number of school children every year.

To read this essay, freely available and written in Norwegian, check out the link in the show notes.

All this talk of life being so hard in the Arctic raises an interesting point in Canada: why are northerners paid so much? In a report published by Canadian broadcaster, CBC, from Monday the 5th, the average incomes across Canada show that the three Arctic territories have the first, second and fourth highest average incomes in the country. The Northwest Territories tops the list, with a median household income of about $75,000 US dollars, compared to the national average of $54,000.

However, Nunavut, The Northwest Territories, and the Yukon also top the poverty rates nationwide, with Nunavut measuring an over forty percent rate. The reason for all this is the high cost of living in the north. Wages might be a little higher than average when compared to the south, but when a loaf of bread costs $7 US dollars, saving money becomes almost impossible.

On another note, on Thursday the 1st, Swedish newspaper SVT wrote that the world's first autonomous forestry robot has been developed by Luleå University of Technology, in northern Sweden. The unveiled prototype has been developed by the Arctic Off-Road Robotics Lab, which hopes to create a fleet of robots that can work alongside a single human to safely and efficiently work in Sweden’s northern forests.

That’s not the only invention revealed this week. An article published on Canada’s broadcaster, CBC, on Saturday the 3rd said that the research organization, Polar Bears International, is developing what it calls a Bear-dar, a fixed radar system designed to specifically detect and warn communities about approaching polar bears.

The first of these was installed at the Eureka weather station in remote Nunavut in August, due to increasing polar bear activity at the station. Now Svalbard is looking to test one out next winter, though the hefty price tag of over $40,000 US dollars means it might be an expensive Christmas next year for Svalbard.

Let’s close this edition with Viking history in Greenland. According to the Greenlandic research organization, The Arctic Hub, on Friday the 2nd, scientists will soon explore a possible Norwegian Viking ship that could have sunk in Iterlassuatsiaat, western Greenland.

A construction company might have discovered the Viking shipwreck when it accidentally dug up some walrus tusks that had been painted red, which was a Viking practice of marking tusks for sale. There has never been a viking shipwreck discovered so far north in Greenland, so if the suspicions of a wreck are true, this could reveal a great deal about the history of viking activity in the Arctic.

Aaand that’s it for this week! Thank you for joining us!

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