ARCTIC: Russia’s Ocean Near Miss & more –30th Sep 2025

Góðan daginn from Keswick Village! This is the Rorshok Arctic Update from the 30th of September twenty twenty-five. A quick summary of what’s going down North of the Arctic Circle!

The Russian Arctic narrowly avoided disaster this week. The news agency, The Barents Observer, reported on Thursday the 25th that in mid-September, a non-ice-class Russian oil tanker carrying 1 million barrels of oil to China struck sea ice and got stuck on the north Russian coast. The vessel had to wait days for assistance, but Russian authorities eventually freed it. The ship had no ice shielding and did not request an icebreaker escort, so it ran the risk of disaster should it run into sea ice.

This isn’t the only such near miss recently. Just a few days earlier, a natural gas carrier without ice strengthening was stuck for a week in the Russian sea ice.

Russia is accelerating its Arctic shipping industry, but without taking the safety and health of the environment into consideration.

The Russian oil and gas tankers are braving the sea ice to get to Asia, but there’s still plenty of business in the EU. The news outlet, High North News, reported on Friday the 26th that official EU statistics show that during the first half of twenty twenty-five, EU countries spent almost $10 billion US dollars on importing Russian gas, a five percent increase compared to last year.

Just last week, we covered the EU’s commitment to ending the importing of Russian energy. But these figures show that EU nations have a long way to go before they take actions that align with their words.

Finding oil and gas in Alaska is prompting a struggle but between the state and federal government. On Wednesday the 24th, Sharon Gleason, Alaska’s US District Court judge ruled against the state of Alaska in its eleven-year dispute against the federal government over the size of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge.

The state has tried to expand the size of the Refuge by 20,000 acres (about eighty square kilometers), but not to increase the amount of environmentally protected land. The Refuge was opened up to oil and gas drilling, and if the land got added to the Refuge, it would fall under the jurisdiction of the State government, so it could easily set up oil drilling without needing to go through the lengthy process of getting federal funding.

Gleason ruled that there is no legal basis to increase the size of the Refuge, which had clear boundaries set by the Bureau of Land Management in nineteen sixty.

Speaking of Alaska, on Friday the 26th, Alaska Daily News reported that the federal Environmental Protection Agency has cancelled grants worth $280 million US dollars to Alaska rural communities.

The grants were intended to address many issues that small rural and Indigenous communities in Alaska face, ranging from installing solar panels to reduce energy costs, to helping villages combat damage caused by climate change.

The grant cancellations come as President Trump cancels billions of dollars in climate change and renewable energy initiatives nationwide, saying they are not part of his government’s priorities.

According to a report published by the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network on Thursday the 25th, the Canadian government is also ending its support for clean energy projects in remote communities, with northern Canada most impacted.

As the government looks to cut spending, it is not prioritizing energy projects in the north. Arthur Bledsoe, a senior analyst behind the report, notes that clean energy projects in the Arctic territories are not viable without federal support and that the government shouldn’t abandon making life better for its northern residents.

That’s not the worst news to hit northern Canada this week, as community elders in Pangnirtung, a hamlet in northern Nunavut, declared a state of emergency on Thursday the 25th over the loss of water services in the community. Over 1,500 residents are now completely without water services after the local water treatment plant suffered serious issues with its pipes.

Pangnirtung has asked for assistance from the territorial and federal governments to have emergency water supplies delivered to residents and assist in the restoration of water services as soon as possible.

There’s water disappearing in Sweden too, as Radio Sweden reported on Wednesday the 24th, that scientists tracking the health of Sweden’s glaciers said that between the summers of twenty twenty-three and twenty twenty-four, eight glaciers in Sweden completely melted away, and there are thirty more at risk of the same fate.

These glaciers are crucial for maintaining water supplies across Sweden, and their melting signals that climate change is seriously impacting the daily lives of those who live in the Arctic.

Norway’s glaciers aren’t doing any better. The Barents Observer reported on Thursday the 25th that Norwegian researchers monitoring the twenty twenty-four ice melt season on the Svalbard archipelago have reported the worst melting season they have ever seen.

In the summer of twenty twenty-four, Svalbard lost one percent of all of its ice: over sixty gigatonnes of ice. For comparison, this is almost the same amount the entire country of Greenland lost in twenty twenty-four, despite Svalbard being fifty times smaller than Greenland.

The researchers also looked at ice loss from across the whole Arctic in twenty twenty-four and concluded that last year, Arctic melting raised global sea levels by a quarter of a millimeter.

The record-breaking ice melt in Svalbard is affecting those who live there. On Wednesday the 24th, news agency High North News reported that the government of Longyearbyen, Svalbard’s largest town, has declared three large apartment blocks uninhabitable due to the increasing risk of avalanches. A total of seventy residences are affected, representing five percent of all of Longyearbyen’s housing capacity.

Svalbard is the fastest warming place on earth, and is warning us how climate change can cause daily lives to get harder on very short notice.

Climate change isn’t the only big change coming to the north since the peaceful Arctic is seeing increasing military activity. On Friday the 26th, Petteri Orpo, the Finnish Prime Minister, announced that his government is developing a drone wall (a dense line of remote drones) to run along Finland’s border with Russia.

Finland is working with Poland and the Baltic States which also have a border with Russia, to create a surveillance network that stretches from the high Arctic to southern Europe.

Throughout the Nordic region, a new research project is aiming to protect both nature and Sámi culture. On Wednesday the 24th of September, High North News reported that a Finnish Environmental Institute study called ALAMOT (Adapting Law for Moving Targets) will examine how national parks in Norway, Sweden, and Finland are handling the protection of both nature and Sámi culture.

Historically, Sami communities have suffered when their homelands were declared protected areas closed to human activity. The project will compare how each country’s laws manage environmental protection and Indigenous rights, and develop legal reforms to ensure traditional culture thrives alongside the environment.

Everything in the Arctic needs to adapt to rapid changes, even polar bears. On Wednesday the 24th, Vadim Makhorov, a Russian travel blogger, published an incredible video he took on the remote Kolyuchin Island in northern Russia of an abandoned Soviet base, which has been inhabited by about twenty polar bears.

While the video is cute, it also shows how the disappearing sea ice is causing the natural habitat of the polar bear to decrease, which forces the bears to look for new homes on land.

To see the footage, follow the link in the show notes.

Let’s close this episode with the biggest annual event of the Arctic: Fat Bear Week! The event organizers announced that voting for the competition to crown the fattest brown bear in Alaska’s Katmai National Park opened on Tuesday the 23rd, and will run until Tuesday the 30th. People will vote while the brown bears of Katmai get ready for a long winter hibernation, spending a few weeks catching sockeye salmon to fatten up.

Last year’s winner, Grazer, is an early favourite to win again as the twenty twenty-four runner-up, Chunk, broke her jaw earlier this year.

In twenty twenty-four,1.2 million people from around the world cast their votes. Want to participate in the poll? Check out the link in the show notes!

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

If you are listening to us on Spotify, you can leave comments on the episode! They are private by default, and we won’t publish them. Leave your email if you want us to get back to you!

Adjo