On Svalbard in Norway—A few years ago, Nil Rodes was tracking a remarkable phenomenon high above the Arctic Circle: hundreds of underwater methane seeps erupting like chimneys from the sea floor of a fjord here on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and Rodes, a marine geologist at the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS), hoped to map the seeps in order to learn how much methane was escaping into the atmosphere and whether warming Arctic waters were accelerating the process. But in 2024, the Norwegian government began to deny requests from Rodes and others to conduct high-resolution seabed mapping on Svalbard, citing unspecified security concerns.
“It’s so frustrating. A Norwegian institution with a Norwegian ship cannot collect data in Norwegian waters,” says Riko Noormets, a UNIS marine geologist whose permits for teaching cruises and long-running studies of glacier-driven seafloor changes were denied. “A lot of research is now jeopardized.”
The tensions stymieing the UNIS geologists reflect broader changes unfolding across Svalbard, a jagged, ice-cloaked archipelago consisting of nine larger islands and thousands of islets perched between mainland Europe and the North Pole. For centuries the islands, encompassing an area roughly the size of Latvia, were a no-man’s land, inhabited mainly by reindeer and polar bears whose ancestors arrived on drifting pack ice. Today, Svalbard has fewer than 3000 human residents but is home to scientific facilities operated by more than a dozen countries, including China, India, and Russia. Many are clustered at Ny-Ålesund, a research outpost on the largest island, Spitsbergen, that Norway promotes as a symbol of collaborative Arctic science.
Researchers have long journeyed to Svalbard to study everything from glaciers to the northern lights. But in recent years the archipelago has become especially important to science because it provides a front-row seat to some of the fastest warming on Earth; since 1991 the region’s mean annual air temperatures have risen at roughly seven times the global rate—and twice the Arctic average.
Even as climate change boosts Svalbard’s scientific value, however, rising geopolitical tensions in the Arctic are making research more difficult. In its National Threat Assessment for this year, Norway’s Police Security Service warned that Svalbard is “especially exposed” to Russian spying, and that “China will try to use research as a gateway to Norwegian territory in the High North.”
Given those concerns, it’s not surprising that the Norwegian government has begun “exercising a firmer grip on Svalbard,” says Mia Bennett, a geographer at the University of Washington and editor of the Cryopolitics blog. Scientists say the government is requiring tighter coordination with authorities and alignment with Norway’s research priorities, and imposing stricter access rules—a trend widely interpreted as part of a broader effort to reinforce sovereignty. The sterner atmosphere has “created fears for some people whether they will still be able to do the science they want to do,” says Clara Hoppe, a phytoplankton ecophysiologist with the Alfred Wegener Institute.
DUTCH EXPLORER WILLEM BARENTSZ put the archipelago on the map in 1596 while searching for a Northeast Passage, but it soon became a destination in its own right. Whalers began to use the unclaimed islands as a staging ground, and by the 1900s coal was the attraction.
A mining boom in the early 1900s sparked negotiations to settle competing national claims to the territory. The resulting 1920 Svalbard Treaty granted Norway sovereignty while establishing an “equitable regime” to ensure Svalbard’s “peaceful utilization.” Under the accord, citizens from 49 signatory nations don’t need visas to live, work, and conduct research on the archipelago.
The treaty’s architects anticipated Svalbard’s scientific value, calling for agreements governing research. During the International Geophysical Year in 1957, Polish scientists established a research base on the Hornsund fjord on southern Svalbard that continues to do critical work, especially in glaciology. And after 21 men died in an explosion in a coal mine near Ny-Ålesund in 1962, “the town pretty much shut down” for a few years before Norway resurrected it as a science base in 1967, says animal physiologist Geir Gotaas, who leads the Norwegian Polar Institute’s (NPI’s) research program at Ny-Ålesund.
Svalbard’s geography had a special allure during the Cold War. The islands occupy a sensitive position near submarine sea routes long surveilled by NATO and Russia. And Svalbard’s proximity to the North Pole makes it indispensable for aurora science and Earth observation, allowing ground stations to have nearly continuous contact with polar-orbiting spacecraft. Ten nations now maintain year-round labs at Ny-Ålesund. “Countries felt obliged to be there because if someone else is flying the flag, they’ve got to have their presence there, too,” says UNIS biogeochemist Andy Hodson.
On a frigid day in late April, Jack Kohler steered his snowmobile past the last research building in Ny-Ålesund and stopped to load his rifle. The safety precaution is mandatory for anyone leaving the station perimeter, in case they encounter a polar bear. The rifle is to be used in extremis; Kohler, an NPI glaciologist, also packed a flare gun as an initial bear deterrent.
Kohler gunned his way up Austre Brøggerbreen Glacier, where for decades he has chronicled how climate change is transforming Svalbard. More than 2000 glaciers cover more than half of the archipelago’s land area. Most are relatively small—dwarfed, for example, by Greenland’s vast ice sheet. As a result, they respond faster to short-term swings in temperature and ocean conditions. Kohler thinks of Svalbard “as kind of a mini-Greenland” where many of the same processes are unfolding, but in a more accessible setting. “We’ve got everything from big tidewater glaciers to little cirques, and we can hit them hard and cheap,” Hodson says.
All are losing ice, and the pace is accelerating. Five of Austre Brøggerbreen’s largest melt years have occurred in the past decade. And Kohler and colleagues have reconstructed nearly a century of change by comparing a trove of photos of 1578 Svalbard glaciers—shot from Norwegian scout planes during mapping expeditions in the late 1930s—with more recent images. The images revealed valleys once filled by ice now occupied by bare rock, streams, and newly formed lakes. Altogether, the team reported in Nature in 2022, Svalbard’s glaciers shed about 15% of their volume between 1936 and 2010.
Then came 2024. During that year’s exceptionally warm summer, Svalbard’s glaciers lost 62 gigatons of ice—more than Greenland, which is 50 times larger, Kohler and colleagues reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last year. A major 2019 report, Svalbard 2100, had predicted pronounced climate effects on the archipelago over the coming decades. “We’re seeing these changes now,” says Michael Retelle, an Arctic geologist at Bates College who teaches at UNIS.
Two decades ago, oceanographers also began to document a surge of warmer Atlantic Ocean water pushing deeper into Svalbard’s fjords. “There was a massive shift with a lot more warm waters flowing further north than in the past,” Gotaas says. The warmer waters reshaped the food web; northeast Atlantic cod, capelin, and haddock have largely supplanted polar cod, once a keystone species in Svalbard’s waters. “Some organisms cope with that, others not so much,” Gotaas says. Glaucous gulls, for example, “eat just about everything, so they’re doing reasonably well,” he says. But Brünnich’s guillemots, another seabird, are struggling.
These days the ocean warming trend—dubbed Atlantification—often keeps Isfjorden, the “ice fjord” off Longyearbyen, Svalbard’s capital and biggest settlement, ice-free through winter. And as the sea ice retreats, Svalbard’s polar bears, like their kin elsewhere in the high Arctic, are venturing into areas they once avoided—and stalking humans as they would prey. “They’re sneaking up on people, doing what they would typically do when they are out to catch a seal,” Gotaas says. “We’ve been lucky. We haven’t had any serious incidents with researchers yet.” (Since 1971, polar bears have killed six people on Svalbard; the most recent fatality, in 2020, was a Dutch campsite employee.)
The weather, too, has gone haywire. During the polar darkness, drenching rains followed by sudden freezes sometimes seal vegetation beneath an impenetrable icy shell. “That’s really bad for reindeer, especially when many animals are competing for the same food,” says Mathilde Le Moullec, an ecologist with the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources who collaborates with NPI colleagues on Svalbard. These rain-on-snow events, she says, trigger periodic starvation and population crashes in Svalbard’s abundant herds.
WHILE THE CLIMATE WARMS, a geopolitical chill is setting in. In 2022, a fiber-optic cable linking Svalbard to mainland Norway was severed mysteriously, disrupting communications and fueling speculation about sabotage by foreign agents, perhaps from Russia. Developments since then have added to the tension. In March 2025, a Russian politician proposed renaming Svalbard the Pomor Islands, invoking historic Russian links to Arctic hunters and fishers. And last fall, Russian military drills included amphibious landings on Franz Josef Land, 400 kilometers east of Svalbard. Some analysts interpreted the exercises as simulating an attack on Svalbard.
Russia’s chief foothold on Svalbard is Barentsburg, a coal-mining settlement where since 1986 it has maintained a few lab buildings. Prior to the Russia-Ukraine war, the handful of Russian scientists based there often collaborated with Norwegians and others on work ranging from glaciology to polar bear tracking. But the war severed such collaborations, and economic sanctions on Russia have hammered Barentsburg’s mining business.
Russia is now emphasizing scientific collaboration with its allies, including China. Officials recently announced plans to build new lab facilities at Barentsburg and Pyramiden, a former mining settlement. The new labs could host scores of scientists from those countries. The centerpiece of the expanded complex, planned to open in October, will be a decommissioned nuclear icebreaker moored off Barentsburg and converted into research space, according to Andrey Bryksenkov of the Russian State Hydrometeorological University.
China’s activities have also unsettled Norway and its neighbors. In its 2018 Arctic strategy, China described itself as a “near-Arctic state” and emphasized its treaty rights to conduct research on Svalbard. The Chinese government has said it wants to join forces with like-minded nations to build a “polar silk road” involving communications infrastructure and Arctic shipping routes.
A backlash soon unfolded across the European Arctic. In Finland, the government cited security concerns in pulling the plug on a collaboration with China on a space research center in Lapland and blocked a bid by the Polar Research Institute of China (PRIC) to lease a regional airport for Arctic flights. Iceland blocked plans to expand the China-Iceland Arctic Science Observatory, opened in 2018, after members of the U.S. Congress, in a 2024 letter to the secretaries of State and Defense, raised concerns that joint research at the space physics site could enhance military radars back in China. A light detection and ranging, or lidar, system for now is off the table. “China had ambitions to have a lot more [instruments] than is there already,” says Halldór Jóhannsson, executive director of Arctic Portal.org, a nonprofit in Iceland that organizes international cooperation.
The U.S. legislators also took aim at China’s Yellow River Station in Ny-Ålesund, which the Chinese Arctic and Antarctic Administration (CAA) has leased since 2004 for PRIC scientists, primarily, to do fieldwork in glaciology, ecology, and atmospheric physics. In their letter, the lawmakers noted that physicists from the defense-related China Radio Wave Propagation Research Institute have also worked at the station, and “at least some” of their projects “may have significant military uses,” including sharpening China’s capacity to “detect and neutralize enemy satellites and missiles.” Officials from CAA, PRIC, and the radio institute did not respond to requests for comment.
By the time the U.S. lawmakers took notice of Svalbard, the Norwegians and Chinese were already embroiled in a dispute. In the summer of 2024, a cruise brought scores of flag-waving Chinese tourists to Ny-Ålesund, including one visitor dressed in military attire. Norwegian officials protested. Months later, King’s Bay, the Norwegian company that manages Ny-Ålesund, asked China to remove a plaque that identified its lab as a Chinese facility—and also a pair of 2-ton white marble lions guarding the vermilion building’s entrance. “The stone lion is a potent symbol of blessing, protection against evil, and good fortune,” says PRIC glaciologist Hu Zhengyi.
In June, the plaque was replaced with a sign showing the logos of Ny-Ålesund Research Station, Kings Bay, and CAA. And the lions are gone. “It’s a genuine pity,” Hu says.
Norwegian authorities insist they are not singling out China. They have told other countries to remove plaques identifying a station’s nationality, on the grounds that Ny-Ålesund is a single Norwegian research center hosting international partners, says Tiril Vold Hansen, a political scientist at the Nordland Research Institute.
Yet Norway is asserting its own stewardship—to some scientists’ dismay. After Norway added the word “Norway” to the official Ny-Ålesund research station logo, Hansen says, “Some foreign scientists viewed this as part of a broader assertion of national control.”
Recent Norwegian policy papers call for increasing the country’s scientific presence on Svalbard. Some foreign researchers see a related trend in new regulations governing access to the archipelago’s wilderness. Beginning next year, anyone venturing beyond settlements—including scientists and tour operators—will generally be required to hire a registered Norwegian guide. Implementation details are still being worked out, and officials have indicated that experienced researchers may be able to obtain exemptions.
Even so, the proposal has alarmed some scientists. Hiring guides “would become prohibitively expensive for many research groups,” says Catherine Larose, a microbial genomicist with the University of Lyon who studies antibiotic-resistant bacteria on Svalbard. “The big frustration at the moment,” Hodson adds, is the uncertainty surrounding how the new rules will be applied. “It’s unsettling,” says one longtime Svalbard researcher, who believes the measure is aimed less at Western scientists than at China and Russia. “Norway seems to be trying to stop them from getting away with doing whatever they want.”
Norwegian officials, however, insist the tighter oversight is intended to bolster science, not constrain it. A Svalbard Research Office established earlier this year, Gotaas says, is tasked with ensuring that research across the archipelago aligns with Norway’s scientific priorities for Svalbard. That effort is particularly important in Ny-Ålesund, he says, where atmospheric and climate experiments depend on maintaining as pristine an environment as possible (see sidebar, below).
Norway is also encouraging researchers to share infrastructure and data more widely, arguing that greater openness will strengthen science throughout Svalbard. “Open access is a key priority for Norway,” Gotaas says. Institutions that fail to make their data available to the broader research community after a reasonable period of exclusivity risk losing access to Norwegian-supported facilities, he says.
A fierce wind kicked up choking clouds of dust as Hodson, the biogeochemist, trudged across the Adventdalen valley near Longyearbyen. A warm spell had stripped the landscape of much of its snow before temperatures plunged and sealed pools of meltwater beneath a skin of ice. Tethered to his waist that April morning was a sled loaded with equipment for sampling liquid burbling from pingos—small hills fed by groundwater rising through the permafrost.
That water is laden with methane. Hodson and colleagues estimate that springs across Svalbard release about 2300 tons of methane a year, and researchers fear such unheralded releases could amplify Arctic warming in a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
Similar concerns are emerging from Rodes’s work on underwater methane flares. He found hundreds, including many reaching the surface, when he analyzed hydroacoustic data collected in just two fjords in 2015. In places the seabed resembles a lunar landscape, pockmarked by craterlike depressions believed to mark earlier methane eruptions. Rodes hypothesizes that networks of buried faults create pathways for methane to reach the seabed.
In addition to probing how climate change is affecting the seabed methane releases, Rodes hopes to understand why seepage sites can migrate over the course of weeks. But achieving those goals would require repeated bathymetric mapping—which is now off-limits in territorial waters deeper than 30 meters.
Norwegian officials have not publicly explained the restriction. But specialists note that detailed seafloor maps can reveal terrain features useful for navigation by submarines. “I don’t think the Russians are shy about doing their own mapping,” Noormets says. “Presumably the restriction applies to them as well, but how would you enforce it?” Growing interest in the Arctic’s seabed mineral resources may also be behind the restrictions; off Svalbard, Norway has already cataloged deposits of cobalt, manganese, nickel, and rare-earth elements.
For scientists, the bathymetric ban comes at an unfortunate moment. Some Svalbard glaciers that empty into the sea are surging, or accelerating dramatically, creating a rare opportunity to study the coursing ice. During a surge, glaciers bulldoze sediments and reshape the seafloor over mere months. “Now is the time,” Noormets says.
But because of the ban, Noormets and others have been forced to move most studies beyond Svalbard’s territorial waters, where permits are not required. Last year, Rodes and colleagues found a bay south of Longyearbyen that was shallow enough to allow mapping. Working from the sea ice, they lowered hydroacoustic equipment directly above methane seeps. Some bubbled continuously. Others pulsed rhythmically every few seconds, whereas still others switched on and off over minutes. The intriguing patterns suggest methane emissions may be far more variable than assumed—another reason Rodes hopes he can ultimately gain permission to map the deeper fjords.
“The Arctic is changing faster than we can fully understand,” Kohler says. “This is exactly the moment when we need more cooperation, not less.”