Glaciers holding massive amounts of water are melting at unprecedented rates, reshaping ocean systems and influencing conditions in the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

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BOISE, Idaho — Scientists across the Pacific Northwest are wrapping up summer research on the status of local glaciers – some of which are melting at record speed and impacting the region.

Melting glaciers can mean much more than rising sea levels – research reveals it also fundamentally changes the ocean’s circulation, temperature and chemistry in way that could impact coasts in the Northwest.

The Earth’s glaciers hold massive amounts of frozen water, and as they melt at unprecedented rates, they are creating unexpected consequences for oceans.

“The ice sheets have these huge amounts of liquid water locked into them. It’s frozen right now, but if it melts, it goes out in the oceans, and that causes sea level to rise,” said Ellyn Enderlin an associate professor in the Department of Geosciences at Boise State University.

Enderlin uses satellite imaging to track how fast icebergs are melting. The meltwater is already reshaping ocean systems and influencing conditions along the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

“Icebergs go out in the ocean, float away – you can imagine their little pockets of fresh water,” Enderlin said. “So, they’re the frozen pockets of fresh water that are drifting out in the ocean, and eventually melt, and they spread that fresh water out”

The ocean’s waters circulate through what’s called the “global ocean conveyor belt,” a system that moves heat from the Equator toward the poles.

“By the time it gets up towards these polar regions, so top of the Earth, bottom of the Earth, it’s really salty. And that salt is actually what makes it dense,” Enderlin said. “It makes it heavy, and so that makes the water sink, and then that drives this global ocean circulation.”

As ocean water moves towards the poles, heat causes it to evaporate, leaving behind saltier and heavier water. The dense water sinks, helping to drive a global circulation system that regulates climate.

But when glaciers melt, they release huge volumes of fresh water, which can slow or even disrupt the flow of ocean currents.

“If we pump out too much ice out into the oceans from Greenland and Antarctica – and depending on sort of where it melts, how it gets mixed in – it can slow down, or actually shut down, global ocean circulation,” Enderlin said.

The shift in ocean flows could have far-reaching consequences for global climate patterns – and the Pacific Northwest is feeling the impact.

Earlier snowmelt and reduced summer streamflow in Idaho are straining irrigation systems in the Boise River Basin, impacting crops.

In Washington and Oregon, shrinking glaciers feed rivers and coastal waters, affecting salmon runs, hydropower and even drinking water.

In early February, during the depths of winter, Twin Otter aircraft belonging to the Canadian military flew over the vast expanse of the western Arctic looking for sea ice. Below, sheets of white extended beyond the horizon.

But the pilots, who were searching for a suitable site to land a 34-tonne (76,000lb) Hercules transport plane a month later, needed ice that was 1.5-metres (5ft) thick.

They could not find any. The teams scoured 10 other possible spots, stretching as far west in the Arctic as Herschel Island, five miles off the coast of Canada’s Yukon territory.

In the end, no site proved suitable for a sea-ice landing area. The north, it seemed, was too warm.

However, that same month, during the same mission, the cold was snarling plans to move soldiers across the tundra. It had grounded transport helicopters. It had broken snowmobiles and other equipment and, at times, spirits. The north, it seemed, was too cold for the materiel the military had hauled up to the tundra.

For generations, the intense cold of the Arctic has served as the bulwark of a military defence of the north. But a rapidly changing climate, defined by extreme shifts in temperature in both directions, threatens to unspool that defence, replacing it with a land and seascape more volatile and far less predictable.

View image in fullscreen Canadian military personnel rest during Operation Nanook, which tests the armed forces’ readiness to fight in harsh Arctic conditions

Over February and March, hundreds of soldiers from several countries gathered in Canada’s western Arctic for Operation Nanook, a military exercise meant to show that allied nations, including the US, Finland, Sweden, Belgium and the UK could “sustain force” in the region, testing cutting-edge equipment in the unforgiving tundra.

In recent months, political leaders have revived longstanding fears that Canada has only a tenuous hold over its northern border. Despite the spectre of hostile nations creeping over unseen borders, however, the biggest threat facing the troops was the freezing temperatures.

The primary enemy is the cold. Whether the bullets are flying or not, that’s the thing that is going to eat people alive Maj Matthew Hefner

“In kinetic fight or a civil response, the primary enemy is the cold,” says Maj Matthew Hefner, senior adviser, Arctic operations for the US army’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in New Hampshire. “Whether the bullets are flying or not, that’s the thing that is going to eat people alive.”

The American, commanding a team of military scientists, combat veterans and Arctic specialists, was in the hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk on the crumbling Arctic Ocean coastline, as part of a community celebration to mark Operation Nanook. Members of Hefner’s international cooperative engagement programme for polar research have brought cold-weather gear to show local people.

The event is also a few miles from where teams have cut triangular holes in the sea ice so Belgian naval divers can plunge into the emerald waters. Visibility extends as far as your arm and the frigid murky waters can disorient even seasoned divers astonishingly quickly.

View image in fullscreen ‘Everything is slower up here,’ says Maj Hefner, of the US army

For those new to the landscape, Arctic veterans say a lack of awareness for the capacity of the cold to degrade and disorient is one of the biggest dangers. It makes plastic as fragile as glass. It confounds the intricate machinery of modern military aircraft.

And at its most deadly, it untethers those travelling in its deepest reaches from reality. Exposed skin can sustain lasting damage within minutes; confusion quickly sets in with hypothermia.

The Inuit who call the land home have pushed the outer bounds of human limits, finding pattern and tempo in a landscape that, to outsiders, is an unappeasable adversary.

That knowledge is a lifeline to Arctic forces that have long acknowledged that tundra is one of the most hostile theatres for warfare conceivable for its ability to render hi-tech equipment unusable.

During Operation Nanook, Hefner’s team went through periods of a cold-imposed communications blackout as their radios and satellite devices shut down, the result of “smart” lithium-ion batteries that will not charge in the cold.

View image in fullscreen The children of Tuktoyaktuk joke with soldiers in the area for Operation Nanook

“Most equipment is metal, and if you touch it without a glove on, your hands go bad. But even if you don’t take your glove off, they’ll get soaking wet because everything’s covered in snow. Then they get really, really cold. And your hands go bad.

“So everything is slower up here,” says Hefner. “I’ve got some guys complaining that we’re not doing a lot of tactical stuff – you can’t do tactical until surviving is second nature.”

Regardless of your opinion on global warming, you will have your own modified opinion when you get out there Lt Col Darren Turner

But the cold, for all its power to degrade, is also a powerful natural defence. In summer, the western Arctic is a boggy, infuriating morass of rivers strewn across the landscape like spaghetti. Enemy forces on the attack would find it near impossible to navigate. In the winter, travel routes open up with few natural barriers.

It has long been the cold, and its power to break machine and mind, that has served as the chief deterrent. This winter, however, the community of Inuvik saw rain in December for the first time in nearly half a century. The drizzle came in the second half of a year that saw a punishing heatwave settle over the town, with the temperatures hitting 35C (95F) more than 125 miles above the Arctic Circle.

This year, more snowmobiles plunged through ice roads – transport corridors built on frozen rivers – than ever before. Hefner’s team also lost two snowmobiles when they fell through the ice.

View image in fullscreen The aurora borealis, pictured between Tuktoyaktuk and Inuvik, both of which are north of the Arctic Circle

“I’ve never experienced this many warm fluctuations in a year,” says Justin Pascal, who lives in Inuvik and is a member of the Canadian Rangers, a paramilitary force of northern reservists drawn from Indigenous communities.

“This year it was jumping between -8C, -40C, back to -8C and then even above 0C at the beginning of the year. Call it what you want, but it’s different than anything I’ve experienced.”

These changes have long been predicted and thaws coming earlier in the year have already expanded travel routes through the north-west passage for cargo and tourist ships.

View image in fullscreen Belgian military divers test equipment in the Arctic Ocean

But they have also had profound effects on the landscape. Thawing permafrost and the subsequent sloughing of land into the ocean means communities such as Tuktoyaktuk are disappearing.

“There’s open water where traditionally there was ice,” Lt Col Darren Turner, joint task force commander of Operation Nanook’s land forces, tells Canadian reservists. “Regardless of your opinion on global warming, you will have your own modified opinion when you get out there.”

The uncertainty surrounding these shifts has confounded local people and military units testing their capabilities in the north.

After a series of reconnaissance flights failed to find suitable sea ice, the military chose to build a landing area on a frozen lake – the first time a Hercules had landed on fresh water. The landing was framed as “enhancing operational flexibility” by giving the plane access to otherwise inaccessible areas.

View image in fullscreen Chinook helicopters are key to moving supplies to remote areas but are also vulnerable to the harsh Arctic conditions

But challenge, and failure, to find sufficiently thick sea ice in the depths of winter highlights a reality military leaders have had to start planning for in earnest.

“Our first level of defence is leaving us,” says Turner.

Sitting on the top floor of his beamed office in Nuuk harbour, where snow is being flung around by strong winds in the mid-morning darkness outside and shards of ice pass by in the fast-flowing water, the chief executive of Greenland’s only shipping company, Royal Arctic Line, says: “What you normally see as easy [setting up operations] in the US or Europe is not the same up here.” As well as the cold, ice and extremely rough seas, the world’s biggest island does not have a big road network or trains, meaning everything has to be transported either by sea or air. “I’m not saying that it’s not possible. But it’s going to cost a lot of money.”

If shipping boss Niels Clemensen were to offer any advice to Donald Trump or anyone else trying to get a foothold in Greenland, it would be this: “Come up here and see what you are actually dealing with.”

But the spotlight on Greenland – and, the shifting focus of the world’s superpowers on the Arctic region as a whole – has highlighted just how poorly equipped for the Arctic environment much of Europe and the US in fact is. Nowhere is this more stark than in the lack of icebreakers – the expensive specialist ships vital for operating in the Northwest Passage and the region more generally.

With its critical position along the highly coveted route – which passes through the Canadian Arctic archipelago instead of the traditional passage via the Panama Canal – Greenland is likely to have an important role to play in its future.

With the potential to slash shipping times between Europe and Asia by thousands of miles – or as much as two weeks – the opening up of the Northwest Passage as the Arctic ice melts is viewed by some as an upside of the climate crisis and one of the main reasons Trump has taken such an interest in Greenland.

“Opening up the Northwest Passage doesn’t mean the ice is gone,” says Clemensen, whose ships (not icebreakers) are used to import and export across the whole of Greenland. “We’re not talking about an all-year-round free passage. The ice is retreating, but it is still there.”

‘The world order could start to evolve from the Arctic’: Trump, thin ice and the fight for the Northwest Passage.

Denmark, which is responsible for Greenland’s defence, does not have a single icebreaker – having retired its remaining three in 2010. Yet the ownership of these specialist vessels has suddenly become what could be a new front in the fight for dominance between the world’s biggest powers – commanding access to everything from shipping routes to search and rescue and minerals. Such is the attraction of Greenland that Trump has not ruled out using military force to get it.

Since Trump’s renewed advances, Copenhagen has said it is preparing for the fact that it may have to purchase icebreakers for Arctic defence. The Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, recently visited an icebreaker in Finland – a country which has several of them. But even if she decided to order a new fleet now, the ships take several years to build.

Greenlandic fishing trawler, Bingo III GR 2-122 coming into ice-choked Ilulissat Harbor, Greenland. Photo by Gordon Leggett / Wikimedia Commons

Russia is by far and away the icebreaker superpower. It is understood to have at least 50 icebreakers – at least 13 of which can operate in the Arctic and seven of which are nuclear – as well as a substantial network of ports in the region. China is understood to have four that are suitable for the Arctic, while new Nato members Sweden and Finland, as well as the US and Canada, all own their own versions of these specialist vessels. There are also a growing number of icebreaker cruise vessels catering to Arctic tourists.

Commercial vessels wanting to use the passage must have icebreaking capabilities as the ice-free window, if it happens, will be as little as three months long. And even in the summer, polar-coded vessels – those, like Clemensen’s, that are designed and certified to operate safely in the harsh ice conditions of the Arctic – are needed. If Greenland’s mining were to take off then icebreakers would be essential to access minerals in the fjords when they freeze over.

Pointing to a big framed map of Greenland hanging on his office wall, Clemensen says they have the Arctic ice drifting down the east coast which closes together so that it has no gaps during the winter and moves south in summer. “That’s multi-year ice. It’s very hard and it’s big flakes. We pass it, we don’t go in and break it with our vessels.”

Then there is the west ice, which comes from the Canadian side starting in November and building up until it closes down as far as Disko Bay on Greenland’s west coast. “When it hits Greenland then it builds up and you’re not able to pass through. That is the situation we are looking at right now and it could go for two to three months. But it depends on wind and current in the sea.”

While you could get through with an icebreaker, to do so would put the livelihoods of coastal communities at risk who go out on to the ice to fish species that include shrimp, halibut, redfish and cod. The same communities also hunt seals, walrus, reindeer and small numbers of polar bear in winter.

Vittus Qujaukitsoq, chief executive of KNAPK, says loss of ice is already affecting the traditional way of living. Photo by The Official CTBTO Photostream/ Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Vittus Qujaukitsoq, a former government minister and chief executive of KNAPK, Greenland’s business association for professional fishers and hunters, says: “Some people think it would be a great help to have icebreakers [in order to help get small fishing boats out on to the water], but not everyone, because they would ruin their way of living.”

Qujaukitsoq says depleting ice and unpredictable weather caused by the climate crisis is already affecting hunting and fishing in Greenland’s rural communities. Carbon emissions are also speeding up the melting of inland ice. “It is affecting our livelihood economically, but also threatening our traditional way of living,” he says. The ice, he adds, must be safe to walk and drive on. “The safety is measured upon the thickness of the ice. In a few short periods we are able to go by car, but most of the traffic is conducted by dog sled and snowmobiles for icefishing.”

If the Northwest Passage were to become busier and icebreakers came through breaking up the ice at inappropriate times, he says it would have a “significant effect” on the Inuit people who live along the shipping route and “pose a threat for our existence long term”.

Johanna Ikävalko, director of the Arctic Centre, says there is “an elevated need for high-performance icebreakers” in the region, but still considers the Northwest Passage a “very risky area for navigating”. If it were to be used to transport oil for example, the ice conditions would pose a “huge risk” even for a routine journey.

A nuclear-powered icebreaker in Murmansk. Russia is understood to have at least 50 icebreakers, seven of which are nuclear. Photo by Sergey Tchernyakov/Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)

She is, she says, fearful for the future of the Arctic, which she predicts will form the basis for which nations become the superpowers of the future. Russia, she adds, has multiple military bases in the Artic near Murmansk which it has been developing for years. “I started to think last summer that the world order will actually start to evolve from the Arctic – and now it’s even more possible.”