After the Thaw

In September 2023, seismic monitoring stations across the world registered a major impact that recurred with startling precision every 92 seconds for nine days straight. What caused this USO, or ‘unidentified seismic object’, no one was quite sure, but speculation quickly grew.

It took nearly a year for seismologists to determine that a massive landslide, triggered by melting glacial ice, had collapsed into an enclosed fjord in a remote part of Greenland, setting off a 200-metre-high mega-tsunami that bounced between the fjord’s high sides for days. Unable to dispel its energy into the ocean, it sloshed back and forth like water in a bathtub, setting off vibrations that registered on monitoring stations all the way in Antarctica.

The Polar north is heating four times faster than the rest of the world, and sea ice forecasts predict that the Arctic Ocean will be “ice-free” by 2050, or potentially well before.[1] Sea ice reflects sunlight, and when it melts it leaves behind darker ocean waters which absorb more solar radiation, accelerating heating. On top of this, when permafrost thaws it begins to decompose, releasing massive amounts of carbon. Despite these potentially catastrophic ecological threats, a steady stream of articles and statements now proclaim that as the Arctic opens up, a promised land is drifting gently into view. In January 2025, the Economist expounded the many benefits of retreating sea ice which they said would bring unfettered access to new mineral reserves, fishing waters and shipping lanes. Speaking at the World Affairs Council of America in late 2024, former lieutenant governor of Alaska, Mead Treadwell, declared that the narrow waterway separating Alaska and Russia is now the “Bering Gate, not the Bering Strait”. While in 2022, Time went one step further: the Arctic, they claimed, would soon be a mild land, the perfect spot to retreat to as extreme weather renders ever larger parts of the world inhospitable and uninsurable.

Depending who you ask, a region of the world that has for so long been considered a periphery is soon to become a centre. For all-in advocates of the green transition, the Polar north is a storehouse of critical minerals; for oil and gas companies, it’s a vast and largely untapped fossil fuel buffet; for geoengineers, it’s a laboratory and frontline in the war against rising temperatures; while for environmental NGOs, it’s an unpeopled and pristine wilderness in need of protection. Few of these versions of the Arctic invite the perspective of the four million people actually living there.

At the centre of surging enthusiasm for a melting Arctic is the spectre of Polar shipping lanes: as sea ice thaws, new sea routes, enthusiasts proclaim, will soon become navigable. Estimates suggest these routes will slash journey times between Asia and Europe by around a third while bypassing key chokepoints like the Suez and Panama canals. Nearly all related port developments needed to make them a reality are, however, at the time of writing, in limbo, but this has done little to stem the rampant speculation about their dramatic changes to the world’s trade geography. Indeed, whatever the reality, the idea of these future routes persists, with deep implications for the present.

For the climate crisis, the implications are twofold. First, the idea of a thawed future works to extend the life of the destructive and increasingly non-viable system of producing things and of organizing our economies enabled by shipping. At the same time, a reassuring narrative of bountiful lands in the process of opening up serves to reduce the urgency of climate action.

The Three Routes

Currently, the passage of a standard twenty-foot container from East Asia to Europe might go something like this: a box (as they are known in the trade) arrives by truck or train in eastern China, home to 7 out of 10 of the world’s busiest ports. There, it is lifted by crane onto a mega-ship and carefully stacked alongside up to 25,000 other metal boxes. The crew then steers the ship out of the port, crossing the South China Sea and through the narrow and shallow Malacca Strait. It then crosses the Indian Ocean, before heading up through the Red Sea and joining the queue for the Suez Canal—or perhaps, given the ongoing Houthi embargo, navigating the southern tip of Africa and thereby adding an extra 10-15 days to the journey and burning an additional 1,500 tons or more of bunker fuel. After arriving in the Mediterranean, it journeys on around Spain, hugging the coast north through the English Channel and on to Rotterdam, Europe’s largest seaport, through which flows some 436 million tonnes of freight every year. All told, the journey takes between 30 and 40 days, during which time the 30 odd seafarers aboard carry out the endless work necessary to keep mega-ships running.

Arctic shipping lanes promise to reduce this journey by around a third. At present, there are three routes in discussion. The first and perhaps best known is the fabled Northwest Passage, connecting the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic through a series of narrow inlets among the shallow waters of North America. This is the route that European colonizers spent 300 years searching for, shipwreck after shipwreck, in their efforts to establish a lane between America and Asia.[2] For much of the year it is rocky, shallow and bound up with sea ice, making navigation extremely difficult, and virtually uninsurable.

The second is the Northern Sea route, or Northeast Passage, which hugs the coast of Russia until it reaches Europe via the Norwegian Sea. Of the three, this is currently the most active, yet transit along the route is minuscule compared with the well-trodden waterways through the Suez and Panama canals: in 2024, just 97 ships made the voyage, primarily carrying crude oil from Russia to China.[3] The route is also part of the Chinese Government’s Belt and Road Initiative in which it is referred to as the Polar Silk Road.

The final is the Transpolar Sea Route, which runs from the Bering Strait clear across the Arctic to the northern coasts of Europe, a straight shot almost right through the North Pole. Of the three, it has the potential to be the most transformative. It is the shortest, and much of the passage lies in high seas, outside of the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) maritime jurisdictions of the Arctic states (US, Canada, Russia, Greenland (or Denmark) and Norway), making navigation through the route politically less risky.[4] Under RCP8.5, the IPCC’s high-emissions climate forecast, some claim it could be a little over a decade until the Transpolar Sea Route becomes seasonally navigable.

Despite this hype, however, only two ships have ever managed to navigate the route, both for research purposes only. Port developments for the Transpolar Sea Route have repeatedly failed to materialize. In Nome, Alaska, a deep-water port expansion backed by the Biden administration was indefinitely postponed after the proposal exceeded the statutory budget limit and the town could not manage the necessary local funding match. Meanwhile in Kirkenes, Norway, port plans fell through after security lobbyists and environmental NGOs decried the investment from Chinese state-owned shipping giant COSCO in a port town just 15 kilometres from the Russian border, citing security and pollution concerns. Thorshofn in north-east Iceland, a similar deep-water project, has been beset by delays and missed timelines.

Alongside port holdups, weather conditions may also delay the arrival of an Arctic shipping boom. Although sea ice forecasts predict an ice-free summer by as soon as 2036, it is important to remember that sea ice does not smoothly melt like an ice cube in a glass of water, leaving behind blue skies, clear waters and plain sailing. When sea ice melts it breaks up into thick floes and icebergs that drift on ocean currents, and warming temperatures may mean dense layers of fog hanging above the water. On top of glaciers, meltwater gushes down through holes in the ice sheets, lubricating their bases and further accelerating the runoff of thick chunks of ice laden with heavy glacial rock. This is the reality of the thawing Polar north: freezing, foggy seas swirling with drifting chunks of rocky ice.

What Logistics Does

There is a standard story about the rise of contemporary logistics, taught by business studies professors and Marxist political scientists alike. That story begins in the 1970s, when a “container revolution” catalyzed by US adoption of containers during the Vietnam war vastly sped up the global circulation of goods, in large part through expanded economies of scale. Whereas the container ships of the 1970s could carry around 500 twenty-foot containers, today they lug upwards of 24,000. As a result, to move things around the world today is far cheaper and requires much less time and labour, which in turn has opened up the world of high volume, low-to-mid value commodities like fast fashion, soybeans for meat production, and furniture.

Some are now challenging this orthodox account. For political scientist Charmaine Chua, for instance, the rise of container shipping is better understood as a “counterrevolution”. In Chua’s account, following a wave of anti-colonial national movements in the 1970s, “containerization” became a convenient technology for maintaining access to the comparatively cheap workers and resources of the Global South. By speeding up and reducing the costs of circulation, the contemporary shipping system allowed companies based in the Global North to move production to wherever labour is cheapest and regulations are low, forcing Global South countries into competition with each other to produce commodities as cheaply as possible.

The world the container made is thus one of a constant race to the bottom on working and environmental conditions, as states seek to lure companies to set up shop in their territory rather than elsewhere.[5] At the same time, this vast planetary system continually facilitates consumption in ever-expanding markets.[6] Many key industries are now absolutely reliant on cheap shipping. This system has also led to dispersed ways of producing things, with parts of finished goods often travelling long distances before final assembly. Shipping has, in effect, expanded the factory beyond the factory wall, rendering the world’s highways and sea lanes 24/7 assembly lines in a global workshop. Today, however, global shipping faces several threats and, in the face of a changing climate, growing constraints; what the promise of Arctic shipping lanes heralds is a route out of these quagmires, and an extension of current patterns of production and consumption far into the future.

Going Big

Today’s mega-ships are colossal. Some stretch up to 400 metres—as long as the Empire State Building is tall. Despite this awesome scale, there are, presently, hard limits on their dimensions. No ship that wants to transit through the Suez Canal can be wider than 48 metres, and no ship wanting to pass the shallow Malacca Strait near Singapore and Malaysia can sit more than 20 metres deep in the water. The shallowness of the Suez became spectacularly visible in 2021 when the Ever Given became stuck for six days, becoming probably the world’s most well-known container ship overnight.

Changing weather is exacerbating these bottlenecks: one of the biggest disruptions to the continuous flow of global trade in 2023 and 2024 was the result of low rainfall in Panama, which meant the Panama Canal Authority couldn’t keep the canal topped up. Even a small drop in the Canal’s water level severely limits which ships can pass through and how much they can carry. In 2023 and 2024, a one-foot drop led to a reduction in cargo volume of around a third. More severe droughts in a changing climate further threaten the Canal, bringing more friction into the world’s sea routes and hindering the passage of mega-ships.

The Panama and Suez canals are also key levers for political contestation. From Egyptian president Nasser’s 1956 nationalization of the Suez Canal, which sounded the death knell for the British Empire, to the recent Houthi-led embargo targeting Israeli-linked ships in the Red Sea complicit in the genocide in Palestine, these lanes are, from the perspective of shipping firms and the trade flows dependent on them, considerable sources of risk.

A thawing Arctic, so the narrative goes, could solve these problems. By opening deep sea routes, the retreating Arctic ice sheets promise to evaporate the physical and political risks of major canals. Shortened journeys enabled by Arctic passage would also reduce fuel consumption per journey, in theory reducing the industry’s carbon footprint—and by extension its exposure to potential legislation demanding the reduction of emissions.[7] In doing so, these lanes make stretched spatial patterns of overproduction and overconsumption seem ever more visible.

A Northern Gold Rush

This is not the first wave of speculation regarding the prospects of a thawing Arctic. The last time, it was kickstarted by the promise of new oil fields. In 2009, the US Geological Survey released a much-anticipated report estimating that 13 per cent of the world’s “undiscovered” oil and 30 per cent of its “undiscovered” gas lay ready and waiting under the Arctic ice.[8] The report spurred a raft of books and reports with titles like The Arctic Gold Rush, Arctic Doom, Arctic Boom and Arctic Opening: Insecurity and Opportunity. As the London-based insurance network, Lloyd’s (which began its life as a forum for insuring slave ships) said soon after, “the combined effects of global resource depletion, climate change and technological progress mean that the natural resource base of the Arctic is now increasingly significant and commercially viable.” That furore quickly died down, partly due to the prohibitive costs of drilling on and around thick ice but also due to its political unpopularity and the scale of direct action that the proposals triggered.[9]

Now, as then, at least some of the renewed speculation about Arctic transit shipping lanes stems for the push for new and politically viable sites for fossil fuel extraction. Establishing and maintaining an oil or gas field in the far north is presently a huge and expensive technical challenge, requiring massive amounts of steel, concrete and gravel, the last of which is particularly hard to procure in the Arctic. But deep-water ports would make it easier and cheaper to do so, as well as to transport fuels elsewhere. Indeed, in a stroke of luck for fossil fuel firms, cargo shipping and fossil fuel extraction share much of the same infrastructure: massive ports where things can come and go, and where enormous ships can be maintained, repaired and refuelled.

The state of extractive operations across the Arctic is moving quickly. The Yamal LNG project in northern Russia, which opened in 2017, is one such gas production facility and port banking on climate breakdown.[10] As seasonal sea ice along Russia’s northern shores retreats, year-round passage of tankers from the port to markets in Europe and China becomes cheaper as tankers do not need to be accompanied by nuclear icebreakers.[11] More still seem to be on their way. This year Norway granted 53 new offshore oil and gas licenses. While Canada and the US remain under a 2016 moratorium on issuing new offshore licenses (despite Trump’s best first term efforts), in 2023 Biden green-lit Project Willow, a massive terrestrial oil project in the North Slope region of Alaska.[12] In the Canadian Arctic, a 2023 accord between the Government of Canada, the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation and the regional governments of the North West Territories and Yukon sought to grant Indigenous peoples more decision-making power and a share of future revenues—indicating that the moratorium may well not last long.

From Periphery to Core

Collective ideas and anticipations about the future are powerful political and economic forces. This is important for those of us engaged in climate politics, who must always contend with a normative common sense shaped by our existence within capitalism. While on the surface they may appear to have little in common, today the Arctic is being framed in strikingly similar terms to the way the Persian or Arabian Gulf was in the 1970s as it transformed global oil production and, in the process, itself. Indeed, since independence from British colonization, the region’s transformation has been explosive: the population of Dubai is now 36 times larger than it was in 1971. 

The Arctic today is increasingly positioned and imagined as a place moving from periphery to centre, a place not just integrating into global capitalism but as the thawing soil for a new round of globalization that may, like the contested development of the Gulf, alter the shape of contemporary capitalism and the world stage on which it plays out. As we ask what the impact of this proposed integration of the Arctic into the global economy might be, it is instructive to remember that in the past thirty years more and more of the oil produced in the Gulf has flowed East, not West—particularly to the factories and workshops of China and East Asia, where it has powered production and been used to synthesize the materials and commodities for the world’s markets.

Polar shipping, much like Gulf oil in the 1970s, promises, to some, an answer to capitalism’s problem of how to secure continued surplus in the near-present, despite a future endlessly destabilized by a present-day excess that continues to trash the planet. This has a further effect: by selling us the narrative of bountiful lands soon to come, the urgency of climate action is in turn reduced in the present. This obstruction is both an assumption and an effect of these imagined futures. At global policy conferences, in the business media and across the glossy pages of ten-year masterplans, the Arctic is presented as capitalism’s backup plan—the consolation prize of a planet in ruin. 

Whatever (or wherever) the Arctic sits in the imaginary of capitalism’s future, in reality it is a place four million people call home, rich in history and biodiversity, where falling glaciers create shockwaves felt across the world, and where conditions will be turbulent for some time yet.

1. Despite the name, an ice-free summer does not imply the Arctic will be totally free of ice. Instead, the United States’ National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association defines it as when the sea ice extent (the area with at least 15 per- cent ice concentration) drops below 1 million square kilometres. At this point, most Arctic waterways would be navigable by ships. For comparison, the 1981–2010 average summer minimum extent was more than 6 million square kilometres.
2. The Panama Canal, which allows transit between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, was not opened until 1914.
3. By comparison, 9,944 ships went through the Panama Canal in 2024, while 13,213 ships went through the Suez Canal, which is very low for the Suez: the year before saw 26,434.
4. An EEZ is a zone of sea that stretches 230 miles from the coast that states have jurisdiction over the resources of.
5. Or in Special Economic Zones: territorial carve-outs that have laxer regulations than the rest of the country. Many factories and ports are located within these.
6. An unlikely illustration of this in the UK is cod. Fish caught in the North Sea is routinely deep frozen and shipped (the long way round) to East Asia, where it is filleted before being sent back to the UK for consumption. Doing this is still cheaper than paying someone on UK or European wages to do it.
7. This would of course only be true if the use of these routes did not simultaneously increase aggregate global shipping and, by extension, the industry’s emissions.
8. These estimates relied on analyses of the geologic properties of Arctic land and seabed near(ish) to the shore. This land is then compared to land where oil and gas are present elsewhere in the world. The estimate was broad, to say the least.
9. Perhaps the most notable of these actions was the 2013 occupation by a group of activists known as the Arctic 30 of an offshore Gazprom drilling platform in Russia’s northern Pechora Sea.
10. “Yamal” means “end of the earth” in the language spoken by the Nenets reindeer herder population, who have lived in the area for over a millennium, and whose lifestyle is threatened by the megaprojects. “Paridenya Syra” is another Nenets word—a new one— that translates to “black snow”, snow darkened by pollution that has settled on the ice around Gazprom’s extractive facilities.
11. Nuclear icebreakers are heavy ships powered by on-board nuclear generators. Russia is the only country to build and operate them. There are 8 in service, and another 4 in construction or ordered.
12. This despite errors in the Bureau of Land Management’s environ- mental review. A legal challenge to this from several groups, including Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic, was recently vacated, allowing the project to go ahead.

Jacob Bolton is a researcher and writer interested in the political economy of logistics. He is a PhD Candidate at the London School of Economics.