Aboard an icebreaker, a writer got a closer look at the Arctic's 'Sea Change'

npr ^ | October 14, 2026 | Dave Davies

[BenLurkin]

As polar ice melts in the Arctic, shipping lanes are opening up, making the region a new zone of superpower competition. Writer Rana Foroohar got an up-close look aboard the USS Healy, a Coast Guard icebreaker. She says that traversing the North Pole by ship — once a "largely conceptual" route — is now becoming a "real possibility" for two or three weeks a year.

"If you are taking one of these Arctic routes, you can save as much as 40% of the time it would take you to go from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and depending on the price of oil, that's a heck of a lot of money," she says. "China and Russia together are clearly trying to make the top of the world an area over which they have the most interest."

In her new book, Sea Change: America's New Great Game in the Arctic Circle, Foroohar makes the case that the "High North" may become as critical to world shipping as the Suez or Panama canals. But she also notes that beneath the Arctic waters are large deposits of oil, natural gas and rare earth minerals, as well as underwater cables, which carry a large part of the world's intercontinental information flow.

"Undersea cables have become a real touchstone in wars and conflicts around the world," she says. "So you are seeing a race to lay down new cable, and who can get there fastest, and then who can potentially commercialize and even militarize areas where those cables have been laid."

"Rusting rivers" are increasingly common in the Brooks Range of northern Alaska, the result of thawing permafrost. The orange color is caused by naturally occurring iron, but it also often indicates elevated levels of heavy metals.

Foroohar describes the Arctic Circle as one of the few areas of the globe where countries and companies can still "hunt" for territory and "duke it out potentially with rivals." And she predicts more conflict in the coming decades as the region continues to warm.

"There is going to be more commerce done through this area. There is gonna be greater military interest in the area, and all of that matters because it really is in America's backyard," she says. "I just think that everything in the High North is going to be higher priority for America in the future."

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TOPICS: Weather
KEYWORDS: arctic; arcticocean; china; energy; greenland; naturalresources; russia; trade

[ComputerGuy]

The NC coast looks just like it did 75 years ago when I was 5.

[Tallguy]

Same reason melting ice in your glass does not cause the glass to overflow. Only melting ice on land (think Siberia, Alaska, Greenland) contributes to a sea level rise.

[Tallguy]

Icebergs have a mass and a center of buoyancy like everything else. Ice has a center of buoyancy slightly above its center of mass. They displace more liquid water than they contain. Same reason a ship floats.

[Paal Gulli]

To mock the Global Warming chicken littles, in April of 2007, when Arctic sea ice allegedly was at low ebb, BBC’s Top Gear crew (the automotive “Three Stooges”) drove 4WD Toyota Hilux trucks across the sea ice from Resolute Bay, Cornwallis Island, Canada to within one mile of where Magnetic North had been in 1996.*

They never came across open ocean anywhere. It was ice everywhere.

*It had moved 150 miles by 2007.

https://topgear.fandom.com/wiki/Polar_Special
https://tubitv.com/tv-shows/200038842/s09-e07-polar-special
https://www.bilibili.tv/en/video/4789925260952064
https://pluto.tv/us/shows/top-gear-special-polar-special/
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWpVvJ8o7wzzYRY-boMcK3B6NJ5k6Lc-G

[samiam5]

The volume changes, the mass does not.

[House Atreides]

“ In fact, frozen water displaces about 5% more than its liquid
equivalent. Therefore, if all the sea ice in the world
melted, sea levels would go down.”
*******************************************************

True if counting only the portion of the sea ice that is at or below water level. Would welting the portion of the sea ice that is ABOVE water level before the melt OFFSET, in whole or part, the change caused by melting of the portion of the ice below the water level?

[T. Rustin Noone]

I think you question is the correct one. If the “land” ice caps
covering Antarctica, Greenland, Northern Canada, Scandinavia, and Northern Russia melt, the net effect would be quite bad for people with waterfront properties. It's Nature's balancing act. During the last Ice Age, the sea levels were hundreds of feet lower than they are now...think of the continental shelf as the sea boundary. If you were standing on what is now the beach on Tybee Island, Georgia, you would have to walk 50 miles east before you reached the Atlantic Ocean. Now, 50 feet is all you need to get your toes wet.

[WKUHilltopper]

We learned about the result of that experiment in the first grade.