From Arctic wargames to 200-year-old whales: the must-read stories of the summer

Welcome back from your summer vacation. We hope you were able to have a digital detox while you were hiking, fishing, foraging for cloudberries or reading in the forest. Now that you have returned, here’s a recap of some of the most-read stories on Arctic Today. We’ve got your back so you don’t miss a thing in Arctic news.

White House names new Arctic ambassador

President Donald Trump has nominated Julia Nesheiwat, a former White House homeland security adviser, as U.S. ambassador-at-large for the Arctic, filling a job that has sat empty for more than 18 months.

The nomination went to the Senate on August 7 as part of a 21-name batch and was referred the same day to the Foreign Relations Committee. The Senate adjourned hours later and returns September 14, so a hearing is unlikely before autumn.

The White House labelled the role a new position, but it is a restoration. Alaskan geographer Mike Sfraga became the first Arctic ambassador in September 2024 and resigned on January 20, 2025, at the change of administration. The post stayed vacant until the fiscal 2026 defence authorisation act, signed in December, wrote it into statute and obliged the administration to fill it.

No, Mr. Trump. Greenland doesn’t need a hospital ship. I should know

Greenland’s system of government provides for basic care for all its residents, as is true in Denmark and other Nordic countries. This is only one way in which its people have a guaranteed, basic standard of living similar to that in other social democratic societies.

Our U.S. standards and norms are so different that it is difficult to imagine how Greenlanders could ever choose to become part of the U.S.

It is obvious to this observer that Greenland’s Nordic society has no need for a helping hand from the U.S. in the form of a hospital ship — or anyone else for that matter.

In Arctic security conversations, there’s a clear change in tone and focus

Military, government and business representatives from across the Arctic gathered for a two-day conference in Stockholm in July. The tone and focus have clearly shifted from past regional security conferences. The conversations were held with a greater sense of urgency. The speakers were almost exclusively military or industry, addressing defense tactical maneuvering and strategy.

I ran into one of our regular Arctic Today contributors, Anita Parlow, and we compared notes. What follows are our joint reflections on conversations on the stage and in the hallways. Chatham House rules apply, so we will not quote or name anyone directly in this commentary.

The town in the way of America’s Greenland oil push

Danwatch’s investigation into a U.S. company’s plans to drill for oil in East Greenland reached the community most affected last week, when Greenland Energy CEO Robert Price travelled to the remote hunting town of Ittoqqortoormiit. Over two days, a town that had armed itself with demands was met with a boss who had very few answers.

Days before Price landed, Ittoqqortoormiit’s roughly 328 residents were invited to a town hall arranged not by the Greenlandic authorities but by Greenland Energy itself. Most residents Danwatch met knew almost nothing about the oil project planned for their hunting grounds.

Left without official guidance, the local committee drew up its own list of six demands in exchange for cooperation: an expanded sports hall, a container gym, an outdoor wellness area with a heated pool, new hunting cabins, a travel fund, and a chartered helicopter flight so residents could photograph their hunting grounds before drilling destroyed them.

How a 200-year-old whale could hold the clues to beating cancer

The bowhead whale is, by every biological calculation, the perfect breeding ground for cancer. It weighs over 80,000 kilograms and lives for more than 200 years — more cells, more divisions, more time for genetic damage to accumulate than almost any other creature on Earth. Yet, it is one of the least cancer-prone animals alive.

“Iceland is in such a strategically important military location that it is unavoidable that these troops continue to be here, both for exercises and operations.”

That was NATO’s supreme commander in Europe, Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, in Reykjavík this week, describing continuous rotations of allied personnel through Iceland for the foreseeable future in remarks broadcast by Icelandic public broadcaster RÚV.

“Although the presence will not be permanent and troops will not be permanently based here, there will be continuous rotations of NATO personnel from across the Alliance, including from the United States,” he said

In an age of geopolitics, who gets to decide the future of the North?

Plans were drawn up. Maps were made. And engineers were calculating costs. The new railway would link Finland’s Rovaniemi with the port of Kirkenes, high up in Norway, as well as reshape northern logistics by carrying goods from  Europe all the way to the Arctic Ocean. There was only one problem: many of the people living along the route had never  been asked what they thought of it.

For veteran Arctic writer Markku Heikkilä, this now-abandoned railway project characterizes a much wider problem. With the Arctic increasingly viewed from afar through the lenses of security, critical minerals and geopolitics, decisions are too often being made from the outside in.

“The Arctic is not some object far away,” Heikkilä says. “It’s a place where four million people and many other species live their lives.”

Inside NATO’s bet on multi-level Arctic wargaming

Militaries have tried for decades to build a wargaming framework that links the strategic, operational, and tactical levels into one coherent picture. It has never scaled. Every attempt runs into the same wall of cost, time, and the sheer burden of coordination needed to get the right people in the right rooms at the right moments. That wall is now cracking.

For the first time, lower barriers to entry for simulation technology and the rapid incorporation of artificial intelligence have opened a path to a multi-level wargaming framework. The world operates in a widening gray zone, one that some experts call the opening phase of World War III, in which understanding how the levels of war connect is no longer optional. A framework that can do that, both at an affordable cost and repeatable, is what NATO Systems Activities Concept-219 High North Scenarios for Wargaming and Analysis (NATO SAC-219) is betting it can build.

Using Arctic and High North simulations as its testing bed, NATO SAC-219 will build and stress-test a methodology that integrates the strategic, operational, and tactical levels into one. The goal is to weave together technologies across these levels to produce methods of analysis, foresight, modeling and simulation, and wargaming that can be reused in future studies.

Who is Dr. Phil, and what is he doing in Greenland?

If you follow Arctic energy news, you may have noticed an unexpected name attached to Greenland Energy Company over the past few weeks: Dr. Phil. Not a Dr. Phil. The Dr. Phil.

Phil McGraw, the 75-year-old psychologist who spent two decades dispensing blunt advice to guests on the daytime program that bore his name, has announced a partnership between his media company and the firm preparing to drill the Jameson Land basin. The centerpiece is Arctic Wildcatters, a six-part documentary series hosted by McGraw and slated to premiere late this summer on his Envoy TV, following Greenland Energy as it attempts the first modern onshore oil drilling on the island.

To understand how a talk-show host ended up narrating a hydrocarbon exploration campaign above the Arctic Circle, it helps to know where each party stands. In an episode of The Dr. Phil Podcast, embedded below, McGraw hosts the men behind the venture as they make their pitch. It is worth watching for anyone curious about Arctic oil exploration, or after a revealing insight into Trump’s incessant interest in annexing Greenland.

Trump administration ends NOAA support for annual Arctic Report Card

The Trump administration has pulled federal support from the Arctic Report Card, an annual, peer-reviewed report that has been published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration since 2006.

NOAA will no longer provide administrative support for the report, though NOAA scientists and programs will continue to collect climate data, said a statement released by the agency on Tuesday.

“Coordination of the 2026 Arctic Report Card will not be facilitated through NOAA,” the statement said. “All data historically contributed by NOAA to the product will continue to be collected and will remain publicly available.”

IUD scandal: 171 Greenlandic women file for compensation in first month

One hundred and seventy-one Greenlandic women filed claims for compensation in the first month after applications opened over Denmark’s historic non-consensual contraception program, Denmark’s Patient Compensation Association (Patienterstatningen) has confirmed, according to the Ritzau news agency, as reported by Greenlandic broadcaster KNR.

The claims relate to what is known in Denmark and Greenland as the “spiral case,” a decades-long chapter in which young Greenlandic women and girls were fitted with intrauterine contraceptive devices, often without their knowledge or consent, under a campaign that began in the 1960s. The scheme now open for claims covers women fitted with a coil without consent up to and including 1991, and sets compensation at 300,000 Danish kroner (about $47,000) per woman.

Applications opened on July 1, and Trine Berner Madsen, secretariat head at Patienterstatningen, expects more to come before the window closes on September 1, 2028. Many women find it hard to relive the experience while describing it in an application, she said, and some need time, help or guidance before they apply.

Scientists thought Arctic winter ice was stabilising. They were wrong

For years, it looked like Arctic winter sea ice had stopped shrinking. Two record-breaking winters, one year after the other, just proved it never did.

For much of the early 2020s, something appeared to have shifted in the Arctic. The steady, decades-long decline in winter sea ice seemed to be losing momentum, prompting some scientists to wonder whether wintertime ice might have found a temporary floor. It was a tantalizing, if carefully hedged, idea.

For much of the early 2020s, something appeared to have shifted in the Arctic: the steady, decades-long decline in winter sea ice seemed to be losing momentum. Some scientists cautiously raised the possibility that wintertime ice might have found a temporary floor. It was an intriguing, if carefully hedged, idea. Now, a new study published in PNAS by researchers at the University of Southampton and the National Oceanography Centre has definitively closed that chapter. The pause was never a genuine recovery.

A different kind of Arctic summit: how the arts transform the discourse

I’ve been to dozens of Arctic conferences and summits. None were like the Arctic Arts Summit this year in the Swedish city of Ubmeje/Umeå. Sure, many of the topics were similar: climate change, geopolitical aggression, Indigenous rights. But the Art Summit addressed them in vastly different ways compared with the significantly larger international Arctic conferences elsewhere.

The first notable difference was the screaming absence of the power-point presentation. I went to a dozen break-out panel discussions and there wasn’t a single power point with graphs, bullet points and words. How truly wonderful it was to not have to listen to someone read lists from a screen for hours!

This may explain why the vibe was palpably different. The audience was leaning in, listening. There seemed to be more patience, more mutual respect and tolerance. People were more present. The sessions were active conversations, interspersed with live singing or a poetry reading. If a session used the backdrop screens, it was to show pictures, videos and films.

A dead explorer in the wrong uniform stumped historians for 166 years. DNA just solved the mystery

Nearly 180 years after all 129 men who took part in the Franklin expedition perished in the Canadian Arctic, DNA is finally giving four of them back their names.

Anthropologists from the University of Waterloo have identified four more crew members from one of history’s most infamous Arctic disasters. Using DNA extracted from skeletal remains found scattered across King William Island and the Adelaide Peninsula in Nunavut, researchers matched genetic profiles against samples volunteered by living descendants of the crew.

The findings, published in two peer-reviewed journals in May, bring the total number of definitively named Franklin expedition sailors to six — and solves a mystery that has baffled historians for 166 years.

On a nearly deserted Alaska island, consumers pay to keep hundreds of empty buildings wired for internet

On an island in the Bering Sea 1,200 miles from Anchorage, Alaska, sits an abandoned house on an abandoned Navy base. There is no furniture, and the wind blows through broken windows. The last people to live here moved away long ago. Yet a bright orange pipe with a black fiber-optic cable inside runs from the outer wall down into the surrounding soil.

The cable was installed to connect the home to the internet after the base closed. It costs more than $340,000 per year to provide this building and hundreds of others — all but a few of them empty — with internet access no one says they use.

The money being wasted is yours.

It comes from a fee added to nearly every American’s phone bill as part of a Federal Communications Commission subsidy program intended to bring fast, affordable internet to remote towns.

How whaling strengthens the bonds uniting nation-states and Indigenous peoples

For more than four decades, my work as an Arctic scholar has been animated by a single, foundational truth: the global arena is not merely a collection of Westphalian states competing for structural dominance. While classical international relations theory fixates on oversimplified structures such as Kenneth Waltz’s classic “three images,” it leaves an analytical void at the foundational level of human organization.

To fill this gap, I have advanced 4th Image Theory. This framework recognizes that beneath and before the modern state lies a deeper, older reality: the tribal, sub-state, and indigenous polities that have survived millennia of change. These are not mere domestic minorities; they are enduring sovereign entities whose governance models, land claims, and cultural practices provide a platform for enduring regional stability.

Is solo circumnavigation of the Arctic possible? Nonstop and unassisted?

When Matt Rutherford set sail from Aasiaat, Greenland on June 25, he embarked on a voyage that no sailor has ever completed: a solo, nonstop, unassisted circumnavigation of the Arctic Ocean. But this feat will only be possible because of something that’s been lost. Arctic sea ice.

“A generation ago, this voyage simply could not have been made,” Rutherford says. “Not because sailors lacked the skill, but because the Arctic was still locked down in ice. And that’s something I hope this expedition will help people understand.”

What 4,500 years of frozen garage can tell us about climate change

Ancient frozen garbage heaps dot Greenland’s coastlines, undisturbed for thousands of years. As permafrost thaws, that buried debris is resurfacing, leading scientists to ponder: what’s living in our ancestors’ trash?

Researchers from the University of Copenhagen and the Technical University of Denmark have spent years studying the bacteria preserved inside Greenland’s ancient middens: the frozen rubbish heaps left behind by Paleo-Inuit hunters, Norse farmers, and early Danish colonists stretching back 4,500 years. Their findings, published in Frontiers in Microbiology in June 2026, show that these long-frozen waste sites are remarkable microbial time capsules, harboring bacteria linked to food poisoning, botulism, and antibiotic resistance — some of which are still detectable centuries after the people who created them disappeared.

Someone’s been honking his horn, fined for waking a polar bear

Once upon a time, in a fjord called Lomfjorden in Svalbard, there lived a polar bear who was doing what polar bears do most of the time, which is nothing at all. He was asleep on land, in a spot that was neither too crowded nor too exposed, but just right.

Then a ship came through Hinlopenstretet, and someone on board reached for the horn.

“SOMEONE’S BEEN HONKING HIS HORN,” the polar bear probably thought to himself before he sauntered off to find somewhere quieter.

What does the word ‘Arctic’ mean? It depends who you ask

The Swedish government’s new Arctic Strategy Report… starts with a definition of the word Arctic. This was no easy task, requiring several paragraphs and multiple terms.”

At Arctic Today, we are often challenged with the question: what is the Arctic? What does it include and where do you draw the line? Against that background, I read with great interest the Swedish government’s new Arctic Strategy report.

The report starts with a definition of the word Arctic. This was no easy task, requiring several paragraphs and multiple terms. I google-translated the text, exposing where we, at times, can get lost in translation.