FIRE AND ICE

NATO’S TRACKING OF RUSSIAN SUBMARINES IN THE ARCTIC IS BEING AFFECTED BY CLIMATE CHANGE

- by Ellie Cook

DEEP IN THE ARCTIC, ON BOARD NATO's only research vessel, green bars of data move across screens as computers whir, the noise occasionally rising in pitch.

To the untrained eye, it all means little. But to NATO's lone scientific unit on board the NRV Alliance, it is a glimpse into how the rapidly changing Arctic could force the alliance to switch how it detects objects and threats-lurk-ing beneath the waves.

One of these threats, and one notoriously hard to pick up, is Russian submarines. Climate change is making the task of finding them even more difficult.

As the planet heats up, fresh water is seeping into the Arctic Ocean as the sea ice and the permafrost melts, while warmer waters from the Atlantic bleed in from the south.

"Whereas in the past, we would have thought of the Arctic Ocean as a frozen desert, now, increasingly, it's being thought of as open water at some parts of the summer season," Klaus Dodds, a professor at the U.K.'s Royal Holloway, University of London, told Newsweek. "It's an ocean literally undergoing state change."

That change in temperature and salinity—or levels of salt—has a heavy hand in influencing how sound moves in water. But knowing how sound travels under the waves is key for picking up threats the alliance otherwise wouldn't spot.

"When you talk about detecting, tracking, identifying submarines, this is something where you can build all the technology you want," the expedition's chief scientist, Gaultier Real, told Newsweek. But "if you don't know the environment in which you are deploying that, in which you're operating that, you're missing something."

ARCTIC MISSION A group of NATO scientists set sail on the NRV Alliance (left) in early July to pull data that will help them understand how sound from any source travels in the Arctic waters.