The very first sentence in the new U.S. National Strategy for the Arctic Region almost didn’t make it into print.

The top sentence is meant to underscore the overarching desire of the U.S. to cooperate with the other seven nations in the Arctic: “The United States seeks an Arctic region that is peaceful, stable, prosperous, and cooperative.”

This pivotal wording was at the top of a final draft, when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24 and new discussions erupted in the U.S. administration:

“Following the invasion of Ukraine, the question arose: Do we really imagine an Arctic that is both peaceful and cooperative? But at the end of the day we decided that the answer is yes. We still do have that vision. It is still our goal and ambition, even if it is harder to achieve now,” Ambassador David Balton, executive director of the Arctic Executive Steering Committee in Washington, told me last week at the Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik, Iceland.

“I think we all benefited from the peaceful and cooperative environment in the Arctic that we have had the luxury of experiencing since the end of the Cold War but which is now under threat“ he said.

I asked if he really believes that a resumption of cooperation with Russia in the Arctic will be possible in the foreseeable future. “I have to think so,” he said.

Russia conundrum

The Russia conundrum permeated this year’s Arctic Circle Assembly in Iceland, involving some 2,000 attendees, including heads of states, the Crown Prince of Norway, Canada’s Governor General, ministers, ambassadors and scientists — but very few Russians and none affiliated with the Moscow government (or at least nobody known to be).

The seven western Arctic governments would like in principle to shun Russia; freeze cooperation, isolate President Vladimir Putin’s nation as a means of showing solidarity with Ukraine and punishing Russia’s violations of international law, human rights and other basic rules of civil conduct in Ukraine.

At the same time, however, several Arctic actors speaking from the assembly’s podiums or in private appeared painfully aware that a complete stop to cooperation with Russia in the Arctic would cause a host of problems and that some of the early restrictive measures, imposed soon after Russia’s invasion into Ukraine in February, may have to be relaxed.

Read more:

Russia’s Arctic provinces constitute half the landmass of the Arctic region and vast portions of the Arctic seas are within Russia’s exclusive economic zone or territorial boundaries. Also, non-Arctic nations like China and India are continuing cooperation with Russia in the Arctic.

“The Arctic cannot — we cannot afford long-lasting costs for suspension or paralysis,” China’s special envoy to the Arctic, Gao Feng said at the assembly.

Mead Treadwell, a U.S. business investor, former chair of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission and former lieutenant general of Alaska, shared with me his thoughts, based on decades of cooperation with Russian partners:

“We cannot pretend that Russia does not exist just because we disagree with them. They have an agenda in the Arctic; they have allies like China. There are engineering firms not subject to sanctions who will work for them and countries like India who depend on them. To say ‘Russia is off, let us not pay attention to Russia’ is like saying we will not pay attention to the Arctic, the environment, shipping or the Indigenous peoples,” he said.

“It is important that we maintain contact. Since this horror in Ukraine started I have gotten messages from Russians friends who care about the future of the Arctic, who are sad for their country. Some even outwardly protesting. Without those networks, we only have spy satellites to tell us what goes on in Russia, and that is not good enough. It is important for our own security and for all that we are working on in the Arctic — environmental protection, safe oceans and so on. We need the personal connections so that we can hopefully get the governmental contacts back up at some point,” he said.

Much continues

Norway, while tough on sanctions on Russia and military support for Ukraine, continues its more than 50 years of cooperation with Russia on fish stock management in the Barents Sea. Like the Faroe Islands — a part of the Danish Kingdom — Norway also continues to service Russian fishing vessels in designated ports and Norwegian scientists are encouraged to continue private cooperation with Russian colleagues.

Other arrangements like search and rescue agreements with Russia are still operational in different parts of the Arctic, as a halt to such cooperation would potentially leave also seafarers of western Arctic countries to drown, should they need help from a Russian vessel.

Intergovernmental negotiations on fishing in the central part of the Arctic Ocean continues with Russia included; so do talks on the legal rights to the seabed in the Arctic Ocean and other formal processes.

Some weather services, civil nuclear disaster preparedness, coast guard operations, search and rescue and other essential functions depend to varying degrees on cooperation with Russia. The same goes for globally significant Arctic climate science programs, sea ice monitoring, atmospheric research, permafrost observation, biodiversity studies and others.

How long a pause?

The seven western governments in the Arctic have put cooperation with Russia in the Arctic Council, including large and long term science projects, on “pause” — no official contact is allowed with Russian partners — and at the Arctic Circle Assembly several observers agreed that the pause might last for years or even decades.

Numerous science projects involving Russian scientists are halted. Photo: World Meteorological Institute

The urgent question facing a multitude of military bodies, government agencies, institutions of learning and science, private enterprises and non-governmental actors is how to maintain operations in the Arctic if formal cooperation with Russia remains down for years.

[Ukraine conflict hurts Russian science, as West pulls funding]

A multitude of dilemmas are still unresolved: Can some work involving Russians be maintained? Can contacts with official Russian non-military agencies on fisheries, the environment, sports or culture be sustained? Are all types of official research programs involving Russian scientists prohibited? Can U.S., Canadian or European Union grants somehow still be spent on projects involving Russians, even if contacts with official Russian institutions are halted? Can artists collaborate across Russia’s borders? Can they do so on government grants? Can the flow of data on climate change and biodiversity in Russia be maintained through official channels — or privately? What to do with Russians on temporary work stays in the West? Are Zoom meetings with Russians acceptable? Are physical meetings with Russians possible outside Russia? Can money transfers be made to struggling Russian colleagues?

Coexistence?

Evan Bloom, senior fellow at the Wilson Center Polar Institute in Washington and a former Director of Ocean and Polar Affairs of the U.S. State Department foresaw a period of “operational coexistence” rather than cooperation with Russia, but what that means in practice remains murky:

“Russia is key to the Arctic. Russia makes up half of the Arctic and it is not clear what coexistence means in their absence,” he told a sizable group of spectators in Reykjavik.

The Arctic Council has allowed more than 70 joint projects not involving Russians to resume operations while Arctic Council projects and all EU projects with Russian participation remain frozen, including large multi-year programs of climate science and biodiversity.

I asked Evan Bloom if he expected western Arctic governments to partially relax the Arctic Council’s pause to allow projects of particular significance to continue:

“It is very hard at this point for governments to say ‘yes it is possible to work with Russian government institutions or Russians in general,”’ he said.

“It is more likely that private researchers will find a way to work with Russian colleagues in a somewhat informal way. In cases where there is no prohibition and it is not government funded research, there are probably some ways for that very valuable exchange to continue, even if it may be tricky.”

Balton echoed this approach but cautioned against the dangers that collaboration with western partners could mean for Russians actors:

“People-to-people efforts could put people in Russia in jeopardy. We don’t want that. On the other hand, certain activities, in particular science activities — we do need the data coming out of the Russian Arctic, and as government-to-government contacts are largely closed off now, we may have to rely on other forms of communication to get that data,” he told me.

Russians still involved

Research professor Timo Koivurova of the Arctic Center at the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, Finland, presented at the assembly a study of how Russia’s war in Ukraine has completely altered Finland’s Arctic prospects:

“There will be no return to the pre-war reality,” the report, commissioned by the office of the Finnish prime minister in Helsinki, said.

The report recounts a host of new challenges to Finland. The EU, for instance, has stopped all Russian involvement in Arctic cross-border environmental programs worth millions of Euros. This is especially painful to Finland, who share a border of some 1,300 kilometers with Russia.

“The paralysis of international cooperation and research in the Arctic region is particularly problematic. Many measures related to the sustainability of the Arctic require extensive international and regional cooperation, as nature and the environment do not change in line with national borders,” the report reads.

In Reykjavik, Koivurova recalled for me an interview he did with a Finnish official who works with Russian colleagues to protect the many rivers crossing the Finland-Russia border:

“She asked me why we now have to punish the environment,” Koivurova said.

He reminded his audience that Russia has not given up on Arctic cooperation even if bodies like the Arctic Council and the Barents Euro-Arctic Council have frozen all relations with Russia:

“Russia is represented in almost all intergovernmental organizations and treaty processes relevant to the Arctic. In all the legal circumpolar processes that we have been able to identify, the Russians are there and continuing the work. This shows us the power of international law, and I think it is a good thing,“ Koivoruva told me.

“We have seen the international prohibition on the use of force being broken before, for instance by the U.S. in Iraq. I fully support the sanctions against Russia — the war in Ukraine is horrible — but as academics we also have to look at the bigger picture,” he said.

Science suffers

As many links to Russia are down, the flow of Arctic data into the global climate models is one likely victim. A few weeks prior to the Arctic Circle Assembly I attended a meeting in Keflavik, Iceland of INTERACT, a network of Arctic research stations. One of the founders of the network, British biologist Terry Callaghan, who was included in the IPCC’s Nobel Peace Prize award, has worked in the Arctic for more than 55 years. He has had to put many long-lasting cooperations with state-affiliated Russian partners on hold with no hope of resumption in sight, but still collaborates with individual Russian scientists outside of the EU-funded INTERACT activities.

[Russia’s climate goals and science are also casualties of Putin’s war in Ukraine]

“This whole break of collaborations is a huge and tragic loss. There are Russians on the ground on half the Arctic landmass who are observing day to day what is happening. And this is not a trivial part of the Arctic, but land which is key to the feedbacks that will determine what happens to the climate and to biodiversity on the rest of the Earth. We can look at satellite images and see what is happening on the surface but we cannot understand why we see changes. We need people on the ground,” Callaghan told me.

“It has taken 30 odd years to build up trust and collaboration since the Soviet Union fell apart. Once that trust is destroyed it is not a fast process building it up again. We have to try to maintain some bridges. I don’t believe collaborations on carbon emissions or biodiversity or medical science is going to hurt anybody. If we have no bridges at all, it will be a disaster for the future,“ he said.

Professor Syndonia Bret-Harte, science co-director at Toolik Field Station of the University of Alaska, the largest Arctic field station in the U.S., also recommended contact be maintained with Russian partners as long as their safety in Russia was not imperiled.

“Very few people in the West speak Russian, so we are dependent on the Russian scientists to tell us what is going on. Also, the pause (of the Arctic Council) has made it much more difficult for Russian scientists to do science because their sources of funding have been reduced. I think there is going to be a big gap in knowledge. We will still have some sort of knowledge like remote sensing, but you will not have the on-the-ground perspective, which is very valuable,” she said.

“The longer the pause lasts the harder it is going to be to get things restarted. I think the sanctions against Russia are appropriate and I don’t have a problem complying with them. But I feel quite strongly that the efforts of individual people to collaborate should not be restricted. Putin’s efforts to isolate his people — I don’t think we need to help him do that.”

First published on ArcticToday.com 22. October 2022. 

The largest ever investigation into possible abuses in Greenland by the former Danish colonial powers or more recent Danish governments is about to begin.

In June this year, the head of Naalakkersuisut, Greenland’s government, Múte B. Egede and Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of Denmark, from where I write, agreed on a joint effort to investigate all major relevant incidents in the seven decades since the second world war.

Mette Frederiksen and Muté B. Egede signining in June their agreement to begin a joint investigation. Photo: The Primeministers office

Their joint statement received surprisingly little public attention, but it revealed an astonishing ambition:

“The investigation will cover the period from the second world war until today. The investigation will focus on the most important political decision, events and other circumstances that shaped the development of Greenland and its population as well as the relation between the two countries,” it said.

At no time in the past has any Danish government shown willingness to partake in such a wide-reaching and deep-probing exercise.

The statement by the two leaders was kept deliberately short and vague, leaving room for the civil servants to design in detail the more precise and potentially controversial mandate for the investigation. It is due later this month; the decisive proportions of the probe, its format, financing and duration is being hammered out as I write this.

Political will

Meanwhile, there is no reason to doubt the political will of the two political leaders behind the investigation.

In Greenland, anger over an extensive series of historical incidents — as well as more recent ones — and what might possibly amount to systematic violations of basic rights of Greenlanders has been brewing for generations and Egede added a separate statement to the joint communique: “During later years we have witnessed how one sad story has been revealed after the other. Stories that have carried with them great personal costs to the individuals involved. All of the people of Greenland stand behind the demand that a historical investigation be carried out,” he said.

In Denmark, Frederiksen has been contemplating a deeper probe for several years. After her first visit to Greenland in 2015, she told me that “it is quite a lot easier to establish a cooperation between Denmark and Greenland, if both parties acknowledge that mistakes have been made through time. You cannot spend many hours in Greenland before you realize that history and also its darker sides play a large role for many there.”

In June she was quoted in the formal press release as follows: “We have recently become aware of cases and processes that bear witness that there are still chapters of our common history that we have not yet uncovered. I am happy that we have made this joint decision about a historical investigation for the benefit of our two countries and for reconciliation with our common past.”

The upcoming probe must be understood in this light. The Danish prime minister most likely finds the entire exercise essential for future cooperation with Greenland. By acting on her conviction that a common approach to the past, including its troublesome sides, is necessary if reconciliation is to be achieved, she aims to restore Greenland’s faith in cooperation with Denmark at a time when Greenland and the Arctic is becoming still more important to Denmark.

No thanks

A few isolated events have been investigated on earlier occasions, reported on and even officially apologized for by shifting Danish governments, but we have not seen more encompassing investigations like that of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission or that of the ongoing investigations in Sweden, Norway and Finland. In those countries long-standing and possibly discriminatory practices against Sámi and other ethnic minorities are being scrutinized by other truth and reconciliation bodies.

Some will find that a thorough probe in the Danish kingdom is long overdue. The first Danish-Norwegian missionaries settled in Greenland in 1721 and Greenland was a de facto Danish colony from then on. From 1953, Greenland became an integral part of Denmark; Greenlanders are Danish citizens. Phenomenal changes, often spearheaded by Denmark, has taken place in Greenland since, so it is no surprise that the upcoming investigation will be pinned to this particular period of time.

Aki-Mathilda Høegh-Dam, Greenlandic member of the Danish parliament, talked of “genocide” when the latest scandal was unearthed. Photo: Siumut

In many respects, Greenland is an autonomous nation, ruled and regulated by Naalakkersuisut, the government in Nuuk, but the island and its people are is still part of the Danish Kingdom and subjects to the Danish constitution.

A separate Greenlandic Reconciliation Commission worked in Greenland from 2014-2017, but with limited impact. The then-head of Greenland’s government Aleqa Hammond often argued openly with the political establishment in Denmark (and she also caused controversy in Greenland).

When asked about potential Danish involvement in the reconciliatory commission proposed by Hammond, Denmark’s prime minister at the time, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, offered only an icy no thanks: “We don’t have a need for reconciliation,” she quipped.

The Greenlandic commission remained a local initiative and it only indirectly probed the events and processes that are often talked about in Greenland as systemic abuses caused by Danes or Denmark’s colonization of Greenland. Eyewitnesses and other people in Greenland were heard, recommendations written, but the Greenlandic commission suffered from a frequent exchange of personnel and shifting levels of political support from the political leaders in Nuuk.

Latest scandal

News of the upcoming joint investigation coincided with widespread consternation in Greenland over the latest scandal.

A Greenland women’s magazine Arnanut did the first interviews with women involved and in May this year the Danish Broadcasting Corporation revealed how, from 1966 to 1975, some 4,000 women — about half of the fertile women in Greenland —had an intrauterine contraceptive device or coil inserted as part of a campaign by the Danish health authorities.

Many of those affected were only 15-16 years old, and many did not understand what happened to them. Some of those interviewed told of horrific pains that lasted for years. Long-forgotten documents revealed that the health authorities in Copenhagen at the time were eager to halt the rapid population growth in Greenland, the rising number of single mothers and an accompanying hike in public expenditure.

As the details of the campaign were unraveled, one of the two Greenlandic members of the Danish parliament, Aki-Mathilda Høegh-Dam, dubbed the campaign ”genocide,” and when I visited Nuuk a few weeks ago with members of the Danish Foreign Policy Society, we were told how others in Greenland shared her indignation:

“My initial reaction was that ‘genocide’ was probably an exaggeration, but as the scope of the scandal has become clear it is actually not wrong. Thousands of Greenlandic lives were never born. Very young girls and women were forced to not have children or did not understand the implications,” said Asii Narup Chemnitz, one of Greenland’s most experienced politicians, a former mayor of Nuuk and now a member of Inatsisartut, Greenland’s parliament, for the governing Inuit Ataqatigiit party.

A deputy chairperson of the Siumut party, Inga Dora Markussen, who has teen-age daughters of her own, told us she wept as she learned of the campaign.

”The state has no right whatsoever to violate anybody’s virginity. This deed can never be justified — never,” she wrote on Facebook, demanding ”an unreserved apology from the Danish state” and ”tangible compensation.”

Equal numbers

In writing about the upcoming joint investigation, Inge Høst Seiding, head of the Institute of Language, Culture and History at the University of Greenland, argued that equal numbers of Greenlandic and Danish researchers should be involved. If not enough are available in Greenland, they should be educated as part of the investigative exercise, she argued. She also recommended that ordinary citizens be heard and engaged, youth included. In Greenland, the experts talk of intergenerational trauma or psychological wounds that are passed from the victims of abuse to their children or even grandchildren.

“Memories are carried by living people, but also by their descendants as recollections  of unwanted relocations from hamlets to towns, adoptions out of the country, divided families, segregation by language and the feeling of not moving forward in life in your own country,” Seiding wrote in an op-ed for Altinget, a Danish news outlet.

No pope expected

Few if any observers expect that the upcoming Danish-Greenlandic investigation will uncover hitherto unknown assaults on the lives and physical integrity of men, women and children in Greenland to the extent now known from the Canadian north through Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

As previously reported, even Pope Francis found it necessary to react to the findings in Canada, begging as he did during a recent visit of penance “forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples.” The Pope was speaking in particular of the many residential schools that were homes to tens of thousands of Indigenous Canadian children forcibly removed from their communities as Canada’s government — and the Catholic Church — tried to rid them of traits of their origins. Many suffered physical and sexual abuse.

There is no indication of crimes of this magnitude in Greenland, but the catalog of what is often interpreted as Danish abuse is impressive. Examples include: the forced relocation of those who lived close to Thule Air Base in 1953; the closure of dozens of small settlements in Greenland in the 1950s and 1960s; the absence of a referendum in Greenland in 1952, as Greenland changed from colony to integral part of Denmark; the lack of subsequent equality between Danes and Greenlanders; the closure of Qullissat, a mining town, in 1972; the “birthplace-criteria” that gave, until 1989, Danes in Greenland much higher salaries than their local colleagues; the segregation of all school children in Danish- and Greenlandic-speaking classes; the so-called “experiment children”  who in the 1960s were sent on extended stays in Denmark in order for them to become more Danish; the “legally fatherless,” who were not entitled to inherit from their Danish fathers when the fathers abandoned them and repatriated to Denmark; the many children adopted by visiting Danish families and the discrimination of Greenlanders in Denmark  — just to name a few.

To get a better idea of the challenges the upcoming investigation will face I called on Astrid Nonbo Andersen, a historian of ideas at the Danish Institute of International Studies and one of Denmark’s leading researchers of truth and reconciliation processes:

“This will be a very, very large exercise. An investigation into all major incidents through seven decades. Think about it for a moment,” she said.

She expects that a least a handful of academic researchers will be roaming archives in Greenland and Denmark for at least five years: “Parts of the archives are not in a very good condition, so one has to dig carefully,” she says.

She also assumes that hearings of eyewitnesses still alive in Denmark and Greenland will be necessary: “What happened to the Greenlanders over time was not necessarily put in writing. It may be something that was felt and talked about in Greenland, but not automatically experiences that were written down,” she said.

Reconciliation how?

There will be particular focus on how the investigation will pursue actual reconciliation.

“Reconciliation with our common past” was highlighted as a goal in the June statement from Greenland and Denmark’s political leaders, and — as Andersen explained to me — the mere provision of facts and figures is not likely to do the job:

“The ‘coil campaign’ is a good example,” she said.

“It is good that the campaign is now out in the open, but in the first instance this has only led to more bitterness and anger in Greenland. It has not brought any immediate relief to the relation between Denmark and Greenland. Reconciliation is all about how you handle such cases,” she told me.

Previous Danish investigations of wrongdoings by the authorities have been based, she finds, on a belief that facts will bring reconciliation by themselves, but reconciliation is not that easy.

To those subjected to abuse, giving evidence of the abuse may cause re-traumatization, just as new Greenlandic accusations against Denmark, Danish institutions or individuals will likely cause indignation and anger in Denmark.

In the end, we should perhaps expect not too many indisputable truths. In Canada for example, the government and communities in the North maintain that the apologies of Pope Francis did not cover all abuses committed by the Catholic church.

As Andersen told me: “Any historian will know that the final word is never said. There will always be new discoveries, new interpretations and explanations. We have to recognize just how long-term any reconciliation is likely to be.”

For years, a heated international debate has been ongoing among explorers, scientists, island-hunters and other interested parties about which is indeed the northernmost island on Earth.

Since 1978, what has appeared to be a mushrooming family of smaller islands north of Greenland has fueled the discussion as still new members of the family were spotted. At least seven of these phenomena have been recorded and celebrated by visiting explorers, adventurers and scientists.

In the summer of 2021, five members of a Swiss-Danish science expedition, including this reporter, landed in a helicopter on yet another and until then undiscovered ice-and-gravel phenomenon about two kilometers north of the Greenland mainland.

When we returned home and as our aerial photography was studied more closely, the muddy but sturdy structure turned out to be about 80 by 30 meters, rising to about two meters above sea level. We came to believe it was indeed at the time the northernmost island in the world — or at least some sort of almost-island located in this very special geographical spot.

What are they?

Now, a year later and following a new expedition counting Swiss and Danish scientists as well as two experts reporting to the Danish authorities, the issue of the small and poorly understood island-like structures has possibly been settled once and for all.

“For many years we all thought that storms from the north pushed sea ice from the Arctic Ocean towards Greenland, where the ice then forced sediments from the seabed towards the surface, so that these new islands were formed, but that is not the case,“ Rene Forsberg, a professor of physical geodesy with DTU Space at the Technical University of Denmark, told me at his office in Copenhagen.

Rene Forsberg and Martin Nissen, a geographer from the Danish Agency for Data Supply and Infrastructure, camped for two weeks with the Leister Go North 2022 expedition at Kap Morris Jesup, Greenland’s northernmost point. The expedition, like the Leister Around North Greenland Expedition in 2021, were funded by the Leister Foundation in Switzerland.

New surveys

Martin Nissen and Rene Forsberg joined the expedition this year to survey the structures in the waters north of Greenland for the authorities in Copenhagen. While Greenland — the world’s largest island — enjoys a large degree of political autonomy, the mapping of Greenland is still a responsibility of the government in Denmark.

During the two weeks of surveying, GPS mapping and lidar (or laser) mapping from a helicopter was carried out alongside bathymetric measurements both in the waters close to the disputed island-structure and also close to a new and previously unmapped member of the family. Some of the island-structures that were recorded years ago have disappeared and were therefore, of course, not subject to any measurement.

A peer-reviewed scientific rendering of the collected data will be published in the future, but a preliminary conclusion has been put into a press release.

“The new bathymetry observations confirmed all the ‘islands’ to be located at water depths in the range of 25-45 m, which uniquely confirmed all ‘islands’ to be grounded icebergs, with an usual cover of glacial soil, pebbles and rock debris, forming a new category of semi-stationary ice islands,” the press release reads.

In other words, and according to these new findings, all the structures recorded since 1978 are not islands in any classical sense of the word, but simply icebergs partly or fully covered by gravel and temporarily stranded on the seabed in the shallows north of Greenland.

Drilling for depth

Forsberg and Nissen also measured the water depth right next to the island-like structure that was discovered in the summer of 2021 during the Leister Around North Greenland expedition.

“We drilled through three meters of ice on both sides of your ‘island,’ and concluded with the help of ordinary echo sounders that the water is about 27 meters deep in this particular spot. When we drilled, we stood on the frozen sea 27 meters above the seabed. We concluded that the gravel on top of the iceberg — which you took for an island — presently lies 29 meters above the seabed,” Forsberg told me.

“We also determined that about nine-tenths of the iceberg lies under water, just like icebergs usually do. It is stuck on the seabed. Only when it melts sufficiently will it travel onwards,” he said. According to Forsberg, the new measurements correlate lidar measurements of the iceberg done earlier this year as Forsberg passed overhead in a fixed-wing plane.

Moving east

The gravel-covered structures north of Greenland — icebergs, ice-islands or ghost-islands, as you like — are potentially short-lived, but nobody knows exactly when they will disappear again.

The icebergs have most likely broken off from glaciers on Greenland’s mainland to the west of Greenland’s northernmost point, Kap Morris Jesup. These glaciers, like dozens of other glaciers in Greenland, carry with them gravel from Greenland’s interior. After breaking off into the sea from the calving glaciers, the icebergs drifted eastward. Those still visible are now temporarily stranded in the relatively shallow waters just north of Cape Morris Jesup and new ones will continue to appear.

“We don’t know when they will disappear again. But we now know that the northernmost island in the world is still Kaffeklubben Ø or Coffee Club Island. That is the northernmost land point on Earth, closest to the North Pole,” Forsberg told me, pointing at Coffee Club Island, or Inuit Qeqertaat in Greenlandic, on his digital map.

Inuit Qeqertaat lies somewhat closer to shore than the disputed icebergs. The small, roundish and storm-scarred island, some 30 meters high at the top, lies at 83°39’55” North, 30°37’45”West. It was named Kaffeklubben Ø by Danish explorer Lauge Koch in 1921, but was likely seen already by U.S. explorer Robert E. Peary during an expedition in 1900.

The Danish Agency for Data Supply and Infrastructure is currently mapping all ice-free land in Greenland in an exercise that also involves U.S. satellites, the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Danish defense forces and Greenland’s Self Rule Authority. The ice-free parts of Greenland’s landmass cover an area roughly the size of Norway; Greenland’s inland ice sheet is not included.

In 1978, as the first of the stranded icebergs was discovered, it was named Oodaaq Island after a famous Greenlandic dog handler. For years, Oodaaq Island, which lies a bit north of Inuit Qeqertaat, was talked about as the northernmost island in the world and added to formal Danish maps of Greenland. Now, as Oodaaq Island changes in status from island to iceberg, it will be scrapped from the maps again.

“Oodaaq Island will not appear on the maps when we publish our new maps of Greenland, most likely later this year,” Martin Nissen told me.

Hans Island will be divided into two parts, with the Greenland part slightly larger than the Canadian. The difference occurs because the new border will follow, in line with international norms, a natural phenomena; a rift in the surface of the island that runs from north to south — almost, but not quite, through the middle of the island.

According to the information available, none of the officials involved in the negotiations have visited Hans Island, but the rift on the island that will now be used as the basis of the new border is easily seen on satellite images that have been available to the negotiators.

The border will run from a small bay on the northern shore of Hans Island across the island to its steep southern precipice. Almost 60 percent of the island will be part of Greenland, including the island’s highest point, while the rest will belong to Canada. Both parties will own part of the bay on the north shore; the only landing place on the island.

At the same time, negotiators have agreed upon the northernmost end of the maritime border between Greenland and Canada in the Arctic Ocean and the southernmost end in the Labrador Sea, with most attention going to the Labrador Sea.

Canada and Denmark, which still holds sovereignty over Greenland, have disagreed for years about the rights to 79,000 square kilometers of seabed in the Labrador Sea, where oil or mineral extraction may be possible in future. According to the new deal the disputed piece of seabed will be split in two; again the Greenlandic part slightly larger than the area allocated to Canada.

Copenhagen and Ottawa both hail the deal as proof that mutually beneficial solutions to difficult territorial disputes can be reached on the basis of international law:

“It is an extremely fine signal to the whole world that you can solve territorial disagreements in a constructive way based on international law. It is exactly this type of message we need in a time when international law is under attack, in particular, of course, by Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine,” Denmark’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Jeppe Kofod told ArcticToday.

Message to Moscow

In Copenhagen, before traveling to Ottawa for the formal signing of the deal, Jeppe Kofod told ArcticToday that he expected the new deal to also have a positive influence on future negotiations with Russia over the seabed in the central parts of the Arctic Ocean. There, Canada, Russia and Denmark/Greenland have all made claims that overlap by several hundred thousand square kilometers.

“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a wholly unacceptable attack on international law” Kofod said. ”But everybody knows how important the Arctic is to Russia. In that region in particular they will have an interest in peaceful cooperation, even if there is conflict in other areas of the world. The agreement between the Kingdom of Denmark and Canada serves as an example that it is possible. They can tell now that it is possible to reach a result where everybody is a winner.”

Island politics

Hans Island is name Tartupaluk  — or “kidneyshaped” — in Greenlandc. It lies in the Kennedy Channel, a mostly frozen strait separating Canada’s Ellesmere Island and the very north of Greenland, some 650 kilometers east of Grise Fiord, the closest civilian settlement in Canada, and 350 kilometers north of Siorapaluk, Greenland’s northernmost township.

Hans Island has an area of 1.25 square kilometers, and its tallest point extends 183 meters above sea. Much of the island’s rock face rises vertically out of the sea; only to the north does it slant more lazily towards the ocean, offering potential visitors scalable access to its flat upper surface.

Most importantly, the islands lies exactly midway between Canada and Greenland. From a visit to Hans Island in 2018 this author remembers the unimpeded frosty views towards Greenland and Canada, both only 18 kilometers away. The island itself appears void of vegetation, its rock floor rounded by the violent storms that used to tear flags hoisted by the Danish soldiers to shreds.

The final compromise on the island border was agreed upon at what has been described as a diplomatic marathon in Iceland in November 2021. Final signatures are to be added to the deal Tuesday in Ottawa by Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Melanie Joly and Denmark’s Kofod. Also signing will be Muté B. Egede, chairman of Naalakkersuisut, Greenland’s self-rule government.

The deal seems unlikely to cause much controversy, and independent observers find it laudable:

“This is the solution I have suggested for decades. You will not hear me pointing out all the faults. I can’t see any,” says Michael Byers, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

No rewards

Parts of the maritime border between Canada and Greenland were previously agreed upon in 1973. Negotiators drew a line in the ocean to the shores of Hans Island, but they left the controversial issue of a terrestrial border on the island unresolved.

The lack of a final agreement has pained both sides ever since, even if the island offers basically no material rewards. Geologists at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland told ArcticToday that there might be deposits of zinc and lead on the island, but also that the island is so tiny that commercial mining is very unlikely. Any oil in the adjacent seabed will be more than 400 million years old and either gone or too old to be of use.

Strategically, Hans Island is regarded as equally irrelevant. There are often rumors of Russian submarines in Greenland’s waters. Also, Thule Air Base, the U.S. air base in northern Greenland, lies only a short flight to the south, but Hans Island has spurred no interest from the armed forces of any nation.

Politically, however, the island has long played a role.

In 1984, a Danish minister in charge of Greenlandic affairs raised the Danish flag on Hans Island, thereby initiating decades of national posturing by both Canada and Denmark. From 2000 Danish visits to the island became more frequent as old flags were replaced by new ones. Canada protested in diplomatic notes to Copenhagen, and in 2005 Canada’s then minister of defense landed on Hans Island in what was dubbed Operation Frozen Beaver.

A Danish flag was taken down and confiscated and, according to legend in the Danish foreign service, formally delivered to the Danish embassy in Ottawa in a cardboard box from a local bakery. Legend also goes that Danish and Canadian troops left bottles of spirits to each other whenever on visit to Hans Island; the media has often referred to the conflict as “the whisky war.”

Following the Canadian removal of the Danish flag, Denmark dispatched a naval ship towards Hans Island to raise a new flag. Before the ship reached the island, however, the foreign ministers of Denmark and Canada met in New York and agreed to replace any further gesturing with diplomatic efforts to resolve the issue.

Still, for years, nothing was solved.

Conservative governments in Canada, in particular under the leadership of Prime Minister Stephen Harper from 2006 to 2015, emphasized Canada’s intention to defend by any means its sovereignty in the Arctic.

“Stephen Harper would never have agreed to a partition or to give up Hans Island,” Byers told ArcticToday.

In 2018, diplomatic efforts picked up speed, reportedly on Canada’s initiative. A joint task force, working quietly behind the scenes, was to finally end the affair. In 2015, Canada’s Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau had taken office, eager to better Ottawa’s relations with Canada’s Arctic communities, and the work on outstanding border issues progressed. The Trudeau government favors the kind of value-based foreign policy also pursued by the current Danish government, in office since 2019. After half a century, diplomats eyed a solution.

Inuit influence

On the Danish side, diplomats from Greenland and Denmark worked in tandem to also satisfy Greenlandic wishes. In the preamble to the new arrangement, promises are made that inuit in Greenland and Canada who used to travel on the ice between Canada and Greenland without regard to any borders, will still be able to enjoy unhindered mobility, hunting and fishing. Before the final settlement was reached, officials from Nuuk and Copenhagen twice travelled to Qaanaaq and Siorapaluk, Greenland’s northernmost settlements, to consult with the local communities.

In the preamble to the new deal, there is mention of the Pikialasorsuaq Commission, established in 2016 by the Inuit Circumpolar Council to investigate avenues towards joint Inuit control over Pikialasorsuaq, or the North Water Polynya, a vast polynya famous for its abundance of wildlife in the same strait as Hans Island. In the new deal, the governments of Denmark and Canada promise to look at further options for increased Inuit control over relevant matters in the area.

“We will establish a border, but I hope that the border will in fact draw people closer together. The idea is that the practical implications of the border should be minimized to the benefit of those who live in the area and have lived there for generations without being preoccupied with borders,” says Kofod.

“The most important is the work that follows to secure cooperation after the agreement on the border. That people are free to move, secure agreements on fish stocks and other resources; anything that is relevant to this geographical area. This will not be up to the Danish government, but to the government of Greenland,” Kofod told ArcticToday.

In Canada, Aluki Kotierk, president of Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. (NTI), the legal representative of the Inuit of Nunavut on native treaty rights and treaty negotiation, hailed the deal in a statement to the Toronto-based Globe and Mail:

“The dispute between Canada and Denmark over Tartupaluk or Hans Island has never caused issues for Inuit. Regardless, it is great to see Canada and Denmark taking measures to resolve this boundary dispute,” Kotierk said.

“As geographic neighbors with family ties, Inuit in Nunavut and Greenland recognize the significance of working together toward our common future. NTI expects this long-standing relationship between Inuit in Nunavut and Greenland to be a symbol of continued co-operation between Canada and Denmark,” she said.

And who is Hans?

Suersaq, who signed his name Hans Hendrik when working for foreign expeditions, was a Greenlandic hunter and doghandler, serving between 1853 and 1883 as a guide, translator and provider of food for five Arctic expeditions. His close encounters with polar bears, grumpy expeditioners and wrecked ships are depicted in his “Memoirs of Hans Hendrik, The Arctic Traveller,” translated from the Greenlandic in 1878.

In the south of Greenland, he and his family were attached to the German mission of the Herrnhuts, until, in 1853, Suersaq took hire with an American polar expedition. His mother, who had recently been widowed, begged him to remain at home, and his farewell-promise burned itself into his memoirs: “If no mischief happen me, I shall return, and I shall earn money for thee.”

Hans Hendrik, however, never returned home. He settled in the north of Greenland. He found life appealing there with plenty of walrus, seals and bears. He married, raised a family and for a series of still more adventurous American and European polar expeditions, he made survival possible.

Notorious in particular were his efforts when in 1872 half of the American Polaris Expedition, who had set sail for the North Pole, got separated from the main party in the ice north of present day Thule Air Base. For seven months the group survived in igloos on ice floes. Also Hans Hendrik’s wife Mequ and their three children, the youngest only a couple of years old, had to make do as waves and heavy currents cut piece after piece off their floes. Meanwhile, the seemingly indefatigable Hans Hendrik and a Canadian inuit colleague hunted seals and bears, meat for the hungry and blubber for their oil lamps. Life was sustained, all survived, saved at the last instant by an American seal hunting vessel after drifting more than 1,500 kilometers at sea.

Hans Hendrik had an island named after him (actually two, but according to Danish author Jane Løve, the other is more of a rock than an island). The naming of Hans Island took place during the better days of the Polaris Expedition in 1871. Expedition leader C.F. Hall pointed out the island, named it, but then died a few months later. The name stuck, but we have no knowledge of C.F. Hall’s reasoning behind it.

After the naming of the island, 100 years passed before Danish and Canadian negotiators, about to draw a border at sea between Greenland and Canada, discovered that the island lies on exactly equidistant between Denmark and Canada.

The new deal may well be the end of Hans Island’s fame.

“That could certainly be one of the outcomes. In 20 years from now, perhaps nobody will be speaking about Hans Island anymore,” says Byers.

The new deal still needs to be ratified by the Danish parliament while a similar procedure takes place in Canada. Also, negotiations with the EU Commission are pending. As Greenland is part of the so-called Schengen Area in which Europeans can travel freely with principally no border control, the new border on Hans Island will also be considered an EU border towards Canada. It’s possible, though, that the EU Commission in Brussels may accept that no formal border control on Hans Island will be needed.