Like other western countries, the Netherlands has severed scientific ties with Russia. This has far-reaching consequences for research around the Arctic Circle. ‘Climate change is happening very quickly there, and we don’t have any insight into that at the moment.’
If the war in Ukraine had not broken out, Thomas Lameris would have gone to Russia in a few weeks. For months, the ecologist is said to have slept in a tent, on an island above the Arctic Circle, and washed in the cold water of a river. During the day he would have searched for nests of birds – barnacle geese, red knot sandpipers, gray plovers – to see how many chicks they are raising.
Lameris, who works at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ), conducts research into migratory birds that live part of the year in the Wadden area and move to the Russian Arctic in summer to breed there. ‘Scientists were already making contact with Russian bird researchers before the fall of the Iron Curtain,’ he says. ‘First the big question was: what do the birds do there during the breeding season? Now the research is mainly about the effects of climate change.’
Global warming is fast, and even faster in the Arctic. With major consequences for the birds: now that the snow is already melting earlier in the year, there is a peak in the availability of insects, and the chicks of, for example, the knots hatch too late. As a result, fewer young grow up and the number of birds decreases.
‘Monitoring has been stopped for a few years now,’ says Lameris, ‘because we couldn’t enter Russia for this because of corona. And that while enormous changes are taking place there due to global warming, about which we would very much like to gather knowledge.’
Arctic Circle
At the beginning of March, Minister Robbert Dijkgraaf (Science, D66) did a ‘urgent call’ to freeze all formal collaborations with knowledge institutions in Russia and Belarus, because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Since then, Dutch research institutes no longer officially exchange data, knowledge or financial resources with those countries. Numerous research projects were halted.
The Netherlands followed the example of Germany, which decided to end scientific cooperation the day after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Denmark also cut ties, the European Commission stopped the payments to Russian research institutes, and prestigious institutes such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) suspended the collaboration.
It is quite a reversal: since the fall of the Soviet Union, contact between Russian and Western scientists has increased sharply. In particular, Russia’s cooperation with Germany and the US has been intensive in recent years, followed by China, the United Kingdom and France. Russian science was also on the rise. In the Nature Indexwhich counts how many publications in authoritative journals a country (or scientist) is involved in, Russia was on the list in 2021 18th placeabove Belgium, Denmark and Brazil.
Russian scientists especially excel in physics, mathematics and chemistry. Yet the country has also become crucial for climate and environmental sciences in recent years. Global warming is happening faster around the Arctic Circle than elsewhere, with major consequences for the seas, tundras and coniferous forests. Now that the West is withdrawing from Russia and funding flows are drying up, there is a danger that climate research will largely come to a standstill.
Fires in Siberia
‘The Arctic is for the most part Eurasian, but two-thirds are Eurasian,’ says Sander Veraverbeke, associate professor of Earth System Sciences at VU University Amsterdam. ‘Now that we cannot conduct research there, we will soon be missing crucial knowledge about the effects of climate change.’
Veraverbeke would also go to Russia this summer to investigate the consequences of fires in the northern coniferous forests and tundras. “The fires in Siberia have been very intense for the past three years,” he says. ‘It has been a huge natural experiment. Now is the time to measure, but that is not possible.’
Veraverbeke mainly wants to know how much carbon is released after a fire, from the trees but also from the soil. When it burns in the cold northern regions, not only do the trees and plants go up in flames, the upper part of the permafrost also thaws. This consists largely of organic material, in which carbon has often been stored for hundreds or thousands of years, like in a freezer. When that starts to decompose, it releases greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane. This process intensifies in the years after the fire: when the forest is gone, extra solar energy ends up on the earth’s surface, which leads to extra thaw, and to even more carbon released.
It is essential, says Veraverbeke, to quantify and measure all of this. ‘This knowledge is necessary to make good predictions of global warming. If this research falls away, it will not only affect the Arctic region, but the whole world.’
Dilemma
Lameris also calls it ‘a major blow’ for polar science that ties with Russia have been severed. ‘Russia covers a huge part of the Arctic’, he says.
He himself will move to Northern Norway this summer to do fieldwork there. ‘A kind of volunteer work, because this is not for my own project,’ he says. ‘I will also go there to see: can I continue my research there in the future, if this situation continues for a long time to come?’
He is not very enthusiastic about the idea of turning his back on Russia for a longer period of time. ‘The gray plovers and barnacle geese from the Wadden Sea all go to Russia,’ says the ecologist. ‘As a Dutch researcher I would like to do research on Dutch birds. The Netherlands can do something for those birds, take protective measures.’
He still maintains regular contact with his Russian colleagues. ‘They are also friends, we spent years together during fieldwork. I still speak to them from time to time, via WhatsApp or in an online meeting. They are in a difficult situation: many of them are against the war in Ukraine, but that is not always appreciated within their research institutes.’
According to some scientists, the West should maintain cooperation with Russia. ‘Let’s Russian scientists do not leave‘, wrote five prominent American scientists recently science† They point out, among other things, that nearly eight thousand Russian scientists signed a letter condemning the war in Ukraine. Moreover, they argued, breaking off the partnership would be detrimental to advances in science and technology, against Western and global interests.
Russian co-author
Yet Lameris understands that scientific ties with Russia have been severed. “It would also be weird to just go there now.”
Minister Dijkgraaf insists that it is important to maintain good informal contacts ‘especially in these times’. “These contacts will later form the basis for normalizing scientific relations again,” he wrote.
Sander Veraverbeke has indeed sent his Russian colleagues an email. ‘That it is a pity that the fieldwork is not going ahead, that I hope that we can pick it up in the future. The consequences are huge for them, also financially. They are partly paid for from Dutch research funds.’
And himself? ‘My research also partly relies on satellite data. I can bet more on that.’
He hopes that he can at least still publish with the Russians. ‘I will soon be finishing an article about the data we collected in 2019. My Russian colleagues would be co-authors. I have to check if that is still possible. But as far as I’m concerned it would be unethical not to make them co-authors.’
From physics to astronomy: cooperation with Russia is difficult
Russian science is especially strong in sciences such as physics, mathematics, chemistry and astronomy. In most of these areas, cooperation with Europe is now difficult. For example, Russian scientists are no longer welcome at CERN, the world’s largest particle lab, in Switzerland.
A new era has also dawned in space research. A European-Russian mission to Mars has been canceled and a number of launches of Galileo satellites, intended for a European GPS system, have been canceled.
Although it sometimes turns out to be possible to put aside differences of opinion in space: at the beginning of May, a Russian cosmonaut installed a European robotic arm at the International Space Station, with the intention of carrying out scientific experiments there.