The Arctic This Week Take Five: Week of November 2, 2026
US, Japan, and South Korea Launch Trilateral Arctic Pacific Partnership
Arctic Today reported on November 2 that the United States, Japan, and South Korea have agreed to establish a Trilateral Arctic Pacific Partnership. The agreement creates a working group to explore cooperation on maritime safety, emergency response, and economic opportunities in the Pacific Arctic. Foreign ministers Marco Rubio, Toshimitsu Motegi, and Cho Hyun signed the memorandum on October 30 at the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting in Atlanta. The governments have not disclosed a timetable, funding, participating agencies, or specific projects. (Arctic Today)
Take 1: The partnership sets out two areas of focus, maritime safety and emergency response, and economic partnership, placing it alongside the broader Western effort to counter the Russian-Chinese cooperation that has built up in the Arctic over the last few years. What sets it apart is who is involved, since an Arctic state has reached outside the region to bring other countries into that effort, although Japan and South Korea are already NATO’s principal Indo-Pacific partners. That choice of partners is also where the contradiction sits, because both countries have spent the war years deepening rather than cutting their Arctic ties to Russia. South Korea has been testing Russia’s Northern Sea Route, completing its first commercial round trip this autumn after consulting Moscow about assistance, and a Busan ship manager now runs four ice-class LNG carriers that Novatek has taken control of. Tokyo and Seoul have a clear maritime safety priority as they need to know whether Russia’s shipping route is viable, though how Washington fits into that given its tensions with Moscow is far less clear. The same ambiguity surrounds where this would live, as Seoul says cooperation will run partly through the Arctic Council, a body of eight Arctic member states and several observers, which has not functioned at its capacity since Russia invaded Ukraine. Until the three governments define the scope, the partnership reads as an intention to coordinate rather than an agreement on a future path of cooperation around these issues. (DW News, gCaptain, High North News)
Greenland’s Parliament Approves Security Agreement With Denmark and US
Associated Press reported on November 3 that Greenlandic lawmakers voted to approve the trilateral security agreement signed in September by President Trump, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, and Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen. The deal opens the way for additional US bases on the island while keeping Greenland under Danish control, and would still apply if Greenland becomes independent. Danish lawmakers debate it later this month, and the agreement will enter into force once those processes are complete. (Associated Press)
Take 2: The vote clears the way for an expanded American military presence in Greenland, with Washington aiming to build new bases and keep Chinese involvement out of the island’s critical minerals industry. The minerals question will test the agreement sooner than the bases will. Keeping China out of Greenlandic critical minerals suits Washington, but it narrows the field of buyers and investors for a territory that needs resource revenue to fund any move toward independence, and that trade-off has not been put to Greenlanders in any vote. Despite the 16-0 result from the lawmakers’ vote, the sentiment among Greenlandic people is split, highlighted by the seven abstentions and broader discussion on the agreement. Some see the agreement as protection, since it settles months of pressure from the Trump administration while leaving sovereignty formally untouched. Others are less convinced that any potential benefits will reach them. The agreement commits the United States to awarding contracts for construction and maintenance to Greenlandic sources wherever possible, which is the clearest material benefit, but the bases can often sit in remote locations far from Nuuk and the main settlements, and a workforce cannot easily be drawn to places that are difficult to reach. While the agreement secures the island with sovereignty and American buildup on paper, whether it produces anything for the people living there depends entirely on how the provisions are applied once construction on new bases begins. (BBC, USA Today)
Greenland’s Parliament Backs Phased Ban on Ship Scrubber Discharges
gCaptain reported on November 4 that Greenland’s parliament voted unanimously to direct the government to ban discharges from ships’ exhaust gas cleaning systems in Greenlandic waters. Open-loop scrubbers, which wash sulfur from exhaust using seawater and release the wastewater overboard, will be prohibited in Greenland’s ports, internal waters, and territorial sea from July 1, 2027. The ban will extend to all scrubber systems by July 1, 2029. Parliamentarian Justus Hansen of the Demokraatit party brought the proposal. (gCaptain)
Take 3: Greenland’s ban removes the loophole that lets ships burn cheap residual fuel and wash the sulfur into the sea, and the cruise industry has the most to work out. Operators have spent recent years adding Arctic itineraries as open-water seasons lengthen, and Greenland is among the destinations drawing that growth. Switching to marine gas oil would satisfy the rule without giving up Greenlandic ports, so the question is not whether compliance is possible but whether it is worth the cost, especially with conflict in the Middle East driving prices higher still. The deadlines in 2027 and 2029 leave operators time to decide whether Arctic demand covers the difference. The harder question is whether any of this can be enforced. Greenland joins Svalbard, which restricted ship fuel quality in 2022, and the Emission Control Areas that took effect across the Canadian Arctic and Norwegian Sea in March. What has not grown is the capacity to check them. A sanctioned tanker linked to Iranian weapons shipments spent recent weeks drifting across the Norwegian-Russian border in the Barents Sea under a false flag without being stopped. If authorities cannot intercept the ship itself, they are in no position to determine what fuel it is burning. Additionally, verifying what fuel a cruise ship is burning, or whether it discharged washwater once it leaves Greenlandic waters, requires inspections and patrol coverage that no Arctic state currently has across vast waters. The regulation adds to a growing set of standards, but a standard nobody can verify becomes a matter of operator honesty. (Cruise Industry News, International Maritime Organization, The Barents Observer)
UK Carrier Strike Group Operates in Norwegian Sea Under NATO Command
High North News reported on November 4 that the British aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales is operating in the Norwegian Sea with allied warships from France and Norway, under the command of NATO’s Joint Force Command Norfolk. The deployment is the second phase of the British Operation Firecrest and falls under Arctic Sentry and Neptune Strike. F-35B fighters from the carrier also carried out live firing with a Norwegian controller at the Setermoen range in Troms. (High North News)
Take 4: The deployment of HMS Prince of Wales to the Norwegian Sea is the latest sign that NATO now treats the Arctic as a theater requiring sustained presence rather than occasional attention. Operation Firecrest has run across most of this year, taking the carrier group through the Dynamic Mongoose and Ramstein Flag exercises, Icelandic air policing, and two rounds of Neptune Strike, all under the Arctic Sentry umbrella. A British carrier operating with French and Norwegian frigates under Joint Force Command Norfolk reflects the integration NATO has been building in the north over the past two years. The British are open about the purpose, with the carrier’s commanding officer saying the deployment is meant to show adversaries that the capability exists and would be used if needed. Russian activity has increased in response, or possibly in parallel, with Tu-142 patrol aircraft approaching the carrier group twice this year, while Royal Navy activations to track Russian movements rose by a quarter over the first seven months of 2026. Both sides are now maintaining a near-constant presence in the same waters. The larger question is what all of this deterrence is actually achieving, since the logic of power projection assumes the other side eventually adjusts its behavior, and nothing in Russian activity this year suggests that is happening. Each deployment is met with closer monitoring, each intercept with another, and the cumulative effect is a region where both sides hold more capability in place without either changing course. Whether that produces stability or simply raises the possibility of conflict in the Arctic is important for alliances to consider. (CBC, Reuters, USNI News)
Study Highlights Arctic Plant Roots as Overlooked Factor in Permafrost Carbon
Phys.org reported on November 5 that a review in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment argues plant roots play a central and understudied role in determining whether Arctic tundra releases or stores carbon. Rebecca Hewitt of Amherst College led the work, with co-leads at Umeå University and The James Hutton Institute and contributions from eight other organizations. The researchers found that warming alters root depth, productivity, and seasonal growth, and that roots can both lock carbon into soils and stimulate the microbes that release it. (Phys.org)
Take 5: This review shifts attention from what is happening on the Arctic’s surface to what is going on underneath it, where plant roots may determine whether thawing tundra releases carbon or stores it. The permafrost holds roughly twice as much organic carbon as the atmosphere currently does, so the direction that process takes matters a great deal. Roots can lock carbon into soils by supporting plant growth, but they also feed the microbes that break soil carbon down and release it as carbon dioxide and methane. The same mechanism working in both directions is exactly what makes it hard to model. Aboveground changes have drawn most of the attention, with shrubs advancing north into tundra generally read as a sign of carbon absorption, while the belowground processes that could offset that have gone largely unexamined. This follows a familiar pattern in Arctic research, where new lines of inquiry tend to expose processes that current models handle poorly rather than confirm what was already assumed. Projections of the Arctic’s contribution to warming will keep moving as a result, and so far those revisions have not gone in a reassuring direction. (AP News, Nature)