Future Arctic

Long at the margins of global affairs and at the edge of our mental map of the world, the Arctic has found its way to the center of the issues which will challenge and define our world in the twenty-first century: Energy security and the struggle for natural resources, climate change and its uncertain speed and consequences, the return of great power competition, the remaking of global trade patterns…

Nowhere is the dual threat of climate change and geopolitical contest felt more strongly than in the Arctic. Sea ice is declining rapidly, wildfires are burning, and permafrost is thawing. All the while, global interest is gathering apace as the region transforms from being a frozen desert into an international waterway. Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds examine the state of the Arctic today, showing how the region is becoming a space of experimentation for everything from Indigenous governance to subsea technologies. Growing geopolitical competition is accompanying environmental disruption.

The Lost Continent: At the edge of the world, an impossible relic from the fables of antiquity has risen from the frozen wastelands of Antarctica. Professor Logan and his exploration team rush to investigate this historic find, but this unique discovery puts their lives in peril when they unearth the remnants of a long-forgotten civilization left buried beneath the ice. Within the twisting labyrinths below the melting glaciers, they uncover an ancient culture which had perished from a mysterious cataclysm. They soon realize it was a polar shift which had caused their destruction, and our ...

The sun won't rise for forty days. Neither side can wait that long. December 2045. A thousand Chinese Marines are slowly freezing to death in ships never meant to survive an Arctic winter. Their government has declared the mission a success. Their Admiral knows better. And the men who could rescue them have been ordered to treat them as a threat. As polar night descends on Victoria Strait, a British intelligence officer pieces together what the Americans already know but won't share. A Canadian sergeant prepares her section for a tactical situation she doesn't understand. And deep in the ...

**Shortlisted for the 2025 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize** The bestselling author of Your Inner Fish takes readers on an epic adventure to the North and South Poles to reveal the secrets locked in the ice about life, the cosmos, and our planet’s future. “Urgent [and]...

They came to test a route. They stayed because they had no choice. October 2045. A Chinese naval task force enters the Northwest Passage, exercising legal transit rights through waters Canada once claimed as its own. The People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) task force consists of a nuclear icebreaker, the Xuelong 3 (雪龙3) - "Snow Dragon 3", a collection of Arctic research vessels, and a last-minute addition: a Type 075 Yushen-class - Landing Helicopter Dock (LHD) 40,000-ton amphibious assault ship/helicopter carrier with a thousand Chinese Marines who've spent six months training in the ...

In the tradition of Elizabeth Kolbert and Barry Lopez, a powerful, poetic and deeply absorbing account of the “lung” at the top of the world. For the last fifty years, the trees of the boreal forest have been moving north. The Treeline takes us along this critical frontier of our warming...

The ice that saved them is now killing them.When a Chinese naval task force's reactor begins venting radiation across Victoria Strait, Admiral Chen Weiming faces an impossible choice: stay aboard the dying ships and watch his people die slowly, or order 2,600 sailors and marines to walk 400 nautical miles across the Arctic—in December—with tropical gear and dwindling supplies.No rescue is coming. Beijing has gone silent. The Canadians are offering help, but Chen's orders forbid him from accepting it. And somewhere between his fleet and salvation, an isolated platoon has just triggered a...

2,600 people. 360 kilometers. January in the Arctic. Tropical gear. The march has begun. Admiral Chen's fleet is dying—reactor failing, hull breached, ice closing in. His only option: order every man, woman, and sailor to walk across the frozen sea to Cambridge Bay. In January. With gear designed for the South China Sea. Lieutenant Zhao Jianfeng walks alone at the vanguard, a robot companion his only partner, finding safe routes across sea ice that could swallow the column whole. Behind him, 2,600 lives depend on every choice he makes. Brigadier-General Fontaine watches the column ...

One man’s “curiously thrilling joyride” of travelogue, history, and climatology, across a planet on the brink of cataclysmic transformation. As the planet warms, winter is shrinking. In the last fifty years, the Northern Hemisphere lost a million square miles of spring snowpack and in the...

Iðunn – the fountain of eternal youth or an instrument of death? Iðunn once granted the Norse gods eternal youth and immortality. But she took her secret to the grave long ago. Now, a reckless expedition is following in the footsteps of this myth, summoning great disaster. A mystical storm costs the lives of two expedition members, and the group's leader disappears without a trace. What the sole survivor reports sounds incredible: an archaic warrior of superhuman strength guards Iðunn's grave and will not rest as long as her heritage is in danger. A divine power that would have been ...

Bob Hasett, a Vietnam veteran with a tortured past, relocates from his uncle’s cattle ranch in Southern Arizona to the oil fields on the North Slope of Alaska. He wants only to live quietly and grieve the death of his wife, but when he is given a job as the head of security, familiar demons demand he choose between the life he thought he wanted and doing the right thing. Set against the frenetic pace of the early Alaska pipeline days, this story places crime, survival and a strong Inupiat woman directly in Bob’s path. He finds himself confronted with tough ethical and moral choices in a...

Most works about the environment build on dire threats warning of the possible extinction of humanity. Alan Weisman avoids frightening off readers by disarmingly wiping out our species in the first few minutes. He then continues with an astounding depiction of how Earth will fare once we're no...