Rather than making the Arctic easier to navigate, climate change is making ice thicker, more mobile and more dangerous in certain areas.
The cold, hard reality facing any US, NATO or European plans for Greenland is the ice. It chokes harbours, entombs minerals, and freezes shorelines into minefields of white and blue shards that threaten ships all year.
And the only way to break through all that is with icebreakers: enormous ships with burly engines, reinforced hulls, and heavy bows that can crush and cleave the frozen masses.
But the United States has only three such vessels, one of which is so decrepit as to be barely usable. The country has entered agreements to obtain 11 more, but can only source additional ships from adversaries - or allies it has recently rebuffed.
The key supplier is Finland, but the Nordic country is facing its own icebreaking challenges. Surprisingly, climate change warming the seas doesn’t necessarily mean the country can rely less on icebreakers in the future.
Rather than making the Arctic easier to navigate, climate change is making ice thicker, more mobile and more dangerous in certain areas, even as overall ice cover declines.
Icebreakers: The key technology in the Arctic
Despite toning down his rhetoric, US President Donald Trump seems set on America owning Greenland for security and economic reasons: to keep what he calls “the big, beautiful piece of ice” out of the hands of Moscow and Beijing, to secure a strategic Arctic location for US assets, and to extract the island’s mineral wealth, including rare earths.
Without specifying any plan, he told world leaders gathered in Davos, Switzerland, on 21 January that “to get to this rare earth you got to go through hundreds of feet of ice”.
Yet there is no meaningful way to do that - or anything else in the semiautonomous Danish territory - without icebreakers’ crucial ability to cut trails through frozen seas.
Even if they decided to surge US material into Greenland tomorrow, “they would have a two or three-year gap in which they’re not really able to access the island most of the time,” says Alberto Rizzi, a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
“On a map, Greenland looks surrounded by sea, but the reality is that the sea is full of ice,” he adds.
If the US wants more icebreakers, there are only four options: the shipyards of strategic adversaries China and Russia or longtime allies Canada and Finland, both of whom have recently weathered blistering criticism and threats of tariffs by Trump over Greenland.
Northern expertise in ice-capable ships
Icebreakers are expensive to design, build, operate and maintain and require a skilled workforce that can only be found in certain places like Finland, with expertise forged in the frigid Baltic Sea.
Finland has built roughly 60 per cent of the world’s fleet of more than 240 icebreakers and designed half the remainder, Rizzi says.
“It’s very niche capabilities that they developed as a necessity first and then they have been able to turn it into geoeconomic leverage,” he says.
Russia has the world’s largest fleet with about 100 vessels, including colossal ships powered by nuclear reactors. Second comes Canada, which is set to double its fleet to around 50 icebreakers, according to a 2024 report by Aker Arctic, a Helsinki-based icebreaker design firm.
“Our design and engineering work order books are pretty full at the moment and the near future looks promising," says Jari Hurttia, business manager at Aker Arctic, as he describes rising interest in the firm's “unrivalled special competence which is not available anywhere else in the world”.
During his first administration, Trump prioritised the US military’s acquisition of ice-capable vessels, a strategy that the Biden administration followed up on by signing an agreement with Helsinki and Ottawa to deliver 11 icebreakers constructed by two corporate consortiums with Finnish designs.
Cracks are appearing in the future of Arctic ice-breaking
While both the US and the 27-nation European Union, including Denmark and Finland, have pledged to vastly increase investment in Greenland, it is clear who currently has the hard-power capability to actually reach the vast frozen territory roughly three times the size of Texas.
“It’s kind of absurd because I don’t think Finland would scrap the deal with the US as a response to threatening to invade Greenland,” Rizzi says. “But if Europe wants to exercise significant leverage to the USA, they could say ‘We’re not going to give you any icebreakers and good luck reaching the Arctic, or projecting power there, with those two old ships that you have.’”
However, Finland also has its own internal problems on the horizon as climate change upsets weather patterns.
Global warming means the country’s fleet of icebreakers was only fired up for the first time this winter on New Year's Eve – almost two weeks later than the previous year and significantly further into the season than the long-term average.
Last year, they were deployed for 153 days, a much shorter period than usual, according to the Finnish Transport Infrastructure Agency, which is responsible for icebreaking.
But that doesn’t mean icebreaking is becoming an easier task.
"Climate change also means extreme conditions, i.e. very warm winters with very little ice, when little icebreaking assistance is needed. But it will also likely bring extreme phenomena at the other end," Arctia Business Director Paavo Kojonen told the Finnish news agency STT.
Wind is the key culprit. As winters get more blustery, ice masses travel towards shallow water or the shore and begin to accumulate.
Where ice fields were once typically 60–80 centimetres thick, they can now reach up to 10 metres in some areas, Kojonen said.
"Icebreaker captains say that winters are getting harder all the time," he added.
Six Arctia icebreakers are currently required to ensure that Finnish shipping trade is unhindered during the winter.
"We’ll need at least this number of icebreakers for the next few decades," Kojonen said.
“The cost of icebreakers to society is quite small compared to the problems if foreign trade does not work. There’s no replacement capacity available from around the world during severe ice winters.”
