60 Percent of Infrastructure on Russia’s Arctic Coast Threatened by Melting Permafrost and Warming Sea, EU’s Copernicus Monitoring Service Says

Paul Goble

              Staunton, Sept. 30 – Sixty percent of the infrastructure in coastal regions of the Russian Federation along the Arctic is at risk of collapse as a result of the ever-more-rapidly melting permafrost underlying it and the rapid warming of the Arctic Ocean which leads to more waves and erosion there, the EU’s Copernicus Monitoring Service says.

              In a new report based on an examination of the Arctic and adjoining areas, the European Union science office says that over the past four decades, the ice cover over off the Russian coast is receding faster than elsewhere in that sea (rfi.fr/ru/в-мире/20260930-доклад-copernicus-полярные-льды-быстрее-всего-тают-у-берегов-россии).

              That allows for more shipping; but together with the melting of permafrost in northern Russia, it is undermining infrastructure built near the coast because the warming of the sea means that waves are larger and contribute to more erosion of the ground on which they are built.

              According to Copernicus, the area of Arctic sea ice in the summer has been declining at the rate of more than 10 percent per decade and the Arctic waters have been warming “almost six times faster than the planet on average since 1980,” with last summer being the warmest on record.

              The Arctic Ocean off Russia’s coast is leading in this regard. According to the authoritative European center, the surface temperature of the Kara Sea has been going up by 1.68 degrees centigrade every decade, “about 14 times faster than the average for the world’s oceans as a whole,” with the Laptyev and Bering seas not far behind.