STRETCHED THIN ON THIN ICE

Kyrre Einarsen peered over the ship’s bridge into the gray waters of an Arctic fjord. Flanking the vessel were the jagged, treeless peaks that define the islands of Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago deep in the Arctic Circle. Ahead of his ship was the vast and empty Greenland Sea. All that was missing was the ice.

Einarsen, a lieutenant commander with the Norwegian Coast Guard, and his small crew were on a three-week patrol around the region, nearly 600 miles north of mainland Norway’s northernmost tip. It was May. Even five or six years ago, Einarsen said, the fjords around Svalbard were iced over at that time of year. “You couldn’t go into this fjord without icebreaking capacity,” he said. This May, there wasn’t a chunk of ice to be seen, even as levels of snowfall rose. “That is not normal in an Arctic condition,” he said in a thick Norwegian accent.

The winter of 2018 brought new record lows in the extent of sea ice in the Arctic. On one day in February—a month when temperatures in the Arctic were around