For once, I couldn’t square the Arctic Circle.
II knew something was off when over drinks at this year’s Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavík, an American investor and his partner pitched me the idea of “AI Elders.” Usually, when someone dies, you might build a mausoleum to remember them. Here, the idea was to make it seem as though they would still be alive, his partner explained during a speed-dating event that was strictly business.
Drawing inspiration from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which houses seeds from all over the world under icy lock and key to safeguard the world’s crop biodiversity, the idea is to record – with Indigenous Peoples’ consent – traditional knowledge and store it in a “wisdom vault” under their control.
Detached from the environments in which Indigenous knowledge is rooted, the “AI Elders” are nevertheless supposed to learn recursively. The next morning during a panel on the Arctic AI economy, Ujjwal Kumar, co-founder of Cognisee, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based start-up behind the concept, explained, “Every time you query the knowledge vault, that knowledge grows with you, that intergenerational knowledge grows.” Kumar added, “The more you query, the better it gets.” Cognisee is collaborating with another firm to develop gloves that an Elder can wear to capture “sensorimotor feedback,” like how it feels to catch and gut a fish on the ice.
One audience member voiced concern over what might happen if an AI Elder decided to go rogue. Masaaki Nagai, executive director of the Earth Elders, a New York-based non-profit, replied, “My understanding is that there’s going to be a kill switch.”
A “species-level event” for an endangered planet
At the 2026 gathering of Arctic Circle, I felt like I was staring into a dark and digitized hole. During one of the headline plenaries, Tristan Harris, co-founder of the California-based Center for Humane Technology, warned that AI represented a “24th century technology crashing down on 21st century society.” A concert violinist played in the background. Towards the end of the performance, Harris and his co-stars, Aza and Joy Raskin, invited the audience to sing along. “It’s still all in our hands,” everyone – or nearly everyone – crooned. While I can’t remove myself from this timeline, at least I could leave the auditorium.
Out in the corridor, I found some friends handling a silvery woven fabric. “Guess what it’s made from?” asked the man holding it. Silky but coarse to the touch, I thought it might be fish skin. “It’s not organic,” he hinted. After a few more tries, I gave up. “It’s basalt!” he revealed. The seams were really starting to come apart.
Since its founding in 2013, Arctic Circle, the largest annual gathering focused on the region, has been a place for polar prognostications. But this year, the soothsaying took on cosmic scales. In their nearly hour-long plenary, Harris and the Raskins declared AI to be a “species-level event.” Despite the ambitions behind their traveling “three-act musical experience,” the Eras tour it was not.
Their performance included photographs from the Reykjavík Summit held exactly 40 years ago, when U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev discussed arms control on the windswept North Atlantic island. At the end, the Californians welcomed Icelandic President Halla Tómasdóttir, who has called for more cautious development of AI, onto the stage. All of this fooled me into thinking that this version of the Silicon Valley spectacle had been customized for the conference. A quick YouTube search, however, revealed that a nearly identical show – complete with the Icelandic president en vivo – had been performed at the AI for Good Global Summit 2026 in Switzerland in August.
Later that afternoon, the heavy hitters at this year’s Arctic Circle continued scaling up both risk and opportunity. Professor Johan Rockström, the Swedish sustainability scientist who helped develop the concept of “planetary boundaries” – the nine Earth-system limits intended to define a safe operating space for humanity – led a session with his fellow “Planetary Guardians.” Among them were Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, and Hindou Ibrahim, an environmental activist from Chad. The goal of the Planetary Guardians is to bring together environmental leaders, Indigenous activists, and scientists to push governments and financial institutions to transition away from fossil fuels.
Robinson chuckled that when she told her grandchildren about her new role, “They thought I was part of Star Wars.” It’s an easy enough mistake to make – especially while walking around Harpa, the glittering conference venue where I often felt like I was in a galaxy far, far away from the harsh realities of life in the Arctic.
Even Iceland sometimes seems a universe apart from the rest of the north. One of the Planetary Guardians on the panel lauded the country as a “good example” of moving quickly into the renewable energy space. Yet Iceland, much of whose infrastructure and urban development was shaped by the heavy American presence after the Second World War, continues to have one of the world’s highest rates of car ownership. Isbiltur, or “ice cream road trip,” remains a popular pastime. And bucking the European trend, Reykjavík’s municipality recently eliminated planters, tables, and bike racks downtown to make room for 15 parking spots.
The Planetary Guardians spoke on a celestial scale, but communities across the Arctic are grappling with more local concerns. Sometimes this means protecting the great outdoors. At other times, it means preserving outdoor seating.
The future is already here – and it’s eastern
While Icelanders were driving around the sub-Arctic in search of frosty treats, this summer, the Russian shadow fleet, a Chinese container ship, and a Korean bulk carrier all plied the Northern Sea Route trying to avoid bergy bits. Some of the Russian vessels even sailed within 500 nautical miles of the North Pole to avoid the sea ice that was choking the Vilkitsky Strait to the south.
If a conference session on “The Northern Sea Route – Hormuz Disruption” was to be believed, these voyages were laying the foundations of a future in which the West is relegated to a periphery. The session was organized by Aiyana Global Group, a Dubai-based investment firm whose 17 executive team members are all men.
Proprietary maps flashed across the screen illustrating shipping routes, train tracks, and pipelines seamlessly linking Eurasia’s eastern markets. In a matter-of-fact tone, the speaker coursed through examples such as driverless lorries between China and Uzbekistan, the new freight railway between China and Iran, and the proposed International North-South Transport Corridor, which would connect Russia and India via Azerbaijan and Iran.
“This piece is transformational. It’s solely self-contained. There’s no West in this. Just a huge amount of connectivity outside of the West,” the speaker asserted. During an exchange with an audience member, he insisted, “I’m just showing you the future.”
Yet according to Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason, “The future actually arrived a month ago.” The luminary’s declaration came not at Arctic Circle but across town at the University of Iceland, where he introduced Johan Rockström. The Swedish sustainability scientist delivered his “Scientific Update on the State of the Planet” ahead of his appearances at both the Arctic Circle and the Global Risk and Stabilization Summit, held in Reykjavík immediately after the polar gathering.
While Rockström’s statistics were worrying, Magnason’s words were stirring. He is the public intellectual behind the “Letter to the Future,” which was engraved in 2019 at the site of the Ok glacier, Iceland’s first to disappear in recorded history. The letter cautions that without action, all of the country’s glaciers are expected to be gone within two centuries. The somber warning to humanity has since been replicated at the sites of several other deceased glaciers around the world.
If written today, Magnason might redirect his letter to the present. Facing the audience, he contended, “Future generations are us.” Back at the conference, during a session on geoengineering, Virginia Selz, a scientist from Ocean Visions, a US non-profit investigating ocean regeneration solutions, observed, “The best climate we’ll ever have was yesterday.” With technology from the 24th century crashing down on us and more flash floods destroying homes in Nepal, it seems we can’t hold eulogies for Earth fast enough.
Something isn’t quite right with the ice
Whenever you think the future begins, the ice already looks bizarre. During the six sessions on geoengineering held at the conference, there was talk of “ice preservation,” or saving what ice remains. Yet the ongoing experiments are creating something altogether stranger.
UK non-profit RealIce shared results from experiments conducted over the past few winters in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. Using pumps that shifted seawater on top of the ice, the researchers produced a frozen layer half a meter thicker than the surrounding, unmodified ice. As documented in a recent article in Earth’s Future, the artificially thickened ice was whiter and brighter, reflecting more sunlight. It may also interact with the many species that depend on sea ice, from plankton to crabs and seals, in different ways, though those effects have yet to be studied.
The geoengineered sea ice is also flatter. When community members told the researchers that this would make travel easier, RealIce donated a pump so they could produce pancake-flat ice themselves.
As the session drew to a close, an audience member asked whether the researchers had considered experimenting not only where the risks of ice interventions were lowest, but also where the potential benefits were greatest. Even as greenhouse gas reduction targets recede into fantasy, if the wildest geoengineering advocates are right, we could be on the brink of a brighter, thicker cryosphere. Making the climate great again, indeed.
The Americans are back
Despite grappling with one of the most controversial topics facing the Arctic, the assembly roundtable on “Geoengineering in the Arctic?” was by invitation only. In contrast, all attendees were subjected to a plenary delivered by Mike Dunleavy, the outgoing Republican governor of Alaska, and Tom Dans, chair of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission. His twin brother is Paul Dans, the mastermind behind the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 – a nearly 900-page playbook for radically restructuring the U.S. government by dismantling federal agencies, strengthening executive power, and installing thousands of loyalists into the bureaucratic ranks.
Dans’ presence marked a departure from last year’s Arctic Circle, when the federal government shutdown prevented its employees from attending. This time, the current administration’s policies and ideology were loud and clear – most notably in the reluctance of both Dans and Dunleavy to say “climate change.” Yet the use of a racial slur seemed not to be taboo: while describing his family heritage, Dans wielded a term that prompted audible gasps from the audience.
During the question-and-answer session, an earnest young man named Cody from California asked what the administration was doing to help tackle climate change. Dunleavy responded by discussing investments in military infrastructure and renewable energy before offering a more personal contribution: “I have fifty solar panels on my property.”
Then, an audience member asked how the U.S. would partner with local communities to ensure successful investments. Dans pointed to the new security agreement between the U.S., Greenland, and Denmark before launching into a litany of reassurances: “To the maximum extent possible, we’re going to work with the Greenlanders. This is their country…I think it’s great – I love the Greenlanders, the ones I know, and I think what we have to be careful of, is not to underestimate them. They’re very sophisticated people. They’re entirely capable of managing their business and their affairs.”
Despite Greenland’s promotion of “Nothing About Us, Without Us” – including in a plenary speech delivered by Múte B. Egede, its Minister for Foreign Affairs, Business and Raw Materials, just hours before Dunleavy and Dans addressed the audience – the conference was giving the floor to yet another American monologue about the Inuit-majority country without a single Greenlander on stage.
Russia in the shadows
While the Americans had returned, Russian officials remained absent as the war in Ukraine raged on. One American at the conference who lives in Moscow told me that things there are “pretty good these days.” A Korean student I met admitted that she had recently traveled to the capital for an academic conference. Such visits are generally kept hush-hush given the current stigma associated with visiting Russia in European circles. Under the surface, however, it seems that some connections persist.
Look closely enough and ties to the Kremlin still influence the conference in subtle ways, too. Fredrik Paulsen, the Swedish pharmaceutical billionaire and chair of the University of the Arctic, sponsors the annual Frederik Paulsen Arctic Academic Action Award, which offers the prize-winner €100,000. Paulsen received a prize of his own from Russian President Vladimir Putin – the Friendship Award – in 2008 for his role in funding and joining the Russian flag-planting stunt on the seabed underneath the North Pole the year before.
Dans, too, advocates closer American ties with Russia, where he spent time making business deals in the 1990s. In September, the US Arctic Research Commission chair announced plans to visit Moscow. Republican pushback has scuttled his trip down memory lane, at least for now. Meanwhile, much of the conference chatter involved reports that millions of barrels of Russian diesel may soon be flowing through American gas stations ahead of the midterm elections, if a recent deal between Trump and Putin holds.
The opening of Club Arctic
During the final night of the conference on a swanky Reykjavík hotel rooftop, I stopped by the “Friends of the Far North” reception. The event was hosted by the Arctic Encounter Summit, the annual Arctic conference held in Anchorage, Alaska, which I attended last spring.
On my table lay a glossy black handout introducing Ultima, a “global alliance for those building, investing, and innovating at the world’s frontiers.” Its first frontier? The Arctic. I scanned the QR code and opened the website, which offers three browsing modes: “Dark,” “Light,” and “Arctic.”
The site revealed little about the company itself but described the “global alliance” as “a private intelligence platform and in-person membership network.” By typing in the access code printed on the handout, I signed up for the mailing list exclusive to the first 250 subscribers. Finding this mysterious document at a private reception at a conference that once billed itself as a new and inclusive venue for Arctic cooperation underscored the region’s increasingly clubbish character.
Ultima was the second invitation to exclusivity that I’d encountered at the conference. The first was a flyer for Aldin Biodome, the world’s first “geo-climate biodome.” Powered by geothermal energy, the selling point of the artificial oasis, designed by the architectural firm behind Singapore’s climate-controlled Gardens by the Bay, is to offer “a unique dining and sensory experience for locals and visitors.” The project’s promoter described to me a sprawling greenhouse on the outskirts of Reykjavík that would enable elderly Icelanders to go for wintertime walks, digital nomads to co-work, and the betrothed to throw weddings.
The next day, I stood at a counter in a dingy suburban bus station answering emails on my laptop. A tank-topped Icelander asked to borrow my phone charger so that he could make a call. Children rollerbladed chaotically back and forth across the linoleum floor. A fast-food restaurant sold zapiekanka, a stodgy Polish snack comprising a toasted baguette topped with mushrooms, cheese, and ketchup. It was all a world away from the Arctic Circle’s receptions brimming with besuited delegates queuing impatiently for prosecco and hors d’oeuvres.
While I typed up my thoughts on the seven-hour bus from Reykjavík to Akureyri, the passenger in front of me was prompting an AI to spit out stories and pictures set in a dazzling winter wonderland. As the dark mossy mountains dusted by the season’s first snow sped outside, I reflected on what one diplomat had told me at the conference. Rather than taking notes, they recorded sessions on their personal phone, uploaded the audio to ChatGPT, and had it transcribe and summarize them into brief reports that formed the basis of diplomatic cables.
As the deep state dissolves into the cloud and the ice thickens from above, declarations of the “end of the Arctic” seem to be giving way to freakish beginnings. The Arctic was once defined by its physical barriers: colossal icebergs, punishing temperatures, and distances traversed by kayak and sled, by reindeer, whale, and tern. Now, reaching the frontier depends on private capital, autonomous tech, and QR codes. For those left outside, I suppose there will be AI Elders to guide them through the simulation.
This post first appeared on Cryopolitics, an Arctic News and Analysis blog.
Related stories from around the North:
Canada: Arctic would be “flagship project” in proposed EU-Canada partnership, von der Leyen says, Eye on the Arctic
Denmark: Trump touts ‘permanent control’ in Greenland deal as Denmark, Nuuk stress sovereignty, self-determination, Eye on the Arctic
Finland: Experts urge policy overhaul to address climate tipping point risks, Eye on the Arctic
Iceland: Iceland plans visitor fee to address overtourism at three famous Golden Circle sites, Eye on the Arcctic
Norway: Resource extraction projects, dwindling sea ice, power Arctic shipping surge, Eye on the Arctic
Russia: Mounting war-time trade between Moscow and Beijing expands in the Arctic, The Independent Barents Observer
United States: Trump says oil, gas and mineral exploration in Greenland is set to begin. It’s not that simple, The Canadian Press
