Circumpolar Science: Scandinavian Approaches to the Arctic and the North Atlantic, ca. 1920 to 1960

Abstract

ArgumentThe Scandinavian countries share a solid reputation as longstanding contributors to top level Arctic research. This received view, however, veils some deep-seated contrasts in the ways that Sweden, Norway, and Denmark have conducted research in the Arctic and the North Atlantic. In this paper it is argued that instead of focusing on the geographical determinism of science – the fact that the Arctic is close to, indeed part of, Scandinavian territories – we should look more closely at the geopolitics of science to understand the differences and similarities between these three Nordic countries. Through case studies of, mainly, Swedish Arctic and North Atlantic glaciology in the 1920s through to the 1940s, and of Norwegian preparations in the 1950s for the International Geophysical Year 1957/58, the paper demonstrates how different styles of research – research agendas, methodological choices, collaborative patterns, international networks, availability of infrastructure, relations to politics and power – are conditioned on economic interests and strategic and geopolitical trajectories, either these are explicitly put in the forefront of scientific priorities as in the case of Norway in the 1950s, or when they are manifestly disregarded in the name of scientific internationalism, as in the case of Swedish glaciology. The case of Danish colonial science in Greenland is only cursorily drawn into this analysis but corroborates the overall thesis. The analysis of this wider science politics of Scandinavian circumpolar science is exercised against a brief introductory backdrop of Arctic science historiography. Its chief message is that the analysis of polar science applying modern theory and method of the social studies of science is comparatively recent and that the full potential of merging the literature of Arctic science and exploration with those of security, geopolitics, indigenous voices, and the politics of nationalism is yet to be realized.

Strategic Arctic science: national interests in building natural knowledge – interwar era through the Cold War

“…Still, even in these small countries, much postwar environmental and geophysical research on the Arctic must be seen in a Cold War context, as is evident from the micro-diplomacy of Svalbard field stations in the IGY, as well as the military context of Rossby's atmospheric research and numerical weather predictions in the 1950s. 136 Nature was an actor in these changes as well. The warming of the Arctic in the first third of the twentieth century that had led Ahlmanndas well as the Soviet oceanographer Nikolai Zubov, the Canadian geographer Graham Rowley and the U.S. bio-geographer Paul Sipledto argue that the far north was thawing rapidly, with important geopolitical implications, abated in the 1960s, when a short-lived spell of cooling reinforced ideas of natural variation.…”

“…10). 120 While good science resulted, research programs were influenced by political and military and diplomatic issues. 121 Another outcome of the IGY in politically neutral Sweden was the construction of Kiruna Geophysical Observatory in 1957.…”

Living (with) Ice

“…Meanwhile we should take note of the fact that neither science nor people ever speak in one voice; there is no unified science as opposed to a unified native point of view-even if it appeared so during the Cold War and was widely entertained, also in anthropology. As has recently been shown for Cold War glaciology in Sweden, always a hotspot for studies of the ice, advances in the field were shaped in a battle between divergent agendas and direct contradictions in depicting the causes of climate change (Sörlin 2009).…”

The map machine: Salmon, Sámi, sand eels, sand, water and reindeer. Resource extraction in the High North and collateral landscapes

“…From perspectives of those who live in "the Arctic," the great explorers are not so interesting to exhibit, nor are Amundsen's journeys so heroic. Rather, they are part of an ongoing process of emptying landscapes of local content that continues to make what they consider their home available to systematic resource exploitation (see also Burnett, 2000;Cronon, 1992;Latour, 1986;Sörlin, 2014;Ween, 2018). In the NewArctic in Oslo, we included Amundsen but countered explorer narratives with visions of the Arctic as seen from the inside: landscapes with embedded memories of past and present appropriation and resistance and, more importantly, as inhabited landscapes, where human and non-human inhabitants otherwise come together.…”