June 2025 | Oceanography
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to find entry into what was hypothesized to be an ice-free cen
tral Arctic Ocean. Nansen was inspired by Jeannette’s finding
and the large quantities of driftwood from Siberia found on the
shores of East Greenland, and reports of driftwood found north
of Spitzbergen, and hypothesized that the Arctic Sea ice drifted
westward across the Arctic Ocean from Siberia toward the
Fram Strait. The existence of the TPD was later documented by
Nansen’s Fram expedition in the 1890s (Nansen, 1897), as he set
out to prove that the currents created by the largest Russian riv
ers emptying into the Arctic Ocean could push a ship across the
North Pole. The TPD as mechanism to move sea ice by a com
bination of wind and ocean drag has been modeled to explain
oceanographic surface systems in these parts of the Arctic
Ocean (Spall, 2019). The importance of the TPD for the occur
rence of driftwood on Svalbard has also previously been exam
ined and documented by Eggertsson (1994). Driftwood can
also archive climate information, and because the wood trans
ported on or frozen in ice stays afloat for an extended time, it
can be used to trace historical changes in currents and ice con
ditions (Linderholm et al., 2021). As demonstrated by a set of
ice-tethered observatories (ITO) deployed at the North Pole in
July 2022 (see Figure 1), the speed of the TPD has increased.
Whereas it took Fram, frozen in sea ice, three years to drift
across the Arctic Ocean (Figure 1), it took the ITOs deployed in
June 2022 only seven months to effectively be transported out
into the Fram Strait (Berge et al., 2025).
Geopolitical and Historical Context
Driftwood can be a naturally occurring and renewable resource,
created by trees falling into the water due to erosion of river
banks and the break-up of ice in the spring. However, the arrival
of human settlements and industry in arctic territories also
impacted the production of driftwood. The larch tree found
in Rijpfjorden started its life shortly after the first Russian set
tlers arrived on the banks of the Yenisei, and died just as the
Romanov imperial dynasty entered its last turbulent years before
the Russian Revolution (1917). This occurred at a critical junc
ture in the development of the international timber trade in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The forests of cen
tral Europe no longer seemed inexhaustible because they could
not meet the growing demand for timber from industrialization
and population growth (Lotz, 2015). Thus, the timber industry
frontier moved north and east, and Russia became the world’s
leading timber exporter.
Commercial logging and timber rafting along the Yenisei
River began in the nineteenth century. The abolition of serf
dom in 1861 had increased labor mobility, and the state also
encouraged settlement in Siberia. But loggers in Siberia strug
gled to overcome disadvantages such as lack of modern indus
trial equipment and transportation to the European markets. Ice
conditions are difficult in rivers flowing toward the far north,
and the Kara Sea was also seen as natural barrier. Only after
the Finnish-Swedish explorer Nordenskiöld successfully sailed
to Ob and Yenisei in 1875 did the establishment of commercial
shipping routes seem feasible. Despite oceanographic research
including depth soundings, hydrographic surveys, mapping of
shoals and ice conditions, very few commercial shipments made
it safely across the Kara Sea before 1904.
The outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war in February 1904,
the same year the Siberian larch died along the Yenisei, greatly
changed the strategic importance of the Northern Sea Route (also
known as the Northeast Passage). The Russian Baltic fleet had to
circumnavigate the world before it could reach Japan, only to be
soundly defeated at the Tsushima Strait in 1905. After the war,
Tsar Nicolas II launched the Arctic Ocean Hydrographic expe
dition (1910–1915) to open the Northern Sea Route as a strate
gic objective for the state (Kuksin, 1991). As a part of the new
Russian commitment to expand its activities in Arctic waters,
the polar explorer Rusanov sailed to Spitsbergen to take posses
sion of coal fields and to promote Russian hunting and resource
extraction, thereby strengthening the Russian position in the
ongoing scramble over Svalbard.
After the Russian revolution in 1917, the new Soviet authori
ties sought to harness the transportation potential of the Yenisei
for trade in bulky commodities (Nielsen and Okhuizen, 2022).
The Soviet industrialization plans and immense appetite for
wood led to intensification of Siberian logging in the 1920s
and 1930s, and at the same time polar navigation techniques
and technology improved. Stalinist forced-tempo industrial
ization, imported equipment, and skepticism toward Western
approaches to sustainable management made for a massive, if
wasteful, expansion of the Siberian timber industry (Kotchekova,
2024). It has been estimated that up to 50% of the timber was
lost while being rafted on the Yenisei River in the early decades,
providing a considerable source for driftwood in the Arctic
Ocean. Over time, the share of reported losses dropped even as
the transport volume increased, with the peak transport volume
for the Yenisei occurring around 1960 (Hellmann et al., 2015).
By that time, only 2.5% of the logs were reportedly lost during
rafting (Korpachev et al., 2022). The later disintegration and col
lapse of the Soviet Union also affected the supply of driftwood,
as harvest levels fell during the economic and political turbu
lence in post-Soviet Russia (Naumov, 2016).
The combination of the TPD and the logging industry in
Siberia has had a significant influence on human presence and
history on Svalbard. Driftwood was an important resource both
for firewood and building materials. Without the extensive log
ging in Siberia, the total volumes of driftwood reaching Svalbard
would have been far less during the last 100 years. Hence, there
would have been fewer wood falls for the wood-eating bivalves,
and the history of resource extraction on Svalbard would have
been different. Many small cabins built by hunters and trappers
using driftwood from this period still remain and are today pro
tected as cultural heritage (Reymert and Moen, 2015).