June 2025

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).