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The book opens with Shea\u2019s memory of his novice immersion in the far north, on a 2005 journey to Canada\u2019s Admiralty Inlet when \u201cclimate change wasn\u2019t the emergency \u2014 the daily alarm \u2014 that we know now\u201d. Shea describes narwhals piercing \u201cthe sea\u2019s glassy surface\u201d, of pricking \u201cour air world\u201d as if it were \u201cnothing more than a pincushion\u201d. Caressing each other\u2019s tusks, \u201csomething powerful was passing between them, and for this we had no language\u201d. <\/p>\n
But the Arctic he saw then \u201cno longer exists\u201d, he says plainly. \u201cThe Arctic is warming three or four times more rapidly than any other region on the planet.\u201d His motivating impulse pivots around the question: \u201cWhat can it mean, for all of us, if the north ceases to be cold?\u201d<\/p>\n
On Canada\u2019s Ellesmere Island, Shea gives us an intimate portrait of a wolf pack. The pups are like \u201ca couple of pillows pushed together\u201d, with large paws and \u201ccarpet-tack teeth\u201d. He develops a relationship with an injured, one-eyed wolf with a \u201cblank egg-white orb\u201d. But the highlight is when a wolf slices open \u201cthe nylon skin\u201d of his tent \u201cwith alarming precision\u201d to steal his inflatable pillow.<\/p>\n
By the time we reach the tundra caribou in the Northwest Territories, he has us on the hook. Here, his investigation of the caribou\u2019s \u201cgreat vanishing\u201d, along with their habitat, becomes an opportunity to present the complexity beneath the term \u201cclimate change\u201d. Instead of cutting fossil fuels to reduce warming, \u201cgovernments have taken half measures\u201d \u2014 the caribou\u2019s predator species are shot; indigenous hunting of caribou is regulated; local people are forced to rely on expensive imported foods instead. In one particularly moving encounter, an Inupiat elder describes it as \u201clike feeling a cold coming on\u201d, until the fear kicks in that it\u2019s something deeper, \u201cshot through your whole system\u201d.<\/p>\n
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Wolves in Canada<\/p>\n
NEIL SHEA<\/p>\n
The second half of the book focuses more on humans. Shea meets the Nunamiut living on the \u201ccaribou highway\u201d in Alaska. This is the western Arctic herd, where caribou numbers have not yet been devastated. But when Shea joins a hunt, and the shot caribou is opened up, its insides are \u201cspeckled with little gray pustules. Tumors\u201d. The herd is \u201csick\u201d. Shea describes \u201coverwhelming\u201d grief: \u201cEven though I\u2019m a southerner, I feel it, a silence spreading below our modern clamour.\u201d<\/p>\n
When he turns his travels to Europe, he asks why, in the mid-15th century, the Greenland Vikings, or Norse, disappeared. The plague? A little Ice Age? Did the bottom fall out in the trade of walrus tusks when Europe turned to elephant ivory? We have options, he says, to stop the melting Arctic, starting with radically reducing our greenhouse emissions. \u201cHere, perhaps, is the great difference between the Norse mind and our own. They tried to survive. Sometimes we don\u2019t seem like we want to.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2022 How the UK is testing a radical plan to refreeze the Arctic<\/a><\/p>\n Finally, Shea travels to Kirkenes, a former mining town near the Norwegian-Russian border \u2014 \u201cthe most controversial place in the Arctic\u201d, Shea claims (true at the time of writing, before President Trump claimed ownership of Greenland). Shea is confronted by the stark contrast between \u201cthe mythic scale\u201d of an older Arctic where ice, animals, people and stories once moved freely, and an \u201cunnatural\u201d, \u201ccruel\u201d barrier. For five weeks he drives and walks the Norwegian frontier, travelling \u201cthrough sublime, spring-sodden country\u201d, the line marked by 4ft-high posts \u201cdecorated like goldfinches, with black caps and bright yellow bodies\u201d and \u201cwell-appointed, even cozy\u201d military observation posts.<\/p>\n Across all these journeys, Shea interweaves natural and human history, travelogue and climate reporting, without losing sight of how it feels to be in this landscape: the \u201cdays where everything is so white it blinds\u201d, where \u201ctime resembles fluid, pooling around us\u201d. His descriptions of the vast backdrop make the individual details all the more arresting, like when he raises the distant, \u201cancient dead\u201d from a medieval graveyard in Greenland, describing two entwined skeletons \u2014 a six-year-old child wrapped in the arms of an older male. <\/p>\n The author and National Geographic writer Neil Shea<\/p>\n NEIL SHEA<\/p>\n This dramatic camerawork \u2014 zooming from wide angle to detail \u2014 is what gives the book its momentum, which is important, not only to balance out the grimness of the melting Arctic, but to conceal the book\u2019s weakness: the episodic individual chapters mean that the big picture sometimes disappears from view. But that\u2019s a small quibble. Shea is a likeable, self-effacing narrator. At one point, he\u2019s so busy waving with happiness from his kayak, he\u2019s goofily unaware of ruining his colleague\u2019s photograph of narwhals. On a quad bike, he hits a boulder and is launched \u201clike a circus clown out of a cannon\u201d. He\u2019s willing to reveal his vulnerabilities, including his fear of falling through the ice. \u201cOne thing I learn quickly out here is that when you are camped on the surface of a frozen lake, no one wants to talk about climate change.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2022 Read more book reviews and interviews \u2014 and see what\u2019s top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List<\/a><\/p>\n In the book\u2019s final scene, on the Norwegian-Russian border, Shea describes a double rainbow, one end falling on the road in front of him, the other vanishing above some trees. \u201cI had never seen such color. It seemed so close, an invitation of light.\u201d This image of an arc of light somehow re-stitching the broken Arctic like a heavenly bridge is, momentarily, compelling, a symbol of possibility. <\/p>\n That rainbow emerged over the very same place where, in June 1968, a few dozen Norwegian conscripts faced a Soviet \u201carmy of thousands\u201d, moved to the border by Moscow as an act of provocation. That face-off came to nothing, but has the Russian threat dispersed? The north is ceasing to be cold, but geopolitically it is hotting up. As Shea says, it is a place for \u201cimagining apocalypses\u201d. The terrifying thing is this: since Frostlines went to press, Russia isn\u2019t the only \u201cBear\u201d in the circle.![\"Man](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/\/cd50e4c3-9143-4007-93a8-e212a388c096.jpg\")
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Sophy Roberts is the author of The Lost Pianos of Siberia<\/a> and A Training School for Elephants<\/a><\/p>\n