American Scientist

FROSTLINES: A Journey through Entangled Lives and Landscapes in a Warming Arctic. Neil Shea. 240 pp. Harper Collins, 2025. $28.00.

Tales of a warming Arctic frequently make national and international news. Yet the seasonal human-animal rhythms that structure life in the region are missing in media coverage of permafrost and melting glaciers. Frostlines is a compelling corrective to the public perception of the Arctic as simply “big, cold, white, and far away.” Through an engaging narrative and a profound appreciation of the landscape, journalist Neil Shea, a long-time contributor to National Geographic, as well as an editor and podcaster, gives readers a textured and multi-dimensional view into the changing human and animal lives in the Arctic.

Shea covers a wide geographic area in the book, from the Brooks Range of Alaska to the town of Kirkenes, on the fraught border between Norway and Russia. Each chapter finds him in a different location, among the many Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples who have made the Arctic home, such as the Tlicho. Appropriately, then, Shea frequently uses the Inuit word nuna. Nuna means “land” and appears in many Arctic placenames, such as Nunavut and Kalaallit Nunaat, the Indigenous name for Greenland. However, as Shea explains, nuna also connotes a situated understanding of environment and identity, one grounded in human experience, relationships, and landscape. Each chapter, then, is a portrait of nuna, of human and animal relations structured by place.

One such set of relations involves caribou. They and the human communities reliant upon them are central concerns of the book. The decline in caribou herd numbers is an existential threat for Indigenous hunters. Yet scientists see the changes from a different perspective. Shea writes, “losing a herd isn’t necessarily unusual. They aren’t permanent fixtures of the landscape. Herds routinely grow, shrink, atomize. . . . This is not a very satisfying assessment for the Tlicho . . . For them the questions are not rooted in biology or ecology but existence: If such a fate could overtake a beloved companion, the more-than-human beings, what might become of the people who depend on them?”

Far to the east in Greenland, Shea describes abandoned landscapes, once home to the farms and fields of Norse settlers. Here he witnesses a Danish and Greenlandic team excavating the remains of a man and young boy from a Norse cemetery. Taken to Copenhagen and likely to spend their afterlives in museum storage, these remains will be analyzed for demographic clues to the 15th-century collapse of European settlement in Greenland. The last written record of the Norse in Greenland is dated 1408. Sometime after that, all Norse settlements were abandoned, though archaeologists and historians still don’t know exactly why. The Norse absence is juxtaposed with the Inuit presence in Shea’s consideration of another set of human remains—the Qilakitsoq mummies on exhibit in Nuuk. Near contemporaries of the Norse, the Qilakitsoq group—complete with clothing and facial tattoos—was preserved by extraordinary conditions. Unlike the Norse, their descendants persist today, as modern Greenlandic Inuit. 

The author’s status as a parent inflects his understanding of the Arctic, but nowhere more so than in the pages describing his encounters with the remains of the young Norseman and the infant Inuk from Qilakitsoq. Shea “struggled to not make too much of [them]. [He] tried to keep them safely in the past, beyond help or hurt and certainly beyond [his] ability to know much about them. But some stories can never be neatly corralled, not even very old ones. And a parent’s mind is never a rational place.”

Shea is what anthropologists call a “participant observer.” He camps on the ice with hunters, hauls in nets, and eats what is provided by his hosts and the land itself. Biting cold temperatures and damp clothing make plenty of appearances in Frostlines, but Shea is undeterred by bad weather and discomfort. Visiting small villages, archaeological sites, and remote camps, Shea speaks with and listens to many Arctic inhabitants, but is particularly attentive to Elders, taking heed of a shrug or a silence—meaningful acts in many Indigenous households.

In addition to human communities, Shea spends time among caribou, wolves, muskox, and narwhal. His approach to animals is part of a welcome shift in nature writing and scholarship—a shift toward appreciation of animals as historical agents in their own right. Accounts of caribou and wolves demonstrate that herds and packs have histories—unique trajectories in time and space structured by (animal) personalities, human encounters, colonialism, capitalism, and now, global warming. Shea understands that the loss of the Fosheim wolf matriarch (on the Fosheim Peninsula) threatens the survival of the wolf pack—a disaster, a collapse of society. One cannot help but see parallels here in the other collapses described in Frostlines: the diminished caribou herds, the demise of the Norse settlement in Greenland, and the breakdown of relations with Russia following the invasion of Ukraine.

Though the theme of climate change and its impacts, both large and small, runs through the book like a fracture through sea ice, Frostlines is grounded in hope and wisdom. Shea’s Arctic is complex and diverse, full of stories of humans and animals whose lives are embedded in the landscape itself.