Alaska Beacon

The U.S. Department of Education has terminated grant funding for universities’ Alaska Native and Native-Hawaiian-serving programs and support services, an act that University of Alaska Fairbanks Chancellor Mike Sfraga said “will have a substantial and negative impact on a large number of Alaskans, including our Alaska Native students.”

Sfraga announced the federal decision in a campus-wide email on Thursday.

Sfraga said the funding cut for UAF is estimated at $2.9 million, and the full effects are still under review. More than 20%, or an estimated 1,450 students at UAF are Indigenous, Sfraga noted.

The full extent of the grant funding freeze across the University of Alaska system is still being analyzed, said Jonathon Taylor, UA director of public affairs, by email on Friday.

UA President Pat Pitney said in an emailed statement on Friday that the university will continue to create a welcoming environment for all students.

“We are evaluating the impact these changes will have on our services to Alaska Native students, and are communicating directly with students, staff, and faculty who may be affected,” Pitney said. “A significant part of UA’s identity is our commitment to Alaska Native culture, language, art, heritage, business, and tribal management and governance; that remains unchanged. We proudly embrace our global leadership in Alaska Native and Indigenous studies, and will continue to sustain a welcoming environment where all – including our Alaska Native and Indigenous students – can thrive and succeed.”

Taylor said the University of Alaska Southeast has at least one grant-funded program on the Sitka campus aimed at improving student services, and university officials are waiting to hear whether it will be eliminated. Taylor said the University of Alaska Anchorage does not have any programs funded by this federal grant.

Taylor said on Monday the University of Alaska Anchorage has at least one program funded by the grant, but it is based on different eligibility requirements, and the university does not expect it to be affected.

As of fall 2024, there were 3,254 students enrolled at the University of Alaska that identified as Alaska Native or American Indian, and 266 that identified as Hawaiian Native or Pacific Islander, according to the university, and 19,629 students total across the UA system.

The University of Alaska announcements came after the Trump administration said Wednesday it will withhold an estimated $350 million of congressionally-approved funding for minority serving colleges and universities, saying the money will be allocated elsewhere. The measure continues President Donald Trump’s initiative to eliminate programs that focus on diversity, equity and inclusion.

Sfraga said the federal government is allowing up to a year to close out the programs. UAF has multiple grants which fall under the program, Sfraga said, and most are under the College of Indigenous Studies and the UAF Community and Technical College.

Sfraga said the grant program does not fund student aid, but it does support degree programs and support services like student advising and recruiting, workforce development and student success initiatives across campuses.

University officials report that to date, the Trump administration has cancelled $6.6 million in research grants and almost $45 million has been frozen.

Each year, the university receives an estimated $250 million in federal research funds, Taylor said, adding that “95% of the university’s broad research portfolio remains intact. UA has experienced only minor disruptions as a result of the rapidly shifting policy picture in Washington, D.C., and we are closely monitoring developments as they evolve.”

From the Southeast rainforest to the Arctic tundra, warming conditions are creating a variety of Alaska landslide hazards, some of them posing extreme hazards to human safety and others creating expensive problems for important infrastructure.

Just how many hazardous sites are out there? Bretwood “Hig” Higman, a geologist based in the Kenai Peninsula town of Seldovia, has done a basic inventory.

From 2012 to early this year, there have been more than 1,000 slow-moving slides of different varieties, with triggers that include receding glaciers, thawing permafrost, extreme weather or combinations of those factors, according to his calculations.

In a state where people contend with earthquakes, floods, wildfires and erupting volcanoes, it may be difficult to add another type of natural disaster to the public’s list of worries, Higman said. But elevating landslide awareness and preparedness is necessary as events increase, he said.

“It is vastly more risky than most things we deal with,” said Higman, a partner in an Alaska landslide science program created by the Massachusetts-based Woodwell Climate Research Center.

Shallow, sudden slides triggered by rain

The lesson has been learned in Southeast Alaska, where catastrophic slope failures triggered by extreme rains have proved deadly. Since 2015, 12 people have been killed by landslides in Sitka, Haines, Wrangell and Ketchikan. Victims included an entire family of five killed by a sudden slide in Wrangell in late 2023.

In Southeast Alaska, steep mountains that were created through tectonic processes rise from the water’s edge, and rain is frequent. It is naturally susceptible to landslides.

“One of the primary processes that sculps the landscape in southeast Alaska is landslides and glaciers and rivers,” said Dennis Staley, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist and Alaska landslide program leader. “When you combine rapid uplift with steep slopes with junky rock and lots of rainfall, you have all of the key ingredients for landslides.”

Southeast Alaska landslides are classified as shallow slides because they involve the soil, trees and other materials atop the bedrock rather than the rock itself. Those slides are numerous; the USGS recorded 162 news-reported slides in Southeast Alaska from 1990 to 2024. They are longstanding threats. A 1936 landslide in Juneau, for example, killed 15 people.

Now climate change is compounding the threat by creating more extreme rainfall events, driven by atmospheric rivers, as well as bringing more winter rain that, in other years, would be snowfall.

That means efforts to monitor landslide risks extend not just to topography studies but also the details about precipitation. Whether it is rain or snow – or rain-on-snow – has implications for slope stability, and the multiagency team studying landslide risks in Southeast Alaska has developed a prototype monitoring station to record precise qualities of the precipitation, as well as wind and temperature.

Beyond federal and state agencies’ work and that of university organizations like the Alaska Earthquake Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, there is focused work by tribal governments and community organizations.

The Sitka Sound Science Center, previously known for its fisheries and ocean science work, now has one of the most well-developed landslide programs. The center’s landslide program was launched in 2015, after a slide there killed three. The center now maintains a local landslide hazards dashboard, and it participates in and coordinates a variety of research projects and educational programs.

One is the Kutí project, a partnership with the Central Council of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska and other tribal partners. Named for the Lingit word meaning “weather,” the program is funded by a National Science Foundation grant awarded in 2022. The purpose is development of a more regional Southeast Alaska monitoring, warning and educational system.

The Sitka center’s work has been hampered by Trump administration budget cuts and policies. A landslide conference that the center was set to host last spring was canceled because Trump administration policies prevented federal partners from attending.

Permafrost thaw and frozen lobes

Farther north, slopes are shifting and creeping as permafrost thaws, creating hazards for infrastructure. The best-known case may be in Interior Alaska at Denali National Park and Preserve, where one of the more than 140 detected landslides along the park’s sole road interfered with travel.

That slide, at a site called Pretty Rocks at the midpoint of the 92-mile road, had been ongoing for years, creating maintenance headaches for park staffers trying to keep the road open. In 2021, it finally made the road impassable there.

A project is underway to create a bridge over the slide area, but it is proving more complicated than originally envisioned. Early on, it was estimated to cost a bit under $100 million and expected to be completed by the 2025 tourist season. Since then, the completion date has been pushed back, with full road access expected to resume in 2027. The cost is now estimated at $150 million, a figure that does not include potential work at other landslide sites along the park’s road.

More than infrastructure at risk from Interior landslides. Last summer, when a guided rafting expedition encountered a landslide on the Nenana River just outside the park, a woman in the party was killed.

Yet farther north, masses of frozen material are working their way down to the corridor that holds the trans-Alaska pipeline. University of Alaska Fairbanks and state scientists have identified more than 200 of them in the Brooks Range. As of last year, said UAF’s Margaret Darrow, there were 99 identified along the Dalton Highway, the road that parallels the trans-Alaska pipeline and the sole land route to the Prudhoe Bay oil complex.

The conglomeration of moving ice, water, crumbling rock and vegetation have their own descriptive name: “frozen debris lobes.” Darrow, the principal investigator on various UAF projects, began studying them in 2011, when she drove up the Dalton Highway for a two-family camping trip with a colleague.

The lobes, which move more quickly than thawing permafrost but are not causing sudden collapse, proved enough of a threat to the highway that the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities rerouted a section in 2018, part of a $25 million project that addressed thaw problems along the highway.

The reconfiguration proved necessary. The leftover section of highway was left in place as a test site, and the frozen debris lobe continued to flow. By late 2023, it had shoved the leftover highway section about a foot to the side, according to research led by Darrow.

In the Arctic, in Alaska and elsewhere, permafrost thaw caused by warming temperatures has triggered widespread landslides known as retrogressive thaw slumps.

Among the affected sites is the Noatak Valley in mountainous Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, considered a hotpot for such slides. In that remote region, the safety of people and property is not much of an issue, but water quality can be. Numerous retrogressive thaw slumps have dumped tens of thousands of cubic meters of sediment into a single creek, according to the National Park Service.

Keeping abreast of the hazards from all types of unstable slopes in Alaska requires coordination by agencies at all levels of government, universities and other entities, said Jillian Nicolazzo, a geologist who leads the state’s landslide hazards program.

“At the moment, we can’t do it all,” said Nicolazzo, a geologist who leads the landslide program at the Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys. “Everyone pitches in a little bit, because it is just too much for any one agency.”

Addressing federal uncertainty

The state program gets funding from the USGS, and a big boost for U.S. landslide monitoring has been provided by the National Landslide Preparedness Act signed into law in 2021. Through that act, Congress in 2021 appropriated $4 million specifically to landslide hazards in Prince William Sound.

But the law, which authorized federal funding for landslide programs, expired in 2024.

Legislation is pending in Congress to reauthorize it, with sponsors from Alaska and Washington, states with deadly slides in recent years. One bill is sponsored by U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Washington. Another is sponsored by U.S. Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Washington.

Without reauthorization, prospects for future funding are clouded.

The Trump administration’s proposed budget for the coming fiscal year would cut funding for USGS natural hazards work – which includes landslide hazards – by about a quarter, from $203 million to $157 million, according to a Congressional Research Service report.

As with the canceled Sitka conference, Trump administration policy interrupted landslide work last spring in Prince William Sound. Massive federal layoff and spending freezes prevented some planned maintenance work at the Barry Arm landslide site.

If federal support for Alaska landslide monitoring becomes spotty, there is a potential backstop: citizen science.

The Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys earlier this year launched an online app through which members of the public can report the landslide risks they encounter. Those could be actual slides, small rockfalls, cracks or anything unusual, and the division encourages people to submit photographs.

The hope is that important information will be gathered “if people are out hunting and fishing and recreating, especially if they see a lot of landslides that we don’t,” Nicolazzo said.

Without help from the public, scientists like her have to rely a lot on things like satellite imagery, she said. “I mostly sit at a computer and look at Google Earth. The images can be years old,” she said.

So far, the Alaska Landslide Reporter app has not been promoted or used much. But Nidolazzo is hopeful about its eventual utility.

Public awareness is, for now, the prime solution to the landslide problem in a place as big, mountainous, wild and fast-changing as Alaska, Nicolazzo said.

“I think educating people about the risk is the best we can do at this point. Because the area is so large and people are everywhere,” she said.

This story has been supported by the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems, solutionsjournalism.org.

An Anchorage Superior Court judge’s ruling has cleared the way for the state of Alaska to repeal its “80th Percentile Rule,” enacted by the state in 2004 as part of an attempt to reduce health care costs in the state.

The Dunleavy administration repealed the rule in 2024, saying it was counterproductive and argued it contributed to higher health care costs. Medical providers say that isn’t true and that repealing the rule will cause some clinicians to close down.

In 2023, a group of medical providers sued the state, alleging problems with the process used to repeal the rule. On Aug. 27, following a four-day bench trial in February, Judge Yvonne Lamoureaux ruled in favor of the state.

In her findings of fact and conclusions of law, Lamoureaux concluded that the repeal was not “unreasonable or arbitrary,” and the state did not conduct an improper procedure.

An appeal to the Alaska Supreme Court is possible.

When in place, the rule required that insurance companies reimburse out-of-network medical providers at a rate equal to the 80th percentile of charges for the given service.

If five clinics provide a given procedure, the required payment would be what the second-most-expensive clinic charges.

The rule was intended to prevent Alaskans from being left with large medical bills after visiting out-of-network clinics. The state and Alaska’s largest health insurance company, Premera Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alaska, contend that it required insurance companies to pay more for services than was warranted, contributing to higher insurance costs.

The top oil-producing company in Alaska is planning significant layoffs, it announced last week.

In a series of statements, the oil giant ConocoPhillips said it will be firing between 20% and 25% of its global workforce of about 13,000 people. That would mean between 2,600 and 3,250 layoffs worldwide.

“We are always looking at how we can be more efficient with the resources we have. As part of this process, we have informed employees that a 20% to 25% reduction in our global workforce, which includes employees and contractors, is anticipated. The majority of these reductions will take place in 2025,” said Rebecca Boys, director of external affairs for ConocoPhillips Alaska, on Thursday.

Boys declined to say how many people the company employs in Alaska, but prior documents published by the company say that it has “about 1,000 people in Alaska,” and of those, about 80% live in the state.

Altogether, the oil and gas industry employed 8,800 people in Alaska as of July, according to state statistics. If ConocoPhillips were to lay off a quarter of its Alaska workforce, it likely would reverse an upward trend for the oil and gas industry here.

Since bottoming out at 6,100 people in November 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic emergency, the number of people employed by the oil and gas industry rose throughout President Joe Biden’s administration.

ConocoPhillips produces the most oil of any company operating on the North Slope and holds the second-most oil and gas lease area in the state.

According to state data, ConocoPhillips leases about 490,000 acres of Alaska land and water for oil and gas drilling. That’s behind only privately owned Hilcorp, whose holdings exceed 500,000 acres.

ConocoPhillips is developing the large Willow project in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, which is expected to begin producing oil in 2029.

According to the Alaska Division of Oil and Gas, ConocoPhillips is also planning to drill four exploration wells in other parts of the reserve this winter.

On its production side, ConocoPhillips was planning to drill 12 new production wells this year and next from the Kuparuk oilfield west of Prudhoe Bay.

A document submitted by the Alaska Division of Elections to the U.S. Department of Justice in response to a nationwide data request names 70 possible noncitizens who voted or attempted to vote in state or local Alaska elections since 2015.

Among the 70 people are 10 American Samoans from Whittier who now face state criminal charges related to their voting. American Samoans are not considered U.S. citizens by the federal government, and civil charges against an 11th individual are now being considered by the Alaska Court of Appeals.

Noncitizen voting remains extraordinarily rare, nationwide figures show, and Carol Beecher, director of the Alaska Division of Elections, said there is no evidence that noncitizen voting changed the result of last year’s elections here.

Ahead of last year’s elections, Donald Trump and other Republican politicians said they believed large numbers of non-U.S. citizens would seek to vote and influence the result of elections.

Since becoming president, Trump has asked Congress to impose citizenship checks on all potential voters. His Department of Justice has asked all 50 states for copies of their voter lists in order to create a national government database.

Alaska turned over its voter list and other documents to the U.S. Department of Justice last month.

In response to a public records request filed by the Alaska Beacon, the Alaska Division of Elections provided copies of documents it delivered to federal authorities.

Most of the documents, including a copy of the state’s official voter list, were already public. The voter list, for example, is available for purchase from any state elections office and doesn’t include sensitive information beyond a voter’s name, how often they’ve voted, and where they live.

The state’s inactive voter list — showing people whose voter registrations have been flagged for review and possible removal — is also a public record, but it isn’t commonly circulated. Inactive voters can’t cast a ballot without additional ID checks.

The inactive voter list provided to the DOJ and to the Beacon is from August. It includes 541 people whose voter records were tagged “NC” for non-citizen.

But it’s not clear whether these Alaskans are noncitizens or were on the list because of mistakes.

Carol Beecher, director of the Alaska Division of Elections, said some people may have been erroneously labeled, so it isn’t correct to say that there were 541 noncitizens registered to vote.

“As we get more information, things change. So what I’m telling you today on a number may change tomorrow because of new information that we got,” Beecher said in an extended interview on Wednesday.

Stephen Kirch, the division’s spokesperson, said by email that “the DOE cannot say with any degree of certainty whether the current number of NC-coded entries is ‘abnormal’ or ‘unusual’ in a historical context. This is because the number is a moving target and not a static one; it is not tracked.”

The inactive voter list shows only people whose records have been flagged for additional attention and isn’t confirmation that they are not citizens. It may include people who filled out paperwork incorrectly or registered to vote shortly before becoming a citizen.

“It’s really hard to say whether this particular number (541) is a problem, because there’s so many questions behind even that particular number,” said Mara Kimmel, a former immigration attorney who now works as executive director of the Alaska chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

That total also might miss noncitizens who are on the active voter list but haven’t yet been identified.

Beecher said she considers the “NC” tag to be “kind of like a file drawer. You put things into that file based on the status when you put it in there. But that could change.”

Kimmel said that the issue is “never as easy as it seems or as it would be framed. … Noncitizens voting has become a real political hot-button issue.”

In her experience, “there’s so much confusion and misinformation that is born out of a benign desire to participate in your new home.”

In Alaska, residents can register to vote by contacting the Alaska Division of Elections. Residents are also asked if they want to register when they update their driver’s license, get a new driver’s license, and apply for the annual Permanent Fund dividend.

As Beecher explained, if someone attests that they’re not a citizen through one method but says they are a citizen via a different method, that gets the attention of authorities.

“When we have gone in there and looked and contacted them, we have found that usually it was a mistake,” she said.

In other cases, particularly with the state’s “motor-voter” program, the mistake might come from a typo or someone’s misunderstanding of the rules, particularly if they don’t speak fluent English, as might be the case with new immigrants.

The Division of Elections doesn’t have investigative powers, which means voting officials rely on an applicant’s sworn oath about their citizenship. There’s no automatic double-checking, and it’s federally unconstitutional for the division to ask for proof of citizenship.

Judges have thrown out a Kansas law that required voters to verify citizenship, and the U.S. Supreme Court has only partially allowed a different Arizona law.

“All we get is the affirmation, and however frustrating that can be for everyone out there to say, ‘Well, why can’t you make sure?’ Well, we are not given that authority. So essentially, the division takes people at their word is really what it comes down to,” Beecher said.

If someone’s registration is flagged by a complaint or because of a discrepancy in the records, the division forwards the case to the Alaska Department of Law for investigation.

“We provide them with documents if they request that, as pursuant to an investigation, but if not, we may never hear from them,” Beecher said of the investigation.

In 2023, the division flagged the registration of Tupe Smith, a Whittier resident, after she ran for and won a seat on the local school board.

Smith was born in American Samoa, an island territory in the South Pacific. Its residents are U.S. nationals — having some of the same legal rights as other Americans — but aren’t citizens.

During the subsequent investigation, Alaska State Troopers learned of 10 other American Samoans who had voted in Alaska. The state charged them with civil crimes in April, and this week, they were indicted.

All 10 are labeled noncitizens on the inactive voter list supplied to the Beacon and Department of Justice. They, and another 60 other people, are shown as having voted or attempted to vote at least once during the past 10 years.

It isn’t clear whether all of those ballots were actually counted. Many are labeled as “questioned,” meaning that they were subject to additional ID verification. Beecher said “it’s possible” that some were counted but that she didn’t have numbers.

She believes “very few” noncitizens have voted.

“I’m speaking very anecdotally, because I don’t have those kinds of numbers for you, but our sense is that it’s very small. And I think the underlying reason for that is because there is no nefarious intent out there to try to sway an election. It’s people who either — and this is my personal opinion — they’re confused about the rules or somehow ended up marking something that they didn’t understand,” Beecher said.

Alaska had 605,302 registered voters on Aug. 3, according to Division of Election statistics.

If the noncitizen-tagged voters on the inactive list had still been active, they would have represented just 0.09% of Alaska voters.

Last year, 340,981 Alaskans voted in the state’s November general election. The division’s inactive list shows six noncitizens either voted or attempted to vote in that election.

In Michigan, officials announced in April that they had found 16 credible cases of noncitizen voting out of about 5.7 million votes cast overall, or one per every 360,000 votes.

Nationally, noncitizen voting remains exceptionally rare.

Sen. Bill Wielechowski, D-Anchorage and a supporter of election reform legislation in Alaska, noted that the rate of noncitizen voting in Alaska is likely well below the rate at which legitimate voters are being disqualified because of problems with the state’s absentee voting system.

“Any time you have people who are voting that shouldn’t be voting, that’s cause for concern,” Wielechowski said in an interview Wednesday.

“But at the same time, we’ve got hundreds of people that we know of, actually thousands of people who were disenfranchised,” he said, referring to the state’s regular practice of disqualifying absentee ballots because of submittal errors.

“In rural Alaska, we had 10% or 15% of the population in rural Alaska that was disenfranchised a couple of years ago, legitimate voters who were disenfranchised because of a bureaucratic technicality that’s not even checked. So I think there’s bigger problems,” Wielechowski said.

In 2023, Rep. Sarah Vance, R-Homer, proposed legislation that would have required the Division of Elections to cross-check the state’s voter rolls with a national citizenship database.

“I always like to presume innocence, but we have to put the safeguards in place, and by having the division use those databases as a check and balance, I think that’s a very simple way to make sure that we’re crossing our T’s and dotting I’s,” Vance said Wednesday.

She noted that current Speaker of the House Bryce Edgmon, I-Dillingham, won his 2006 primary election via a coin toss that followed a tied election.

“When you look at how slim some of our elections are, how tight races can be, these numbers matter,” she said.

The Alaska Senate stripped out Vance’s citizenship provision and passed a revised bill, but the Republican-led House failed by a single vote to take up the legislation on the last day of the regular session in 2024. The bill died at the end of the session, and lawmakers started anew this spring.

In recent years, the Alaska Department of Law has requested funding for a part-time elections investigator. The Legislature has not approved that request.

“We shouldn’t have anyone voting in our elections on any level who shouldn’t be,” Vance said.

“This is important and significant because we want to make sure that we protect the sovereignty of every individual’s vote,” she said.

The U.S. Coast Guard shadowed two Chinese research ships operating in disputed waters within the Arctic Ocean this week, the Coast Guard announced Wednesday.

The icebreakers Ji Di and Zhong Shan Da Xue Ji Di were traveling more than 200 miles offshore of Utqiagvik, America’s northernmost town, in what’s known as the “extended continental shelf” under the International Law of the Sea Treaty.

Ordinarily, international law restricts a nation’s fishing, oil drilling and scientific exploration to within 200 nautical miles of its coast, in what’s known as its “exclusive economic zone.” Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, a nation can extend that exclusive limit if the continental shelf — a place of generally shallower water — stretches beyond 200 miles.

More than 160 countries and the European Union have ratified the Law of the Sea agreement, but the United States has not, despite the urging of members of Alaska’s congressional delegation.

The agreement says foreign vessels may pass through extended continental shelf waters, but they must have the owner’s consent in order to perform scientific studies or seafloor mapping there.

The United States claims the extended continental shelf near its shorelines and in 2023 began the international process to have its claims recognized, but the United Nations committee that regulates the agreement has not finalized the American claims, a process that could take decades because the United States is not a party to the agreement.

Meanwhile, despite the lack of international recognition, the United States has continued to claim sovereignty over the extended continental shelf in the Arctic Ocean.

In late April, the Trump administration announced that it was beginning to plan oil and gas lease sales in the disputed area.

China, which operates more Arctic icebreakers than does the United States, has contended that the Arctic Ocean should remain open to free navigation.

This week, when the two Chinese research icebreakers crossed into the disputed area, the Coast Guard dispatched the icebreaker Healy, which was already operating in the Arctic Ocean under a different mission.

“They were pretty close to the standard 200 nautical mile EEZ boundary. They were outside of that by a few miles, which is directly over that portion that is being claimed right now … by the United States,” said Troy Bouffard, director of the Center for Arctic Security and Resilience at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

“It’s deliberate in several ways,” he said of the Chinese action. “It’s meant to get attention but not go over the line.”

He said some of China’s actions in the Arctic have been to “promote it as a global commons that belongs to everybody, and to minimize sovereign rights as much as possible. So that’s a pretty obvious reason why they would have done this at the location they did.”

Chief Petty Officer Travis Magee, assistant public affairs officer for the U.S. Coast Guard’s Arctic District, said that in cases like the ones that occurred this week, the typical response is to “monitor, and query the vessels” over the radio, frequently using a pre-prepared script.

The script he said, often goes like this:

“You are currently operating over the United States Extended Continental Shelf (ECS). Under international law, the United States has rights to conserve and manage the living and non-living natural resources of its ECS as well as to regulate marine scientific research by foreign scientists relating to its ECS. In all cases where marine scientific research is pursued on the Extended Continental Shelf, appropriate official channels must be used to obtain U.S. consent.”

The Coast Guard also flew a long-range patrol aircraft from Kodiak to shadow the two ships.

Rear Adm. Bob Little, commander of the Arctic District, said in a prepared statement that “the U.S. Coast Guard is controlling, securing and defending the northern U.S. border and maritime approaches in the Arctic to protect U.S. sovereignty, and Healy’s operations demonstrate the critical need for more Coast Guard icebreakers to achieve that.”

While the U.S. Navy frequently operates submarines in the Arctic Ocean, it does not have any icebreakers; the Coast Guard operates the federal government’s only icebreaking ships.

The recently approved Republican budget package known as the “Big Beautiful Bill Act” included billions of dollars for the Coast Guard to construct new heavy icebreakers.

The first of those ships is expected to enter service in 2030, though some medium-weight icebreakers are being planned and could arrive sooner.

As an interim measure, the Coast Guard purchased and commissioned an icebreaking oilfield services ship, renaming it the Storis.

At the time of the Healy’s intercept in the Arctic Ocean, the Storis was conducting training operations in the Bering Sea.