Russia’s environment ministry has ordered the urgent evacuation of 16 scientists from a research station on an Arctic ice floe near Canada because the ice around it is disintegrating at an alarming rate, giving the station little chance of survival.

The emergency has sparked a wider debate among Russian Arctic researchers over how to continue their work amid rapidly changing climate conditions, and in an atmosphere in which the race for newly uncovered Arctic resources has become one of the most politically charged issues on the international agenda.

“It’s getting harder and harder to find a proper block of ice to sustain one of these stations,” says Viktor Boyarsky, a former polar explorer and current director of the Russian State Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic in St. Petersburg.

“There are fewer suitable ice locations, and they are much more mobile than in the past. The SP-40 expedition [being evacuated] lasted barely 9 months, and there are no proper ice floes in the area that they can move to. We’ll go on sending these expeditions, but it’s going to be much more costly. The best idea is to have a station that lasts for two or three years, but that’s probably a thing of the past,” he says.

The drifting “North Pole” SP-40 station, which is one of Russia’s main field bases for studying all aspects of the Arctic environment, had been calculated to be solid and able to support work through to the end of September. It was established nine months ago, but the team of permanent researchers arrived only last month.

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