Quantification of Potential Ice Road Evolution in the Pan-Arctic and its Impacts Through Remote Sensing Observations

Ice roads serve as vital land transportation during the Arctic winter season. In the context of polar increased warming, there are great uncertainties for human activities on ice roads. In this paper, we integrate remote sensing techniques to quantify the potential ice road evolution in the Pan-Arctic and its impact on land accessibility from 1979 to 2017. We show that the potential ice roads have significantly decreased, with the fastest decrease in March to 2.34×10
⁴
km
²
yr
⁻¹
. Furthermore, the contribution of potential ice roads to port accessibility is most severely reduced in the Canadian Arctic, reaching 0.93 h yr
⁻¹
. The results demonstrate that warmer winters are imposing severe stress on Arctic land access.