Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds have produced an extraordinary synthesis of historical narratives and contemporary debates over the Arctic—or better said, the “many Arctics” (p. 30)—as we barrel into the unprecedented and unknown. Demonstrating their command of a dizzying plurality of Arctic pasts, presents, and possible futures, Bennett and Dodds deftly pick apart competing master narratives—for example, the Arctic as pristine wilderness, as resource frontier, as rarified geopolitical arena, as canary in the climate coalmine—and braid the resulting strands back together alongside nuanced analysis and situated knowledges. The result is a richly textured portrait of the Arctic as a lived place, a dynamic regional formation, and a fraught geographic imaginary.

Reflecting their own wide-ranging experiences in Arctic spaces within and beyond the circumpolar North, the authors move gracefully across varied temporal and spatial scales to sketch out “three directions of travel, which are all intertwined: an extractive Arctic, an endangered Arctic, and an adversarial Arctic” (p. 17). Maintaining this tripartite vector of analysis throughout the book’s sweeping narrative of transformation—which covers no less than 10,000 years, though heavily weighted toward the last few centuries and present day—is a feat in its own right. Yet a more subtle contribution lies in the book’s multiplicative method, which maps out the myriad perspectives (from within and without) through which the Arctic assumes particular, often contradictory forms. What the unsuspecting reader might have counted as a self-explanatory and singular toponym—the Arctic—is quickly pluralized into a geographic signifier that floats, transforms, and is recomposed—not unlike the sea ice to which the book’s title partly refers—through the strategic and speculative discourses in which it is made to do political work.

And indeed, it is worth dwelling here on the initial definition of geographic terms. The Arctic, though aspiring to geographic generalization or “metageography” (following Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen’s coining of the term in their 1997 book, The Myth of Continents), is as specific and situated a term as Inuit Nunangat, Kalaallit Nunaat, Sápmi , or Utqiagvik (if undoubtedly less prone to induce reflexive awareness of provenance). Bennett and Dodds note that “the Arctic” is often less a regional qualification than a directional one, implying a northerly or, more recently, a transitive orientation. The etymology of “Arctic” (from the Greek arktos , meaning “northern”) suggests a vector or projective dimension rather than a bounded place; the corollary is that the very concept of the Arctic is the artifact of an exogenous political, economic, and social point of view that can be traced back to historically contingent centers of power. Even as it appears to encompass a diverse set of place-based and regional designations that might exceed a Eurocentric vantage, in aggregate, the Arctic looks more like the Great Bear constellation with which it shares a name: an imagined unity that, despite resolving easily to those trained to see it, remains gestural, tenuous, and reconfigurable.

Much of the book successfully problematizes the primacy of this compound colonial gaze by systematically foregrounding the enduring and complex agency of Indigenous worldmaking. But in doing so, Unfrozen does not only affirm alteric views from “within” or “below.” It gestures toward a third space that emerges between the inside/outside distinction: that of the edge delimiting the geographical interface between Arctic and non-Arctic domains. The character of this space recalls the so-called “ice edge” or “marginal ice zone” (p. 128), which is not really an edge at all, but a jagged gradient of transformation that spurs extraordinary (biological) productivity. This liminal geography haunts the project as a kind of alternative architecture, in which the Arctic is figured and refigured through a series of criss-crossings between what counts as an inside or outside. Whether approached through geohistorical narratives of multigenerational migration, seasonal hunting and reindeer herding routes to the contemporary project of circumpolar Inuit solidarity, or from geophysical accountings of the anomalous mass export of sea ice in the fourteenth century to the increasingly elastic range of the polar vortex, the Arctic is constituted in transit, and is ever on the move.

This dual attention to what might be glossed as the “pluralizing” and “projective” dimensions of Arctic space occasions a revisiting of its most exhausted geographic trope: the frontier. When read vectorally, the Arctic appears in the form of a vast accumulation of frontiers (to borrow Marx’s well-worn phrasing): a long-standing “resource frontier” of fisheries and extraction networks (p. 57), a modern “oil and gas frontier” pushed ever further north (pp. 68–70), “new mining frontiers” opened by the green transition (p. 76), a “green energy frontier” of hydropower and wind (p. 82), a “potential … frontier” in the ice-free future of the Central Arctic Ocean (p. 219), a geopolitical borderland “where the frontiers come close to one another” (p. 160), borders reframed as “frontiers that can be opportunistically expanded” by “sovereigntist” states (p. 266, p. 182), a lynchpin for China’s self-declared “four strategic new frontiers” of the polar regions, deep sea, outer space, and cyberspace (pp. 102, 146), and, in the register of popular imagination, the conjunctural domain where “the ‘last frontier’” meets “the ‘final frontier’” of space (p. 113). It is even a brand: Arctic Frontiers, naming the boosterist annual conference put on by the nonprofit arm of a multinational corporate conglomerate (p. 12). And with mass geophysical transformation to polar landscapes, the Arctic Ocean, and regional seas, climate change renovates each of these frontiers in turn, while rendering the Arctic as a whole into a planetary frontier for the accelerated and amplified effects of warming.

Reconstellated by Bennett and Dodds’ careful tracework, the frontier takes on a more dynamic, productive function. That is, the question of the frontier pivots from how successive or concurrent frontiers have shaped the Arctic—in which the frontier presupposes an existing regional coherence—to centering the frontier as a central mechanism of spatial production through which the Arctic takes geographic shape in the first place (see, for instance, Michael J. Watts’ 2019 article in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, “Reflections on circulation, logistics, and the frontiers of capitalist supply chains”). Bennett and Dodds offer a deep catalog of these frontier-forming and -dissolving processes that, while providing indispensable insight into the specific provincializing tendencies of distinct and interlocking extractive regimes, highlight the highly mobile, transcalar character of the Arctic frontier complex that cannot easily be reduced to extraction alone. For running alongside and through the extractivist logic of Arctic frontiers is an inextricably speculative one—one in which Arctic futures generate value in circulation before and apart from any viable possibility of extraction in the present (to say nothing of profit).

Such prospects—from the refurbished nineteenth century fever-dreams of an open polar sea to the more recent hype around “a $1 trillion ocean” (p. 54), AI-driven minerals prospecting in Greenland, schemes for transpolar cable routes, and even the World Economic Forum’s absorption of Arctic governance norms through its investment protocol—suggest that one key modality of “the Arctic” in the modern nomos is, if not simply to produce viable resource frontiers, to hold open the possibility of frontier production for a geopolitical order strained by a scarcity of easily appropriated space. From this perspective, the Arctic is less a frontier region than a frontier engine. In this vein, Unfrozen opens up exciting lines to more systematically elaborate how exactly the Arctic as “speculative geography” and its constitutive “geographies of speculation” articulate to other frontier formations elsewhere—what might be called an emerging superarctic mode of valuation—regardless of whether or not Arctic extraction as such pays out. Amidst the increasing “Arctification” of domains beyond the circumpolar North, we would do well to recognize the Arctic’s “hyperborean hem” (p. 23) as its influence on the production of global space intensifies and expands through interwoven geopolitical, geoeconomic, and geophysical mechanisms. Bennett and Dodds have given us a superlative guide with which to do so.