The Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, emerging in 2020, severely restricted global human activities, including international shipping. The impacts of COVID-19 on shipping in other oceans have been evaluated recently. However, there is no such study that focuses on the Arctic Ocean, where a continuous sea ice decline dramatically increases the feasibility of Arctic shipping. This study aims to fill this gap based on more than 104 million tracking entries that cover all Automatic Identification System (AIS) data within the Arctic Circle from 2015 to 2020. The spatial and temporal variations of Arctic shipping activities under different locations and seasons were firstly evaluated for different types of ships in 2015-2019 to provide a normal condition of Arctic shipping development. From 2015 to 2019, Arctic shipping witnessed remarkable growth, with both the number of vessels and the distance sailed increasing at an average annual rate of more than 180%. On this basis, the changes in Arctic shipping during COVID-19 were detected. Compared to the reference growth estimates, the emerging COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 decreased 31% of the number of vessels sailing in the whole year. In particular, the distance sailed in April 2020 was nearly twice that of April 2019, while shipping remained subdued in the second half of 2020. Not only did the number of ships and the sailing distance not increase in accordance with the original growth trend, but even lower than those in 2019. Whether during the COVID-19 pandemic or not, high-density navigations were concentrated in the Norwegian and Barents Seas, and mostly concentrated at latitudes below 75°N. Compared with global shipping, Arctic shipping has been more affected by the COVID-19 outbreak, with a larger reduction in the range sailed (14.6% and 1.4%, respectively) and more sampling units with decreased traffic density (60.0% and 54.8%, respectively), which provides an important reference to quantitatively evaluate the impact of COVID-19 on Arctic shipping.