"We've got these incredibly warm seas."

The view from Kongsfjorden, Svalbard, is endless snow-covered mountains and glassy, frigid water. You need to travel roughly 400 miles west from the remote Norwegian archipelago to reach the northeast coast of Greenland.

‘Blooming’ might be the last word to associate with the Arctic, yet pictures below show meadows bursting with life as brightly-coloured flowers blossom in lush green grass. And while vegetation in khasyreis, basins of drained Arctic lakes, is less of a surprise, researchers discovered ‘bursts of life’ next to a residential settlement where permafrost ice veins were broken when people dug sand pits.

Iceberg-making submarines and "cloud brightening" are among the geoengineering solutions that could help replenish polar sea ice.

The biggest scientific project ever to take place in the Arctic is about to kick off. Within days, a ship is set to begin drifting in the sea ice off Siberia, from where it will eventually become locked in the ice for months of the Arctic winter. The Polarstern icebreaker is set to depart from Norway on 20 September – around the same time that researchers are expected to confirm the area of Arctic sea ice has reached the second lowest level on record. The ship is part of an epic endeavour called MOSAIC, which will involve some 600 scientists studying climate change, Arctic wildlife and more over the course of a year.

After a 35 year hiatus, the U.S. Coast Guard is set to build a new heavy endurance icebreaker. The head of the sea service's acquisition office believes production on a new ship could start in five years—and will cost at least a billion dollars. According to USNI News, acquisition chief Rear Admiral Mike Haycock said the Coast Guard has finalized plans to buy a ship to replace the Polar Star, the service's only heavy icebreaker.

The warming Arctic has set another record. The average air temperature over Arctic land reached 1.3 degrees Celsius above average for the year ending in September. That's the highest since observations began in 1900. The new mark was noted in the annual Arctic Report Card, released Tuesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The Arctic centres on the North Pole and reaches into North America and Eurasia.

An ancient fossil forest in Norway with tropical origins is one of the earliest forests to appear on Earth. By Mindy Weisberger. (Nov. 20)

BBC’s Frozen Planet

For millennia, the frozen lands of the far Northern Hemisphere have been a huge reservoir of carbon. The permafrost soils that characterize the Arctic and sub-Arctic tundra cover roughly 8 percent of the global land surface but hold half of Earth’s underground organic carbon and twice as much carbon as is currently in the atmosphere. Arctic tundra stores carbon during the summer and releases some of it during the winter.

In the Arctic, roads are magical. They appear in the fall and melt in the spring. Others, buckled by permafrost, undulate in the snow. Many are invisible to the naked eye — caribou migration routes that exist only by instinct. During the sunless, frigid winter, the Arctic Ocean becomes one vast road for polar bears and snowmobiles. Amid these roads, a new one is being built, an 85-mile sliver topped with gravel in Canada’s Northwest Territories.

The pounding noise shatters the ancient, eerie silence of the Davis Strait, a frigid finger of ocean separating Canada and Greenland. Thwick-thwack, thwick-thwack, thwick-thwack. It comes from above but the marine fog is thick, the source invisible. The sound gets closer, louder. THWICK-THWACK, THWICK-THWACK, THWICK-THWACK. The pilot wears an old red neoprene survival suit. But it's hot in the helicopter, and the bulky outfit's mittens...

Los Angeles-class submarine USS Hartford (SSN-768) breaking through several feet of solid ice in order to surface in the Arctic Circle.

Rolf Steinmann

Science and Shamanism in the Arctic. By Tim Fulford. (July ’13)

The town of Ny-Ålesund, the most northerly permanent civilian settlement in the world, also houses the largest laboratory for modern Arctic research in existence. By Anna Filipova.

Greenland has the world's highest suicide rate. And teen boys are at the highest risk.

The Arctic is on track to be free of sea ice this year or next for the first time in more than 100,000 years, a leading scientist has claimed. Provisional satellite data produced by the US National Snow & Ice Data Centre shows there were just over 11.1 million square kilometres of sea ice on 1 June this year, compared to the average for the last 30 years of nearly 12.7 million square kilometres. This difference – more than 1.5 million square kilometres – is about the same size as about six United Kingdoms.

As of Tuesday, the deepest cyclone in the Northern Hemisphere wasn’t anywhere near the tropics--it was spinning in the central Arctic Ocean. A surface low located near 83°N, about 500 miles from the North Pole and about 1000 miles north of Barrow, Alaska, deepened to a central pressure of 968 mb at 2 am EDT Tuesday morning, August 16. This is on par with the central pressure you might find in a moderately-sized Category 2 hurricane. The low harks back to the Great Arctic Cyclone of 2012.