A few weeks back I wrote about my concerns about Russia and the push/positioning of various countries for the resources believed to exist under the North Pole.
Channel 4 News - easily the best daily news bulletin on television - is running a series of reports on the issue, with Jon Snow heading up the live broadcasts from there. More from their environment page, but the main point being made from their Norway piece was the hugely sad irony that whilst global warming is melting the ice caps, it is that itself that is making the region exploitable. A sad example of a destructive negative feedback loop if ever there was one.
Also interesting from a technical perspective too was that last night they were unable to make use of any satellites - they were so far north that no satellites were in range - but they were able to use the public internet. So we had grainy, but still reasonably good quality, video of Jon Snow introducing the news to us, all via mpeg encoders, ADSL lines and TCP/IP. Marvellous.
