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"Up in the north, it's still about survival," he said.With that in mind, the Canadian Army plans to outfit individual soldiers with new winter warfare equipment, including snowshoes, skis and toboggans. Up to $49 million will be spent on that gear with deliveries to begin in 2021.

he Army plans to purchase up to 100 all-terrain vehicles capable of operations in the snow.

Increasing the Canadian government and military's presence in the resource-rich Arctic is a key defense platform for Conservative Party Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Harper contends that the increased military and government presence is needed because oil, gas and minerals in the Arctic are critical to the country's economic growth. The types of incidents the Canadian Forces would most likely have to respond to in the Arctic, Jolin said, would be a major environmental disaster or a search-and-rescue operation, such as aiding a commercial cruise ship that has capsized after hitting an uncharted obstacle.

"The biggest thing will be coordination, so you'll want to have the ability to mount a command post, have good radios and radars, good surveillance," he said. "It's about command and control, power generation and communications."

construction of two polar communications and weather satellites.

The Canadian military also has an increased surveillance capability planned for the Arctic, dubbed Polar Epsilon 2. The system will use the data produced by the Canadian government's Radarsat Constellation Mission (RCM) spacecraft currently under design. The RCM satellites are scheduled for launch in 2018.

Originally the plan was to build a deep-water port at Nanisivik, but because of the high costs of construction in the Arctic that has been scaled back to a $130 million refueling site for the Royal Canadian Navy. The site will be used to support the new Arctic offshore patrol ships.

he prize for these countries is the mineral wealth of the Arctic, which global warming may make more accessible.

an eighth of the world’s untapped oil

perhaps a quarter of its gas.

Drilling for oil and gas there is extremely expensive, and falling oil prices have made the economics of Arctic energy even less favourable. This gives would-be prospectors an interest in co-operating, not in adding to the risks and costs.

The melting of the summer sea ice has also opened up trade routes between Asia and Europe via the top of the world; 71 cargo ships plied the north-east passage last summer, up from 46 in 2012

Russia

carried out extensive combat exercises in the Arctic for the first time since the end of the cold war

re-equipping old Soviet bases there and in July tested the first of its new-generation rockets,

Sweden spent part of the summer searching for a Russian submarine that it suspected of slipping into its territorial waters.

countries may control an area of seabed if they can show it is an extension of their continental shelf.

marginal discovery of oil and gas with its summer exploration in the Chukchi Sea but not enough to continue to the search for the “foreseeable” future.

Shell has spent over $7bn (£4.6bn) on its failed hunt for oil

t appears that Shell’s chief executive, Ben van Beurden, was also worried that the row over the Arctic was undermining his attempts to influence the debate around how to tackle climate change.