OSLO (Reuters) -Norway's Supreme Court ruled on Monday that EU ships cannot fish for snow crab off the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic in a case also deciding who has the right to explore for oil and minerals in the region.

As the smallest of the group of baleen whales that includes the blue whale - filter-feeding behemoths of the marine realm - the Antarctic minke whale aptly can be called the littlest giant. It also has been among the most enigmatic of the baleen whales, owing to its remote and frigid domain.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The oil industry on Monday cheered the U.S. government's greenlighting of ConocoPhillips' multibillion-dollar oil drilling project in Alaska's Arctic, but court challenges could mire the plans in further delays.  

Guns N' Roses and Arctic Monkeys will join Elton John as headliners at the Glastonbury Festival in June, organisers said on Friday, drawing attention to the largely male line-up of its biggest performers this year.

Huddled in a retreat in a remote Arctic village, European Central Bank policymakers faced up last week to some cold hard facts: companies are profiting from high inflation while workers and consumers foot the bill.

A 'doomsday' Arctic seed vault on Norway's Spitsbergen island is set to receive its most diverse batch of seed donations yet as efforts to secure the world's food supplies ramp up amid rising climate concerns.

Scientists studying Antarctica's vast Thwaites Glacier - nicknamed the Doomsday Glacier - say warm water is seeping into its weak spots, worsening melting caused by rising temperatures, two papers published in Nature journal showed on Wednesday.

Meticulously crafted over decades as a major revenue stream for the Kremlin, Moscow's gas trade with Europe is unlikely to recover from the ravages of military conflict.

In Chile's remote south, the country's gateway to the Antarctic, the worst drought in half a century is hitting cattle ranchers and vegetable farmers, leaving the earth so dry in some areas that grass cannot grow for grazing.

(Corrects temperature in America's coldest spot to minus 39 F in, instead of minus 30 F, in paragraph 8)