Svalbard

A handful of other Australian territories were also hit by the new tariffs, in addition to the Norwegian archipelago Svalbard, the Falkland Islands and The British Indian Ocean Territory.

Temperatures around the north pole were about 20C above normal in early February, leading to melting conditions in places like Svalbard.

Last month Greenpeace welcomed the decision of the Norwegian government to stop the first round of licencing for deep sea mining in Arctic waters between Norway's Svalbard and Jan Mayen islands.

The proposed lunar biorepository, described in the journal BioScience, would be similar to the widely known Svalbard seed vault in the Arctic Circle, where global samples for primary food crops are stored.

The study focused on the Norwegian Arctic archipelago, Svalbard, at the edge of the Arctic Ocean, and was published in Nature Communications.