Where will you be spending your next vacation? Don’t know about you, but we’re going to Svalbard, Norway, the northernmost inhabited place on Earth, and one of the coldest. Well, no, we’re not. But a melting arctic – opening up shipping lanes, oil and gas reserves and global warming research centers –  has made the remote island of Svalbard, a place that was once offered as a harsher alternative to the death penalty, a veritable hotbed of interest from major countries, such as China, Russia, South Korea, and the United States. On the U.S. side, publications such as Admiral Robert J. Papp Jr’s “The Emerging Arctic Frontier” in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings Magazine this past February, speak loud and clear to that growing interest.

Still, we plan to go to Malta instead.

The full story at Public Radio International.