People need to get their head out of the sand about what the arctic really is. It is an extremely cold environment, dark almost the entire year, waves of huge porportions and massive ice bergs regularly drifting around. It's as hostile environment as you can possibly get, it will take a massive amount of effort to get things going up there at "the end of the world".

Uh, where did you study pop science? In summer, the North Pole experiences sunlight all day long between the Equinoxes, that is, 6 months of the year. There aren't many of those "giant icebergs", as the source of most of these is the glaciers of Greenland and almost all of those dump bergs into either the Nordic Seas or the Baffin Bay/Davis Strait/Labrador Sea. Sea-ice is not the same as an iceberg. When there was lots of multi-year sea-ice, the winds could not produce waves. Things were calm enough for people to camp out on the sea-ice over winter, which Russian scientists have done for many years.

E. Swanson