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An expedition by environmental group Greenpeace has revealed a stunning array of sea life on the Arctic Ocean seabed.
The crew on board the Greenpeace ship, Esperanza, sailed to waters north of Norway's Svalbard Islands to record the footage.
Using state-of-the-art equipment, veteran underwater photographer Gavin Newman was able to capture rare images of sea anemones, tunicates and soft corals which appear to thrive in the harsh subzero temperatures.
"We came here very much prepared to survey vast areas of flat sand and mud, but we have found an amazing amount of under water biodiversity," Newman told CNN.

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On June 15th, as BP's catastrophic spill in the Gulf neared its third month, President Obama addressed the nation from the Oval Office. He had put an indefinite hold on plans to open up new coastal areas, including Florida and Virginia, to offshore exploration. And he had frozen all new permits to drill in deep waters for six months, to give a blue-ribbon commission time to study the disaster. "We need better regulations, better safety standards and better enforcement," the president insisted.

But Obama's tough-guy act offers no guarantee that oil giants like BP won't be permitted to repeat the same mistakes that led to the nightmare in the Gulf. Indeed, top environmentalists warn, the suspension of drilling appears to be little more than a stalling tactic designed to let public anger over BP's spill subside before giving Big Oil the go-ahead to drill in an area that has long been off-limits: the Arctic Ocean.

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The Arctic sea ice cover appears to have reached its minimum extent for the year, the third-lowest recorded since satellites began measuring sea ice extent in 1979, according to the University of Colorado at Boulder's National Snow and Ice Data Center.

While this year's September minimum extent was greater than each of the past two record-setting and near-record-setting low years, it is still significantly below the long-term average and well outside the range of natural climate variability, said NSIDC Research Scientist Walt Meier. Most scientists believe the shrinking Arctic sea ice is tied to warming temperatures caused by an increase in human-produced greenhouse gases being pumped into Earth's atmosphere.

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Autumn temperatures in the Arctic are at record levels, the Arctic Ocean is getting warmer and less salty as sea ice melts, and reindeer herds appear to be declining, researchers reported Thursday.

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