Antarctica
Each year, scientists from 28 different nations conduct experiments not reproducible in any other place in the world. In the summer more than 4,000 scientists operate research stations; this number decreases to just over 1,000 in the winter. McMurdo Station, which is the largest research station in Antarctica, is capable of housing more than 1,000 scientists, visitors, and tourists.
Arctic resources race
The first offshore oil platform in the Arctic was Prirazlomnaya in the Pechora Sea off Russia, operated by the Russian company Gazprom; it began production in late 2013. Russia jailed 30 Greenpeace activists protesting the platform and seized their ship. The largest Arctic platform in the Arctic is Goliat in the Barents Sea off Norway, co-owned by Eni Norge AS and Statoil; it began production in 2015. Royal Dutch Shell had $7 billion project to extract oil from the Chukchi Sea off Alaska, "Polar Pioneer", but abandoned the project in 2015 after determining that it was "not sufficient to warrant further exploration". Contributing to these decision was the record-low price of oil and the high operating costs of operating in a remote region with extreme weather.