Southernmost settlements
There are many research stations in Antarctica, both permanent and summer only. Many of the stations are staffed all year. McMurdo Station is the largest with an average population of 1200.
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.