The Great Smoky Mountains Railroad’s partnership continues with Warner Brothers Consumer Products for 2007. The Polar Express 2004 holiday film from Warner Bros. reunited the Academy Award-winning team of Tom Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis in an inspiring animated film based on the beloved children’s book, by Chris Van Allsburg, about a doubting young boy who takes an extraordinary train ride to the North Pole on Christmas Eve.

Preliminary research results released by Russian scientists are allowing the country to claim 1.2 million sq km of potentially energy-rich Arctic territory, the Natural Resources Ministry said Thursday.

Studying the geological samples taken from the North Pole seabed during Russia's symbolic expedition last week could take six months, a Russian Academy of Sciences spokesman said Wednesday.

Russia is guided by international law in its polar shelf probes, the country's foreign minister told a news conference Friday.

Russia has rejected criticism of its landmark expedition to the Arctic Ocean's seabed under the North Pole, where explorers on August 2 planted a Russian flag.

Russian media report that Russian explorers have made a historic dive into the Arctic Ocean in two submersibles and planted a Russian flag on the seabed. The explorers today were reported to have reached the seabed directly under the North Pole at a depth of more than 4,200 meters, and are expected to carry out scientific experiments.

WWF ambassador Lewis Gordon Pugh has successfully become the first man to swim at the Geographic North Pole. His 1km swim took 18 minutes and 50 seconds in below freezing temperatures of minus 1.8 degress C - the coldest waters in which a human has ever swum.

An eight-month voyage through the Arctic Ocean, without ship or travel route: the North Pole drifting station NP-35 represents an unusual project of the International Polar Year

Satellite-detected declines in salinity and bottom pressure in parts of the Arctic Ocean indicate that a reversal of the polar ocean's circulation may be under way.

It is perhaps an unlikely combination - an international team of scientists stationed in Svalbard, Norway and two polar explorers crossing the North Pole on foot. Both teams, however, are currently part of a common effort to collect vital data on the ground and from the air in support of ESA's ice mission CryoSat-2.