Researchers at the UK National Oceanography Centre have inspected samples from arctic sea floors, discovering that these floors used to teem with life. The samples were replete with a type of algae called diatoms. These diatoms serve as a low rung on the food chain for larger, more complex ecosystems. Other studies suggest that sharks and larger fish once called the warmed arctic their home.

If arctic temperatures continue their upward trend, the arctic ocean floors will be covered in this food source again. As a result, creatures that consume these diatoms could move in during the summer, making the summer arctic oceans as biologically rich as southern oceans.

No word yet on when construction begins for the first arctic beach resort.

Warming arctic could teem with life by 2030 [via NewScientist]

Further reading: Images of the Arctic Ocean as We Will Know It

Here's the old-school Arctic Ocean, the way it looked before the 2000s when things started melting.

(Satellite views via NASA/RADARSAT/Alaska Synthetic Aperture Radar Facility.)

Here's a model predicting almost complete ice melt by 2050.

Chart via Fullerton College

And you've probably seen this image before. It's the most commonly-used infographic showing the extreme ice melting that's taken place over the past decade. The ice cap has shrunk nearly 40 percent in summers during that time, and will probably shrink more than that before this year's melting season is over in late September.

Time lapse map via Wikipedia.

Get used to seeing an ice-free Arctic coast. This was taken last year off the coast of Alaska.

Arctic Coast via Sulekha.com.

About five years ago, some scientists argued that heavy cloud cover over the Arctic would protect the ice from melting. Here is a photograph of those clouds from 2003. Sadly, the swirly clouds didn't prevent melting, and the biggest melts came in 2005 and 2007.

Satellite photo of clouds over Arctic Ocean from 2003 via University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A big worry for environmental scientists right now is the melting of the ice sheet on Greenland, which you can see illustrated here. Obviously, this huge ice sheet melting will raise water levels, but it will also have an effect you might not have realized: When ice melts and then refreezes, it can absorb up to four times more sunlight, and therefore will melt more easily next season and create a magnified melting effect.

Greenland melt from 2005 via NASA.