Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Arctic is the polar region of Earth surrounding the North Pole, lying north of the Arctic Circle at about 66 degrees 34 minutes north. It includes parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, the United States, Canada, the Danish Realm with Greenland, and northern Iceland, along with the Arctic Ocean and adjacent seas.
Average winter temperatures in the Arctic can fall to minus 40 degrees Celsius, and the coldest recorded temperature is approximately minus 68 degrees Celsius. Precipitation is low, with most of the area receiving less than 50 centimetres, mostly as snow.
Arctic herbivores include the Arctic hare, lemming, muskox and reindeer, preyed on by the snowy owl, Arctic fox, grizzly bear and Arctic wolf, while the polar bear hunts marine life from the ice. Vegetation forms tundra of dwarf shrubs, graminoids, herbs, lichens and mosses, since trees cannot grow there, and some 200 bird species breed in the region.
The earliest inhabitants of North America's central and eastern Arctic belonged to the Arctic small tool tradition around 2500 BCE, followed by the Dorset culture, known as the Tuniit. The Inuit, descendants of the Thule culture, replaced the Dorset after 1300 CE and are the present-day Arctic inhabitants.
No country owns the geographic North Pole or the surrounding Arctic Ocean. The six states bordering the ocean are limited to a 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone, though Norway, Russia, Canada and the Kingdom of Denmark have launched projects to claim extended continental shelf areas of the seabed.
The Arctic's near-surface temperature is rising 2 to 3 times faster than the global average, a pattern called Arctic amplification, making it a leading indicator of global warming. Thawing permafrost releases ancient carbon as methane and carbon dioxide, and melting of the Greenland ice sheet could contribute substantially to worldwide sea level rise.