Well, if we want now a beachfront house in Spain, it's possible that our grandchildren will buy it in Greenland. 'Cause ours will surely be already on the seafloor.

The worldwide rise in temperatures has already helped agriculturists in Iceland - where twenty years ago they couldn't grow any grain - cultivate barley and other cereal crops.

In northern Canada, they have discovered an exploitable seam of diamonds, once inaccessible due to the ice and snow. The melting ice in the Barents Sea has expanded the area for phytoplankton, which now feed increased stocks of larger fishes.

Global warming is clearly advantageous for marine plants and animals: as their territories expand, our landmass shrinks! By the year 2080, the Met Office says there will be no ice remaining at the North Pole.

So says also a group of European scientists meeting in the northern Germany city of Bremen announced on Tuesday. "If the situation evolves as physics predicts, the Arctic Ocean's summertime ice fields will completely disappear by 2080," said Eberhard Fahrbach of the Alfred Wegner Institute (AWI), a member of the European Arctic research body DAMOCLES.

At present, the polar ice cap's size varies according to the season, with parts melting and refreezing throughout the year, but the stable zone getting smaller and smaller every year.

According to Fahrbach's prediction, there would be no permanently frozen areas in a matter of decades. "That has consequences going much further than the Arctic," he added.

Climatic change threatens the polar bears of the region, but changes in fact the entire food chain. "It also has an effect on the fish which ultimately end up on our tables," the scientist added.

The DAMOCLES programme (Developing Arctic Modeling and Observing Capabilities for Long-term Environmental Studies) is a European project aimed at monitoring and forecasting climate changes in the Arctic.