NY-AALESUND (Norway) - OUT of place in the snowy, polar landscape, the train that once hauled coal out of the mountain serves as a reminder to scientists at the Ny-Aalesund Arctic research station of the origin of the planet's woes.

Before becoming an international research station where scientists study the effects of global warming, this cluster of coloured buildings in the northwest corner of Norway's Svalbard archipelago was once a mining site for fossil fuels now blamed for climate change.

A firedamp explosion in the coal mine killed 21 men in 1962. The disaster ended the mining era in Ny-Aalesund, which is closer to the North Pole just 1,200 kilometres (745 miles) away than to Oslo, where the tragedy brought down the government.

Scientists in white lab coats have since replaced the black-faced miners, and the remote town - the northernmost in the world - has a 'broader broadband than London,' boasts Kings Bay, the company that runs the site.

There is however no mobile network, and visitors are asked to turn off their cell phones to avoid disturbances to the research station's finely-calibrated measuring instruments.

A somewhat erratic cable car brings visitors and researchers up to Zeppelin, which measures, among other things, fine particles from forest fires in North America brought to the Arctic by air currents.

In graphics taped to the walls, all the arrows point upwards, with particularly sharp increases seen in recent decades.

The Svalbard archipelago is on the frontline of global warming. Each year, the volume of its ice cap shrinks by 13 cubic kilometres or the equivalent of 5.2 million Olympic-size swimming pools.

And the glaciers around Ny-Aalesund are no exception. At the town limits, a docking port for blimps attests to Ny-Aalesund's unique role in the history of polar expeditions.

Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, Italy's Umberto Nobile, and Lincoln Ellsworth of the United States left here in 1926 aboard the blimp Norge to become the first team ever to reach the North Pole with certainty. -- AFP