The underwater reactors are said to be at an advanced stage of development, with the aim of having the first one operational by 2020. And while there will be some humans involved in this aspect of Project Iceberg, many other routine operations will be carried out by robots alone.

The workhorses will be deepwater unmanned submarines or autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). AUVs are currently used in small numbers by many nations, and generally under close operator control rather than roving freely. Russia has previously lagged in this area, but they seem to be catching up.

The Harpsichord-2R-PM AUV has been developed for Iceberg, and is intended to be the forerunner of a whole family of different underwater vehicles. This two-tonne, 6m-long (20ft) torpedo-like craft is currently being tested in the Black Sea but has also being used to help in the recovery of crashed aircraft. In 2009, one of these AUV’s located a Russian Navy plane, which had crashed killing all 11 people on board during a training flight. The plane had come down in the sea off Sakhalin, a Russian island near Japan, but the search on the surface was hampered by ice and severe weather. The AUV’s ability to operate by itself beneath the waves allowed it to successfully recover the black box flight recorders needed to help determine the cause of the crash.

While AUVs are often already used for underwater surveying, there is no precedent for using them to drill on the sea bed. Igor Vilnit, head of Russia’s largest submarine design company the Rubin Central Design Bureau for Marine Engineering, claims they are on course to have a working AUV drill in action in as little as five years.

Amid all this drilling and underwater exploration, though, there are bigger changes afoot that extend beyond even the simmering political tensions. Climate change is hastening the melting of the Arctic’s ice caps – this presents a slew of challenges for the indigenous peoples who call the region home, as well as for wildlife, like polar bears.

But as rising temperatures melt the Arctic ice cap, leaving the region more hospitable and accessible, climate change is also likely to exacerbate the political turmoil in the area too.

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At a conference in March, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said development of the Arctic region would help to build neighbourly relations with surrounding states and that it should be a "territory of peace and cooperation". But this is hardly consistent with other Russian activity in the area.

Some 50 former Soviet Arctic military bases have recently been reactivated. The Russian army has new Arctic Brigades, and showed off special military vehicles for polar operations in this year’s May Day parade. Russia‘s Northern Fleet is also to get its own advanced icebreaker, as well as “ice capable” patrol vessels, essentially mini-icebreakers armed with anti-ship missiles.

Project Iceberg is also going ahead in the face of sanctions imposed by Western countries against Russia in the wake of its annexation of Crimea. The sanctions restricted the access that Russia’s oil and gas companies had to the sort of foreign finance and technology needed to develop wells in the difficult Arctic environment. Instead Russia has chosen to go it alone. Earlier this year the country began a complex horizontal drilling operation from a remote peninsula on the edge of the Laptev Sea to reach oil reserves up to 15km (9.3 miles) under the frozen ocean.