Let it snow -- on Mars: NASA

In an unprecedented discovery, NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has found snow falling from clouds on Mars, scientists said Tuesday.

A laser instrument collecting data on how the atmosphere and surface interact on Mars detected snow from clouds about four kilometers (2.5 miles) above the spacecraft's landing site. The date found the snow vaporized before reaching the ground.

"Nothing like this view has ever been seen on Mars," said Jim Whiteway, of York University, Toronto, lead scientist for the Canadian-supplied Meteorological Station on Phoenix. "We'll be looking for signs that the snow may even reach the ground."

Because they believe that fossil-fueled trips are destroying the Arctic, these people booked a fossil-fueled trip to the Arctic

In a warming world, it's a vital time to see and tell about this ecosystem of ice, to watch it shape the rock, push the moraine, shed its meltwater in ever increasing gushers. Our own trip was planned two years in advance as reports of climate change grew more dire. Once here, we find glaciers melting faster than the snowfall can feed them, due to temperatures that have been rising since the 1970s. Last summer, in 2007, there was hardly any sea ice at all, say our naturalists; by this early summer of 2008, ice has returned.

Polar bears are still healthy here, but the fjord that leads to Spitsbergen's largest town has not frozen in three years and there is worry about the future. Polar bears are now a threatened species in the Canadian Arctic because of global warming. Summer ice has been so reduced that bears cannot hunt seals successfully or swim the great distances between ice shelves.

The islands of Svalbard are half way between Norway and the North Pole. About 2,000 people live here in small settlements, as do many of the 2,000 or 3,000 polar bears that surround the Barents Sea.