An international group of researchers will try to uncover the mystery of what lives in one of the most remote areas of the world – the Arctic Ocean.

Scientists from Canada, Russia, the United States and beyond will map marine species from the seabed to the surface, looking at the biology, geology and physics.

The 10-year, $1 billion Census of Marine Life aims to survey all of the world's oceans.

For the Arctic Ocean, scientists will use icebreakers, remote-operated video cameras and submersibles to discover species in the icy waters.

Global climate change is blamed for increases in the melt rate in the north, although little is known about its impact on the Arctic Ocean.

"There's going to be increased shipping through the Arctic if we lose the ice, there's going to be increased oil exploration, fish that are subarctic moving into the arctic," said Russ Hopcroft, one of the census project leaders who is an oceanography professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.

"We need to simply know more about what's there now if we want to understand what the future may hold."

One of the areas of particular concern is the Canada Basin, located off the north coast of Alaska and the Yukon, said Ron O'Dor, chief scientist for the census project in Washington, D.C.

"It's very isolated, it's deep water completely surrounded by ridges," said O'Dor. "It's been called the oldest water in the world because the habitats there have been isolated for tens of millions of years."

The Canada Basin is 3,800 metres deep and connects to the Pacific Ocean through the Bering Strait. The researchers say they could find living fossils of species that scientists thought had disappeared.

The scientists, who are both Canadian, hope to complete the census by 2010.

The Arctic component of the census was seeded with a $600,000 grant from the New York-based Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, announced on Thursday.