Which of the world’s oceans would you guess is the most biologically productive? Would you guess a tropical ocean? Would you be surprised to find out it is the Antarctic Ocean? The water surrounding Antarctica accounts for only five percent of the world’s sea water, but produces twenty percent of the world’s sea life (measured […]
It’s like something out of a science-fiction horror movie: creatures that feed on slime coating the underside of sea ice, and swim in swarms of as many as 35,000 per square meter, advancing in a narrow band or sheet. They eat by gathering food between their legs and stuffing it in a sort of sausage […]
In May of the year 2000 a chunk of ice measuring 4,250 square miles (11,000 square kilometers) broke free from Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf. The size of the New England state of Connecticut, this tabular berg, which is flat unlike the jagged and pointy icebergs that break off glaciers, was the largest floating thing on […]
Apsley Cherry-Garrard wrote a book called The Worst Journey in the World to tell the story of Robert Scott’s early Antarctic explorers, but the title could have described any number of early attempts to explore the coldest, windiest, driest, highest, and most remote continent on earth. Early explorers suffered from scurvy, frostbite, hypothermia, starvation, and […]
Antarctica has no native people and was officially “discovered” only 188 years ago. There is no agreement about which of three sailors first saw the continent; a Russian, a Brit or an American. It is also possible that any of a number of people aboard the numerous sealing boats sailing greater and greater distances south […]
Arctic (North): A vast ocean surrounded by land inhabited by people for thousands of years. Home to four-million current human residents. Includes parts of the United States, Canada, Russia, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Greenland (Denmark), and Iceland. Home to polar bears, wolves, foxes, caribou, lemmings, wolverines, muskoxen, and other land mammals. Summer home for several hundred […]
The land-based ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica hold enough water to raise global sea level by more than 200 feet Three ice sheets (Greenland, Western Antarctica, Eastern Antarctica) hold 99% of the ice that would raise sea levels if global warming caused it to melt or go afloat (the remaining 1 % is locked […]