Arctic versus Antarctic: Differences between the North and South Poles

The earth globe has two poles, both ice-covered but located on either side of its axis.

The North Pole and South Pole are both frozen, but they’re basically opposites turned inside out.

Arctic: Ceiling the North by Northwest

The Arctic is ice floating on top of an ocean. It is the polar region of Earth that surrounds the North Pole.

Beneath that frozen surface at the North Pole sits thousands of feet of open seawater, which is why Arctic sea ice usually thins, cracks, and drifts with the currents.

And this is also why submarines can actually surface by breaking through the ice brick.

The Arctic region is a unique area among Earth’s ecosystems.

Life in the Arctic includes zooplankton and phytoplankton, fish and marine mammals, birds, land animals, plants, as well as human societies.

The Arctic land is bordered by the subarctic.

Ringed around that frozen ocean are the northern edges of real continents, Canada, Russia, Greenland, Scandinavia, all pressing in from the outside.

Antarctic: Tailing the South Down under

Then there is the Antarctic which flips that setup entirely.

The Antarctic is a genuine continent, featuring land, bedrock and mountain ranges, all buried under an ice sheet so thick such that in places it tops two miles deep.

This is essentially the largest single mass of ice on Earth.

Antarctica is the Earth’s southernmost and least-populated continent.

It is located almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle and surrounded by the Antarctic Ocean alias Southern Ocean.

Instead of continents surrounding a frozen sea, here it’s an ocean, the Southern Ocean, wrapping all the way around a frozen landmass with nothing else bordering it.

That single structural difference explains a lot of what makes these two places behave so differently.

Antarctica’s ice sheet holds around 90 percent of the world’s fresh water, since it’s piled on solid ground and simply keeps accumulating snowfall over hundreds of thousands of years.

The Arctic, on the other hand, cannot do that in the same way.

This is because floating ice has a natural ceiling on how thick it gets, and it’s also far more exposed to warming ocean water from below, which is part of why Arctic sea ice has been shrinking faster than Antarctic ice historically.

So, here is the difference between the two poles. One’s an ocean wearing a lid of ice, while the other’s a landmass wearing a two-mile-thick coat.