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One way to reach Antarctica (from the Greek 'Arktos' meaning the Great Bear constellation: Antarctica means opposite the bear) is to set off from Cape Beale in British Columbia, Canada, and sail due south. The next land you hit will be Antarctica.
Antarctica is twice the size of Australia.
2% of Anctarctica is able to sustain plant life. There are no trees able to grow in Antarctica, but two flowering plants are the Antarctica hair grass and pearl-wort. Lichens, moss, algae and fungi can also be found.
Scientists estimate that the last rainfall fell on Antarctica two million years ago.
There are no native peoples in Antarctica.
Gale force winds that roar down from the interior to the coast are called Katabatic winds. A wind speed of 320 km (199 miles) per hour was recorded in 1972. Some research stations try to harness the wind for generating electricity, sometimes the wind mills are damaged by the ferocity of the wind.
Antarctica is, at the same time, the driest and highest continent, and the continent with the lowest surface point. The whole of Antarctica is a polar desert, with an average precipitation amount similar to that of the Sahara. Its thick ice sheet gives it the highest average elevation of all the continents. Finally, there is a spot in West Antarctica 2550 meters (2789 yards) below sea level. However, it is covered by 4347 meters (4754 yards) of ice.
Deception Island, off the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, is famous for the fact that people can swim there. It is the semi-submerged summit of an active volcano. The waters around the island are geothermally heated and warm enough to swim in.
Parts of six independent countries lie north of the Arctic Circle. These are the United States (Alaska), Canada, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Others in question would be Greenland and Iceland. However, Iceland is only minutes of latitude south of the circle and Greenland itself is not an independent country, but a dependency of Denmark.
Four of the world's top ten largest islands (by area) lie either partially or completely north of the Arctic Circle. These are Greenland, Victoria, Baffin, and Ellesmere. (All of the last three belong to Canada). Greenland and Baffin exist only partially above the circle while Victoria and Ellesmere lie completely within it.
According to a 1920 census, less than one in forty-six Eskimos had ever seen an igloo. In 1931, it became clear that they had other ingenious solutions to their housing problem. Point Hope, Alaska, was faced with such an epidemic of crime in that year that it had to order a larger jail to be built. The trouble started when word spread among the Eskimos about the warmth and good food served in the old jail and they all wanted to enjoy it. This inversion of normal values may be more readily understood when one realizes that some Eskimos use refrigerators to prevent food from freezing.
The Eskimo language has more than twenty words for snow.
Clarence Birdseye had the idea for frozen food in 1930 after watching Eskimos catching fish in temperatures of -50 F (-45.6 C).
Eskimo women never comb their hair on the day a polar bear is to be killed.
All polar bears are left-handed.
Eskimos do not suffer from heart disease. One research study recently attributed this healthy sign to their diet of salmon, which reduces the level of blood cholesterol.
Mrs Myrtle Grundt, the widow of a fur dealer from Perth, Australia, left one million Australian dollars to a pair of polar bears in the local zoo.
King Henry III of England had a pet polar bear which he kept in the Tower of London and let out for swims in the Thames on the end of a rope. The king issued a writ “directing the sheriffs of London to furnish six pence a day to support our White Bear in our Tower of London; and to provide a muzzle and iron chain to hold him when out of the water; and a long strong rope to hold him when he was fishing in the Thames”. It is thought likely that the bear was a present from King Haakon IV of Norway. He also gave polar bears to Emperor Frederick II and to the Emperor of Germany.
One of the sad facts of life is that no polar bear has ever met a penguin in the wild, owing to their dwelling at opposite poles.
One of the richest natural sources of Vitamin A is the liver of a polar bear. One nineteenth-century Arctic expedition was totally wiped out after its members had eaten the liver of a polar bear they had killed. They all died of Vitamin A overdose.
All polar bears are Capricorns since they are all born in late December or early January.
Polar bear skin is black.
Polar bear's are so well insulated and give off so little heat, that they are difficult to find using infra-red heat detecting cameras.
A polar bear's tongue isn't pink! It's a black and blue colour
Churchill (Canada) has a polar bear jail that is larger than the jail for people.
Polar bears are pigeon-toed. That means their toes point inward instead of straight ahead.
If a child dies in some parts of Greenland, a live dog is buried with it to guide it to the next world.
Greenland is the world’s largest producer of icebergs (from the Scandinavian or Dutch ‘berg’, a hill or mountain). The Jakobshavn Glacier alone sends a new iceberg into the sea every five minutes.
The largest iceberg ever sighted was in the South Pacific in 1956. It covered an area greater than that of Belgium. Even an average iceberg weighs 20 tons (18.1 metric tons).
Eric the Red named a huge and barren land ‘Greenland’ in 982 in order to encourage Norsemen to emigrate there. His implied promise of greenery succeeded in tricking twenty-five boatloads to make the long journey.
Eighty per cent of all the ice in the world is in Antarctica. If all the ice in the world melted, the sea-level would increase to such an extent that the Empire State Building would be submerged up to the twentieth floor.
Telephone directories in Iceland are arranged in alphabetical order of first names. Icelanders have no family surnames, only their given first name plus a patronymic formed by adding the suffix ‘-son’ (in the case of a male) or ‘-dottir’ (in the case of a female) to the first name of the father.
Dogs are illegal in Reykjavik, the capital city of Iceland.
The Icelanders read more books per capita than any other nation on earth. Their literacy rate is 100 per cent.
The average temperature in Reykjavik is higher than in New York.
Iceland also has the world’s biggest gannet colony.
The penguin was the name originally given to the now extinct great auk. The excrement of the Gentoo penguin is pink. The Gentoo penguin itself may be unaware of this phenomenon, since penguins are in general extremely short-sighted on land, though they do see well under water.
King penguins living on uninhabited islands have been known to fall backwards with surprise on seeing a human being for the first time.
Penguins have an uncanny knack of knowing which ice flow will take them home.
Penguin breastbones act like a boat keel and their huge muscles enable them to propel themselves at the incredible speed of 40 km/h (24.8 miles/h).
Penguin colonies often number into the hundreds of thousands and an aggregation of five million Adelie penguins have been recorded in a single group of islands.
Penguins are such avid brooders that they will fight to mother a stray baby.
The Magellanic penguin is often called the jackass penguin because of its braying call.
A penguin can propel itself 7 feet (2.1 metres), straight out of the water, to avoid a whale or leopard seal.
Ten inches of snow provides as much water as one inch of rain.
The Ultimate Irrelevant Encyclopaedia, Bill Hartston and Jill Dawson, George Unwin & Allen, 1984
http://www.bluemoon.net/~opus/nframe/penguin.html
http://www.geocities.com/mikepolarbear/trivia.html
http://www.funtrivia.com/playquiz/quiz776868e7458.html
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Wikpedia: polar regions
Wikipedia: Antarctica
Wikipeida: Arctic
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