The Polar Regions
Antarctica is the coldest place on Earth, sometimes reaching 130 degrees below 0ºF. It is one of our seven continents and includes the South Pole. The coast of Antarctica is windy and snow-covered, yet inland the Antarctic is a desert! The dry Antarctic interior is not like a hot sand desert at all, though it is considered the driest place on Earth. It is actually covered by a sheet of ice a mile or more thick, but there is rarely snowfall. It is a frozen desert. The Antarctic ice sheets may hold about 90 percent of all the earth's fresh water! Penguins, fur seals, leopard seals, Weddell seals, elephant seals, albatross, petrels, blue whales, killer whales, and krill all make their homes on or in the southern ocean around the frozen continent.
Polar Bear Freeze
Fill up an ice cube tray with blue raspberry juice (light blue colored). Then add three gummy bears to each ice cube spot. Let them freeze for several hours. Invite friends over and pop a couple of ice cubes into a little glass bowl for each person with a spoon. Polar bear freeze treats for all!
The Arctic doesn't contain a central land mass like the Antarctic, but includes the northern edges of Europe, Asia, North America, and Greenland, and, of course, also contains the North Pole. So it's mostly frozen ocean — nine feet thick frozen ocean! The only land habitat in the Arctic is called arctic tundra, treeless, frozen land covered in permafrost that only grows plants in the twenty-four- hour sun of the short Arctic summer. This boggy plain is not an easy place to travel, especially when the fierce mosquitoes descend to feed on the animals living there. Musk ox, caribou, lemming, arctic fox, hare, wolf, and polar bear all fall prey to the biting insects of the Arctic.
Hidden Danger You can easily show the hidden nature of icebergs. Take a clear glass bowl and fill it with water. Drop in an ice cube. Notice how much of the ice cube shows above the water — not very much. Now imagine that ice cube is the size of your entire school building!
Icebergs are huge chunks of ice that float in the ocean. They form in the warmer months when they calve off a glacier or ice pack. Most icebergs come from the edges of the Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets, so are made of fresh water. They are usually a lot bigger than they look. The saying that something is “the tip of the iceberg” means that you are just seeing a little bit above the water. Usually only about one-eighth of the iceberg is showing above the water. Most of it is hidden underwater out of sight. This can be a hazard to passing ships. Interestingly, it is the smaller icebergs, called growlers, that can be the most dangerous because they don't show up on a ship's radar and can't be seen easily from above water.
