48 Fun Facts About The Arctic

Which bear did the ancient Greeks have in mind when they named the Arctic after their word for bear?

The Great Bear is the constellation Ursa Major, which circles the pole without ever setting, so the Greeks called the north arktikos, of the Bear. Some accounts credit the Little Bear, home of the Pole Star, instead.

The Arctic Circle marks the southern limit of what?

The midnight sun lasts a single day on the circle itself, at the June solstice. The run of unbroken daylight lengthens the farther north you go, until at the North Pole it lasts six months.

Ecologists draw the Arctic's edge where July averages 10 °C, which closely matches which other boundary?

The northern tree line is where summers turn too cold for trees and tundra takes over. It pays little heed to the Arctic Circle: in some regions forests grow well to the north of it.

What Arctic record did Verkhoyansk, a Siberian town famous for its brutal winters, set in June 2020?

Highest temperature: 38 °C, a swing of nearly 106 degrees from the same town's record low. It came in a long Siberian heatwave that fed vast Arctic wildfires.

Which city near the Arctic Circle bills itself as the official hometown of Santa Claus?

Rovaniemi, in Finnish Lapland, began its Arctic Circle trade with a cabin built in 1950 for a visit by Eleanor Roosevelt. Today a line marked across Santa Claus Village lets visitors step over the circle.

What is the largest city in the world north of the Arctic Circle?

Murmansk was the last city founded in the Russian Empire, built in 1915–16 as a First World War supply port because its harbour stays ice-free. In the next war it took in the Allied Arctic convoys.

What is the largest US settlement north of the Arctic Circle?

Utqiagvik dropped the name Barrow in 2016 after a referendum won by six votes, 381 to 375. The sun sets there in mid-November and does not rise again for about two months.

The Arctic Circle creeps north by about 14 metres a year because of a slow change in what?

Earth's axial tilt wobbles over a 41,000-year cycle, and the circle moves with it. On Iceland's Grímsey a concrete sphere marking the line is shifted every year, and the plan is to roll it into the sea when the circle leaves, around 2047.

Which two Arctic states have no direct access to the Arctic Ocean?

Finland and Sweden hold Arctic land but no northern shore, since Norway's coast lies between them and the sea. In 2008 the five coastal states met without them, and without Iceland, which complained at being left out.

What was the first binding treaty concluded under the Arctic Council, in 2011?

A search and rescue agreement, signed in Nuuk in May 2011, divides the Arctic into national rescue zones. Its text insists that those zones settle nothing about borders, several of which the eight signatories still dispute.

The Russian flag planted on the seabed beneath the North Pole in 2007 was made of what?

Titanium alloy went into a metre-tall flag, set down by a mini-submarine more than four kilometres beneath the ice. Canada's foreign minister scoffed that this was not the 15th century, when planting a flag could claim a territory.

Besides a flag, what did Canadian and Danish expeditions take turns leaving on disputed Hans Island?

Bottles of liquor, Canadian whisky answered by Danish schnapps, gave the dispute its name, the Whisky War. It ended in 2022 when the two countries split the rock, giving Canada and Denmark a land border with each other.

Russia, Denmark and Canada each argue that the undersea Lomonosov Ridge is a natural extension of what?

Their continental shelf is the prize: prove it runs beyond 200 nautical miles and the law of the sea grants the seabed there. The ridge spans 1,800 km of the ocean floor, leaving a UN panel to weigh three overlapping claims.

Canada regards the Northwest Passage as what?

Its internal waters, Canada says, so foreign ships must ask permission to pass. The United States calls the route an international strait, and made the point in 1985 by sending the icebreaker Polar Sea through without asking.

What did the International Maritime Organization ban ships from burning or carrying in the Arctic from July 2024?

Heavy fuel oil is the cheap, tar-like residue left over from refining crude. Loopholes let ships with protected tanks burn it until 2029, which campaigners said left three-quarters of Arctic shipping untouched.

Which cruise ship became the largest yet to navigate the Northwest Passage, in 2016?

Crystal Serenity carried more than 1,500 passengers and crew from Alaska to New York. Critics took the fact that it was possible at all as a warning about the retreating ice.

Melting sea ice speeds up Arctic warming because the open water left behind does what?

Absorbs more sunlight: bright ice bounces most of the sun's energy back to space, while the darker sea soaks it up and melts more ice. Since 1979 the Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the globe.

Which culture, ancestral to today's Inuit, spread east from Alaska and replaced the Arctic's earlier Dorset people?

Thule was the ancient Greeks' word for the farthest north, borrowed by archaeologists from a Greenland settlement where remains were first found. With dog sleds and skin boats these whale hunters crossed rapidly from Alaska to Greenland.

What was the Soviet Union's pioneering 1937 research station North Pole-1 built on?

A drifting ice floe carried four men for nine months, from near the pole to the sea off Greenland, more than 2,500 km away. Icebreakers finally took them off in February 1938, after several failed attempts.

Polar bears are specialised hunters of which prey in particular?

Ringed seals are mostly taken by ambush: a bear can wait for hours beside a breathing hole in the ice. When the hunting is good it eats only the energy-rich blubber and skin and leaves the rest.

The polar bear's scientific name describes it as a bear of what?

The sea: Ursus maritimus spends most of its life out on the frozen ocean. It is the only bear classed as a marine mammal, protected in the United States under the same law as whales and dolphins.

Under its white or yellowish fur, what colour is a polar bear's skin?

Black skin lies under a coat that is not really white either. The hollow outer hairs hold no pigment at all, and only look white because of the way they scatter light.

A male narwhal's spiralled tusk is actually which tooth?

A left canine grows forward through the upper lip, spiralling to the left, and a rare male sprouts a second tusk from the right one. It may double as a sensor, picking up changes in the water around the whale.

Which whale is the narwhal's closest living relative?

The beluga is the only other living member of the narwhal's family. In 2019 DNA from an odd skull that a Greenland hunter had kept on his shed proved the two can interbreed: its mother was a narwhal and its father a beluga.

Arctic terns see two summers a year by migrating from the Arctic to where?

The Antarctic coast is reached by a zigzag, not a straight line, because the birds ride the prevailing winds. Tracked terns from Greenland averaged about 71,000 km a year, the longest migration known in any animal.

How did scientists finally map the Arctic tern's full migration route in 2010?

Tiny tags on leg bands, each weighing 1.4 grams, showed the yearly trip was about twice as long as anyone had thought. Over a 30-year life that adds up to roughly three round trips to the Moon.

What happens to a white Arctic fox's coat when summer comes?

It turns brown, moulted for a shorter, darker coat that hides the fox among the summer rocks and plants. A rarer 'blue' type skips the trick and stays charcoal-dark all year round.

Which Arctic animal's Inuktitut name, umingmak, means the bearded one?

The muskox earns it with outer hair that hangs almost to the ground. The English name misleads, since the animal is no ox and is more closely related to sheep and goats.

What is the name of the prized soft wool harvested from muskoxen?

Qiviut is shed, not shorn: the animals moult their underwool each spring and farmers comb it out by hand. The soft fibre is so scarce that Alaska's wildlife agency says it has been called the rarest in the world.

Which longstanding myth is attached to lemmings?

That they leap off cliffs en masse owes much to Disney's 1958 documentary White Wilderness. Its famous scene was faked in landlocked Alberta, where the crew filmed lemmings on a turntable and then threw them off a cliff.

The 1920 Svalbard Treaty gives citizens of every signatory country the right to do what in the Norwegian archipelago?

Live and work there, with no visa or residence permit. In practice Norway extends the same welcome to every nationality, which is how Thais, whose country never signed, were for years the main town's largest foreign community.

What is the largest island in the Svalbard archipelago?

Spitsbergen is Dutch for pointed mountains, the name Willem Barentsz gave it when he sighted its peaks in 1596. Until 1925 the name covered the whole archipelago, which Norway then renamed Svalbard.

Longyearbyen was founded in 1906 by an American whose company mined what?

Coal drew the American John Munro Longyear, whose Arctic Coal Company gave the town its name. The Norwegian firm Store Norske bought the mines in 1916 and dug on until 2025, when it closed Mine 7, its last pit on the islands.

Who almost completely destroyed Longyearbyen on 8 September 1943?

The town was rebuilt after the war and now lives on tourism, research, a university centre and a satellite station.

The first withdrawal from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, in 2015, replaced a gene bank cut off by war in which country?

Syria hosted an international seed bank near Aleppo, with one of the world's great collections of wheat, barley and lentils. Its scientists fled to Morocco and Lebanon, then asked for their backup copies so they could start again.

Svalbard's Global Seed Vault, a backup for the world's crop collections, is popularly known by which nickname?

The Doomsday Vault is the press's name for a project conceived by Cary Fowler. It was built less for the apocalypse than for everyday disasters, the fires, floods and wars that wipe out ordinary seed banks.

At which strait does Russia's Northern Sea Route officially reach its eastern end?

Bering Strait nearly defeated the first ship to make the passage: Nordenskiöld's Vega was frozen in just short of it in September 1878 and stayed stuck for almost ten months. The route's western end is the Kara Strait.

Roald Amundsen made the first full transit of the Northwest Passage in which small vessel?

Gjøa was a 47-ton sloop with a crew of six. Two winters iced in on King William Island taught Amundsen the Inuit's fur clothing and dog sledding, the skills that later took him first to the South Pole.

In 1926 Amundsen became the first verified visitor to the North Pole aboard which airship?

Norge was built in Italy and flown by its designer, Umberto Nobile, from Svalbard across the pole to Alaska. In 1928 Amundsen vanished while flying to the rescue of Nobile, whose next airship had crashed on the ice.

Which US Navy submarine crossed beneath the North Pole on 3 August 1958?

USS Nautilus was the world's first nuclear-powered submarine, and the trip was codenamed Operation Sunshine. Her first try that June was turned back by deep ice in the Chukchi Sea, so she withdrew to Pearl Harbor to wait.

What is the nearest permanently inhabited place to the North Pole?

Alert, a Canadian military and weather station on Ellesmere Island, lies 817 km from the pole. Nobody settles there for good: its staff fly in for tours of up to six months.

Which speck of land off Greenland's north coast is the northernmost undisputed land on Earth?

Kaffeklubben Island is Danish for Coffee Club Island, a bare stretch of gravel. In 2023 scientists found the world's northernmost plant there, a moss growing just north of an Arctic poppy.

Quttinirpaaq, the Inuktitut name of Canada's northernmost national park, translates as what?

Top of the world suits Canada's most northerly park, which took its Inuit name in 1999, the year Nunavut was created. It is also the country's second largest, a land of peaks, ice fields and glaciers.

Among the world's five oceans, the Arctic Ocean is the smallest and the what?

Shallowest, at about a kilometre deep on average, and the least salty as well. Little water evaporates in the cold, while rivers keep pouring fresh water in.

What do the indigenous people of Europe's far north call their homeland, which outsiders long knew as Lapland?

Sápmi is the Sámi people's own name for a land split among four countries. They elect their own parliaments in Norway, Sweden and Finland, and the old outsiders' word for them, Lapps, is now considered a slur.

To count as permafrost, ground must stay below 0 °C for at least how long?

Two years is all the definition asks, however permanent the name sounds. In practice much of it has stayed frozen for many thousands of years, and the deepest reaches about 1,500 m down.

In the Arctic, auroras are known by which Latin name?

Aurora borealis means northern dawn. The glow comes from charged particles from the Sun striking the upper air, where oxygen shines green and red.

Which member of Robert Peary's 1909 expedition said he reached their claimed North Pole ahead of Peary himself?

Matthew Henson, an African American who had gone north with Peary since 1891, made the last dash with him and four Inuit men. He spent decades as a customs clerk, but in 1988 was reburied with honours at Arlington, near Peary.