Polar Regions

So, when we talk about the Polar Regions, just to clarify exactly what we mean. And we have first of all the Arctic at the top of the earth and the Antarctic at the bottom, and so the Arctic was named after the Greek word for bear. Now surprisingly it's not after the polar bears that live in the Antarctic or live in the Arctic and based on it's after the little and great bear constellations that can be seen in the sky. Now the Greeks also hypothesize that there would be the Anti-arctic, which is how we get the name Antarctica and of course it wasn't discovered until much later on. Now these regions are opposite in many ways other than just their names and their location on the globe, and so if we look at the arctic first of all, and the Arctic is actually ocean surrounded by land, and so you can see here this is the UK down here and this kind of Russia and then America and Canada around here, and so there is a bit of land cover in our ice on the top in the Arctic, which is Greenland here and Macie all this area here. Surprisingly a lot of people don't realize that this isn't actually land. The North Pole isn't on land. It's just one big ocean.