Polar ice can be found at the most extreme points of our planet: the Arctic, home to the often mythologised North Pole, and the southernmost point of all, the glacial and largely uninhabited continent of Antarctica.
These frozen landscapes are home to animals that we see nowhere else on earth: from minke whales to chinstrap penguins, our polar regions are a veritable wonderland of unique life forms. Those of us lucky enough to visit might catch a glimpse of this world from sailing boats as we cut a swathe through the icy waters of the Arctic north or, at the opposite end of the Earth, alongside the majestic ice sheet that makes up Antarctica.
Antarctica is made up of the largest single mass of ice on Earth, covering 14 million square kilometres in the midst of the Southern Ocean. At the South Pole, the average winter temperature is -49 degrees.
It’s hardly a secret that massive threats to this delicate environment exist. Currently around 10% of the Earth’s surface is covered by ice, although this is decreasing at an alarming rate. In fact, the polar ice caps are now melting six times faster than they were in the 1990s, with 6.4 trillion tonnes of ice being lost from Greenland and Antarctica alone between 1992 and 2017. With their home habitats diminishing, the animals that reside here are the first to feel the brunt of human-made changes to this most precarious of landscapes.
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