The Great White Bear by Kieran Mulvaney Read Free Book Online Page B

that Earth was spherical, not flat. They noticed that Earth tilted in relation to the sun, offering first one hemisphere and then the other over the course of the year, and deduced that, because of that tilt, there had to be a line beyond which the sun neither set at the height of summer nor rose in midwinter. They calculated correctly that this line was 66 degrees north of the equator (and that there was an equivalent line 66 degrees south), and when they projected this line onto the celestial sphere that they imagined surrounded the earthly one, they noticed that it grazed the constellation of the Great Bear. To the Greeks, that constellation, like the species after which it was modeled, was called
Arktos,
and so the region that lay beneath it was the land of the bear,
Arktikos.
    Furthermore, the reasoning continued, if there was a land to the north that lay beneath the Great Bear, then there must also be a counterbalancing landmass to the south. And if the northern lands were
Arktikos,
then those to the south must be the opposite—
Antarktikos.
    The ability to predict the existence of the Arctic and Antarctic did not necessarily translate into an ability to portray them with any precision. Writing roughly two and a half thousand years ago, for example, the poet Pindar imagined a people called the Hyperboreans who lived "beyond the north wind." "Illnesses cannot touch them," he wrote, "nor is death preordained for this exalted race." Several hundred years afterward, the Roman geographer Pomponius Mela more accurately proposed that both the northern and southern realms were frigid, that each was flanked by a belt of more temperate climes, and that north and south were divided by an impassable torrid zone.
    (Centuries later, this latter view and its subsequent variations ran headlong into Christian orthodoxy. If the southern land were unreachable because of the torrid zone, then its inhabitants could not be the descendants of Adam and Eve. Besides, Christ had commanded the Apostles to "go into all the world, and preach the gospel unto every creature"; the Bible did not record that they had visited this land;
therefore they had not been there; therefore it couldn't exist; therefore the world must not be spherical; therefore it must be flat.)
    The Arctic and Antarctic have many things in common, not least the fact that, as Pomponius Mela correctly surmised, they are both, relative to the rest of the surface of the Earth, very cold—although the Antarctic is more so than the Arctic. Both, as also predicted, have periods of uninterrupted daylight in summer and seemingly endless night in winter. Each region surrounds its respective geographic pole: the North Pole in the Arctic, the South in the Antarctic.
    But there are also differences.
    Antarctica is a frozen continent in the Southern Hemisphere, surrounded by ocean. The Arctic is the northernmost ocean, encircled by land. Both regions boast whales and seals in their waters, but Antarctica and its environs have penguins, and the Arctic does not.
    And the Arctic, unlike the Antarctic, has polar bears.
    Polar bears are found only in the north, penguins only in the south; cartoons and Christmas cards notwithstanding, the paths of the two do not cross. Should a population of polar bears be picked up by a panhemispheric tornado and deposited on Antarctica, their stay would assuredly be brief; they would likely rampage through the resident seal and penguin populations during the summer but find themselves bereft of sustenance during the long, hostile Antarctic winter—when seals retreat to the sea and the coasts of sub-Antarctic islands and temperatures plunge to levels that would challenge even this hardiest of predators.
    Defining the Antarctic is somewhat easier than delineating the Arctic. The conventionally acknowledged northern limit of the former is the Antarctic Convergence, where the cold waters of the Southern Ocean clash with warmer seas farther north and