This delineation was originally established based on the orientation of the sun. On world maps the Polar Circles are generally marked by dashed lines at 66° 33' north and south latitude. The diameter of each region is 5204 kilometres because both the Arctic and Antarctic Circles maintain consistent distances of 2602 kilometres from their respective geographic poles, which are not to be confused with the Earth’s wandering magnetic poles. The southern polar region, called the Antarctic, contains the continent of Antarctica and areas of the surrounding Southern Ocean. The northern polar region, called the Arctic, encompasses the Arctic Ocean and a portion of some surrounding land masses. The regions of the Earth designated as polar are those areas located between the North or South Pole and the Arctic or Antarctic Circles, respectively. The competition for raw materials and shipping routes there has already been underway for some time. In the Arctic, on the other hand, the five bordering states alone will determine what happens. South of the 60th parallel, the Antarctic Treaty establishes strict limits for the major economic players. The number of tourists in the two polar regions is therefore increasing, just as economic interest in the exploitation of polar resources is growing. Both in the Arctic and the Antarctic, animals and plants have developed sophisticated survival strategies and impres- sive species diversity that people want to see for themselves. That was 16 per cent more than the previous summer.īut the fascination of the polar regions also partly reflects the fact that there is nowhere else in the world where ice, snow, biting cold and the long darkness of the polar nights present such huge challenges for life. 42,000 cruise tourists visited Antarctica during the Antarctic summer of 2017/2018. 1.1 > A tourist ship on the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. Weather services and scientists therefore follow the events at high latitudesclosely in real time – at least where satellites and measuring networks have made observations possible. Since the middle of the 20th century it has been warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the Earth, and is thus seen as an early warning sign for climate change. Today, the impacts of global climate change are more clearly observed in the polar regions than anywhere else, and this is particularly true for the Arctic. The melting of these two ice covers would raise water levels worldwide by around 70 metres, and long stretches of the Earth’s coastlines would be flooded. If they melt, global sea level will rise. Between them they contain 99 per cent of the ice on the Earth. This is especially true for the large ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. Small changes in their complex structures can have far-reaching consequences. There are still no answers to many fundamental scientific questions such as: What exactly is hidden beneath the kilometre-thick ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica? How did the Arctic Ocean originate?īesides fascination, the world also views the polar regions with concern because, acting as cooling chambers, they play a crucial role in the planet’s climate system and significantly impact the patterns of global air-mass and ocean circulation. Most of the practically inaccessible ice and snow regions today are as yet unexplored. There are hardly any other natural landscapes that fascinate mankind as much as the distant land and marine regions of the Arctic and Antarctic. The 21st century is the century of the polar regions.
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