5 Things People Often Get Wrong About the Arctic

People often confuse the Arctic with Antarctica. Both are cold and icy, but that’s basically where the similarities end. 

The Arctic is a region at the top of Earth consisting of an ocean—the Arctic Ocean—more or less surrounded by land. The Antarctic is at the bottom of Earth and is a continent surrounded by ocean. People have lived in the Arctic for a long time, while Antarctica has no native human population. Both regions have 24-hour daylight in summer and 24-hour darkness in winter, but these seasons are at opposite times of the year.

Let’s correct some more misconceptions about the Arctic, from its wildly varying temperatures to its complete lack of a certain bird, as adapted from the above episode of Misconceptions on YouTube. 

1. Misconception: You can see penguins in the Arctic.
2. Misconception: Almost no one lives in the Arctic.
3. Misconception: It’s always cold in the Arctic.
4. Misconception: We definitely know who “discovered” the North Pole.
5. Misconception: The North Pole belongs to … somebody.

Misconception: You can see penguins in the Arctic.

You will not find wild polar bears in the Southern Hemisphere, but you will see tons of penguins. Now, let’s flip the script: You will see a lot of polar bears in the Arctic, but definitely no penguins. 

That is not to say that there aren’t any birds in the Arctic. The polar region is actually one of the world’s biggest breeding areas for birds. Many species migrate huge distances to the Arctic each year to lay eggs and raise their young over the summer. The 24/7 sunlight allows plants to flower and melts the winter’s snow into countless freshwater pools—the perfect breeding ground for mosquitos. With abundant insects, berries, seeds, and fish available to eat, the boggy tundra becomes one big bird buffet. The Arctic tern actually migrates all the way from Antarctica each year because summer in the Arctic is so awesome.

Misconception: Almost no one lives in the Arctic.

It’s true that vast areas of the Arctic are nearly empty of people. Take Greenland. Fewer than 60,000 people live within its 836,300 square miles, with about a third of the population concentrated in its capital city, Nuuk. 

But the Arctic is far from uninhabited. People have lived in its chilly embrace for thousands of years. A group known as Ancient North Siberians lived in the Russian Arctic at least 31,000 years ago. Fast-forward several millennia. In 2004, it was estimated the Arctic was home to about 4 million people across eight countries. 

The largest Arctic cities are Murmansk, Russia, with about 270,000 people; Norilsk, Russia, with 184,000, and Tromsø, Norway, with 78,000. There are dozens of smaller towns and villages. About 10 percent of the Arctic population is Indigenous, belonging to numerous cultures and speaking multiple languages.

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Misconception: It’s always cold in the Arctic.

The Arctic has seasonal temperature changes like the rest of the world. Most Arctic settlements are located on seacoasts, and coastal towns tend to have more moderate average temperatures because they are mitigated by the high heat capacity of the oceans. Longyearbyen, the largest town in Svalbard, sits on the edge of a huge fjord and counts just three seasons of the year: Sunny winter, polar summer, and northern lights winter. Yes, two out of three of those are winter. But, in polar summer, the average temp rises to about 45° F, which is warm enough to melt winter’s snow and allow flowers to bloom. Its coldest month is February, when the average high is about 9 degrees, give or take.

Inland areas without the mitigating oceans tend to see bigger swings between extreme summer and winter temps. Fairbanks, Alaska, which is slightly outside the Arctic Circle and hundreds of miles from any ocean, sees July highs around 76 degrees and January highs just below zero; Norilsk in Siberia has July highs of 67 degrees and January highs around -12. 

In recent years, climate change has fueled unprecedented heatwaves across the polar region, and nowhere is the trend more shocking than in Verkhoyansk, Russia. The small town carries the distinction of being one of the coldest inhabited places on Earth as well as one of the hottest places in the Arctic. Its average high in July is 71 degrees, and in January it plunges to -44. But even that deep freeze does not prevent summer heat spikes. On June 20, 2020, the mercury hit 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit, setting an Arctic-wide record that still stands.

Verkhoyansk now holds another superlative. When its high temp record was paired with its recorded low of -90 in February 1892, the town achieved the “greatest recorded temperature range in a single location over time” at 190.4 degrees.

Misconception: We definitely know who “discovered” the North Pole.

First, a little mini-misconception. There are actually multiple North Poles—if you’ve ever done a lot of navigation with a compass you know that the compass and your map usually have very different ideas of where north is. We’re specifically talking about the Geographic North Pole, which is the point where the axis of rotation intersects the surface.

By the end of the 19th century, the age of European exploration was coming to an end, and the North Pole was one of last prizes to be had. Scores of expeditions from British, American, Norwegian, Swedish, and even Italian adventurers attempted to reach it, without success. By 1908, two American rivals, Frederick Cook and Robert Peary, were well on their separate ways toward the Pole.

Nothing was heard of their progress in the race until September 1, 1909, when Cook sent a telegram from the Shetland Islands saying he had reached the North Pole on April 21, 1908. Throngs of reporters and fans hailed Cook as a hero when he finally sailed into Copenhagen’s harbor on September 4. Headlines around the world blared his accomplishment.

All of this was largely unknown to Robert Peary. In his diary, Peary wrote that he reached the North Pole on April 6, 1909. When he finally walked into a telegraph office in Labrador on September 5, ready to tell the world of his triumph, he learned Cook had beaten him by almost a year.

Peary was not one to admit defeat. He attacked Cook—who had once served as Peary’s surgeon on an earlier expedition—as a straight-up liar. And Cook left a good chunk of his evidence in Greenland; conveniently, Peary had refused to carry Cook’s evidence back to the U.S. when he stopped in Greenland on his way home, even before he knew Cook had beaten him to the punch—and they were eventually lost. Cook did submit the records he had to the University of Copenhagen, but they determined they didn’t provide any actual proof that Cook reached the pole. Peary was also backed by the National Geographic Society, and most Americans came to believe Peary’s account over Cook’s.

Modern explorers have thoroughly examined each man’s case, and some have even attempted to recreate Peary’s journey as he reported it. Most now think that Peary could not have reached the Pole because he would have had to travel many more miles per day than seemed possible—and he was prone to navigational miscalculations. Historians have also concluded that Cook couldn’t have made it, either. 

If both are discounted, then the first becomes a matter of definition. In 1926, Richard Byrd claimed to have flown over the North Pole, but there are serious doubts. That same year a group of people including Roald Amundsen flew over the pole in an airship, which is pretty uncontested. If you don’t like just flying over, it’s widely agreed that in 1948 a Soviet plane landed at the North Pole and some people walked around. If you think an explorer actually needs to travel over land or over ice, then your best bet would probably be Ralph Plaisted's expedition in 1968. But the question of who was really first at the Pole may never be answered.

Misconception: The North Pole belongs to … somebody.

Here’s a quick geography review. Eight countries have territories lying within the Arctic Circle. Five of these—Canada, Russia, the U.S. (via Alaska), Denmark (via Greenland), and Norway (via Svalbard)—border the Arctic Ocean. Each of the five has a territorial sea extending 12 nautical miles from its coastline, and an Exclusive Economic Zone extending up to 200 nautical miles. In the Arctic Ocean, though, none of these exclusive zones overlaps the North Pole, so it lies in international waters.

That hasn’t stopped countries from trying to claim it as their own territory. In 2007, a submarine planted a small Russian flag on the seabed of the North Pole, symbolically taking possession of the spot. But Denmark and Canada have also staked claims on it.

Each claim is based on the Lomonosov Ridge, an otherwise inconsequential string of underwater mountains stretching across the Arctic Ocean seabed from Greenland to Russia and near the Pole. It’s made of Earth’s continental crust, not oceanic crust—so the continent to which the crust belongs, theoretically, might own the Lomonosov Ridge. It gets a little complicated, but in maritime law there’s a concept called “the Extended Continental Shelf.” Normally, countries are given the rights to seabed resources in their Exclusive Economic Zone, but if you can prove your continental crust extends farther, you might be able to get more seabed—and with it potential for things like oil and just the national pride of owning the North Pole. The problem is figuring out whose crust it is.

By 2019, Russia had claimed a little over 463,000 square miles of the Arctic, and increased it by roughly 272,000 square miles in 2021 based on additional scientific data. The area now covers the Arctic Ocean, including the North Pole, all the way to Canada’s and Greenland’s exclusive economic zones and overlapping both of those countries’ claims to the Pole. Denmark/Greenland claims nearly 346,000 square miles, including the Pole, while Canada claims much of the Arctic Ocean basin to the edge of Russia’s exclusive zone. 

All of these petitions are being reviewed by the UN’s Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, which examines these things. But its role is purely scientific, and they can’t determine boundaries of overlapping claims. That usually has to be done through diplomacy. Until then, the North Pole will probably remain a frosty free-for-all.