POLAR REGIONS. – GEOGRAPHY – This term denotes the complex of continental or insular territories that extend into the regions near the Poles. While, however, in the northern ice cap, which forms a vast maritime basin (Arctic Ocean: 14.2 million sq. km.), they consist entirely of islands, the largest of which is Greenland, which with Cape Morris Jesup extends to 83° 40’ N. (the northernmost point of the peri-Arctic landmasses), the South Pole is occupied by a vast continental landmass (13.2 million sq. km.) that extends beyond the Antarctic Circle, reaching 63° 30’ S. in Graham Land. The islands here are few and far between, scattered across an even more extensive liquid surface (Southern Ocean: 20.4 million sq. km.).
Of the Arctic islands (246.5 thousand sq. km.), the largest (163.5 thousand sq. km.) belong to the European sector, including Spitzbergen, Novaya Zemlya, and Nansen Land; the first are a Norwegian possession (forming the Svalbard Prefecture), notable for their economic value (fishing, and especially coal mining) and because they are permanently inhabited (1,000–1,500 souls); the latter belong to the USSR. All the islands of the Asian sector (Severnaya Zemlya, New Siberia, Wrangel, etc.; totaling 8 thousand sq. km.) also belong to the USSR; they are mostly uninhabited but have recently assumed special importance due to their position along the Northeast Maritime Route, which the Soviet Union has sought to organize into a regular commercial traffic route. In the American sector, the Arctic territories include all of Greenland (2.2 million sq. km.) and the Canadian archipelagos (13 million sq. km.), still of little economic value but also subject to increasingly thorough studies and research due to their presumed and confirmed mineral resources and their strategic importance.
Antarctica appears to consist of a vast plateau, averaging over 2,000 m. in elevation, still almost entirely unknown, which seems to rest to the west (Ross Sea) on a series of mountain ranges, some exceeding 4,000 m. in height (6,100 m. in the American sector), believed to connect the South American archipelago (Graham Land) to New Zealand. The entire region is covered by a thick ice sheet; immense glaciers descend from the plateau toward its margins and, upon melting, form a continuous ice shelf that ends in the long (600 km.) wall where it meets the sea. Some of these glaciers extend into the sea, forming the so-called ice barriers: the largest, the Ross Ice Shelf, alone covers half a million sq. km. The polar pack ice, finally, is much more extensive here than in the Arctic, extending between 60° and 50° S. The climate is extremely harsh, certainly the coldest on Earth. Given the average annual temperatures (-25°) and absolute minima (-80°), the frequency and violence of hurricanes and winds, and the fact that the permanent snow line is here (and only here) at sea level, one may say that Antarctica is always in a state of winter, and a terrible winter at that. Vegetation and fauna are almost entirely absent in the interior; in the narrow ice-free coastal strip, only mosses and lichens grow where the soil is free of snow, and seals, leopards, and sea elephants, penguins, petrels, and gulls live. Despite this, although permanent human settlements are impossible everywhere, the importance assumed by the peripheral seas in the hunting of marine mammals (whales, baleen whales, sperm whales), the convenience of exploiting the continent’s strategic and commercial position (air bases), and the hope of exploiting its presumed or confirmed mineral reserves (coal, radioactive rocks?), have long led to a political division of Antarctica into sectors (thus delimited by meridians), which follow in this order (longitude from Greenwich): 1) Norwegian (20° W–45° E; from Coats Land to Queen Maud Land; plus Bouvet Island and Peter I Island; 2.5 million sq. km.); 2) Australian (45°–136° and 142°–160° E, south of 60°; also called Eastern Antarctica or the Wilkes–Underby complex; 4.5 million sq. km.); 3) French, or Adélie Land: 136°–142° E, with the Kerguelen Islands, Crozet Archipelago, McDonald Islands, Heard Island, St. Paul Island, and New Amsterdam Island (370 thousand sq. km., administratively dependent on the Governor of Madagascar); 4) New Zealand or Ross Dependency: 160° E–150° W, always south of 60°; including, among other areas, the entire Ross Sea (2 million sq. km.); 5) American: 150°–80° W, in the so-called Pacific Quadrant (1.8 million sq. km.); 6) British: 80°–20° W, south of 58°, between 80° and 50°; for the rest, south of 50°, including Graham Land, the South Shetland Islands, the South Orkney Islands, the South Sandwich Islands, and South Georgia (8.5 million sq. km., administratively dependent on the Falkland Islands; while the Tristan da Cunha Islands, Gough Island, and nearby islets are aggregated to the island of St. Helena). This partition has, however, given rise to numerous disputes; to the original claimants, others have been added (not excluding Germany, which claims part of the Norwegian sector), among which Argentina and Chile appear most directly interested, if only due to their geographical position, in gaining a foothold in the British sector. Argentina has already established a maritime base in Scotia Bay (South Orkney Island) and two meteorological stations on Melchior Island (off the west coast of Graham Land) and at Port Foster, in Deception Island, while Chile, for its part, had as early as February 1948 established its own settlement (Soberanía) on Greenwich Island, also in the Graham Land sector. Argentina claims the territory between 25° and 74° W, south of 60°; Chile claims that between 53° and 90° W.
As for the two Poles, it should be noted that the North Pole coincides with a point in the Arctic Ocean 2,743 m. deep; the South Pole coincides with a point on the plateau elevated 2,765 m.
Explorations. Among the various regions of the Earth, the polar regions were the last to be known to man; their exploration continues even now, and at an ever-increasing pace, due to their enormous strategic and also economic importance, which they have suddenly acquired.
The exploration of the Arctic lands dates back to the Middle Ages, when the Norsemen discovered and colonized Iceland and Greenland; before then, there were only legends of the Hyperborean Sea and of Ultima Thule, the solitary island constantly bathed in sunlight. In the 16th century, the numerous attempts made to find a Northeast and Northwest Passage, from Europe and from North America respectively toward East Asia, inadvertently led to the knowledge, albeit superficial, of many Arctic lands (Novaya Zemlya, Svalbard, Bear Island, part of the American Arctic archipelago): Barents, Frobisher, Davis, Hudson, Baffin, and others contributed to this. After two centuries of stagnation, explorations resumed in 1818 with Ross and Parry (to the latter of whom we owe the first attempt to reach the Pole) and were not always successful (it suffices to recall the mysterious fate of Franklin). In 1850, Collinson and McClure discovered the Northwest Passage; in the following years, the American Arctic world was almost entirely explored by the English and Americans.
Polar Lands – Preparations for the Danish Arctic expedition (1605–20). Engraving from *Natavia Septentrionalis*, Copenhagen 1624.
The first crossing to the NE was accomplished in 1878 by Nordenskiöld and the Italian Bove. Other fruitful expeditions were those of Nansen (1893–96), the Duke of the Abruzzi (1899), Sverdrup (1898–1902), Amundsen (1903–1906), and the Canadian Arctic Expedition (1903–10). It was only at the beginning of the 20th century, however, that the non-existence of an extensive landmass, whether continental or insular, around the Pole was proven. Exploration of Greenland, in particular, is owed above all to Jensen, Nansen, De Quervain, Nordenskiöld, Rasmussen, Peary, Kock, and Wegener, the last of whom lost his life there in 1931.
The principal expeditions toward the North Pole, which had been attempted since 1773, included, besides those already mentioned of Nansen and the Duke of the Abruzzi, those of Peary—who has the glory of having reached it first by land on 6 April 1909—Byrd (by air in 1926), Amundsen-Nobile (1926), Wilkins (1927), Nobile (1928), and the airship *Conte di Zeppelin* (1931). As for the enterprise of General U. Nobile, it is worth recalling that he received, through Cardinal Tosi, Archbishop of Milan, from Pius XI a cross with an inscription dictated by the Pope himself, to be cast upon the North Pole. This took place on 24 May 1928. The advances made by aviation have subsequently led to the almost total conquest of the Arctic lands. In the last ten years, American, Russian, and British aircraft have flown over, in every direction, much of the land and sea spaces north of the Arctic Circle. Particularly noteworthy are the modern, well-equipped military expeditions, both overland (including the American one of 1946, called *Musk Ox*, and the Danish one of 1947 in Peary Land, the northernmost in the world) and maritime (among which should be mentioned that of the U.S. aircraft carrier *Midway* in Baffin Bay).
The history of Antarctic exploration is brief and recent. The earliest voyages, from that of Tasman to that of Cook, gradually dispelled the hypothesis of a southern continent, which 16th-century cartography, following Hipparchus, Marinus, and Ptolemy, had accepted, even lowering the equatorial boundary of such a continent to latitudes near 50°. Captain Cook inaugurated modern exploration: in his three voyages between 1772 and 1775 he proved the non-existence of the continent at low latitudes and the isolation of New Zealand, the Kerguelen Islands, Bouvet, and South Georgia. The second circumnavigation of the Antarctic ice sheet, after Cook’s, was carried out by Bellingshausen (1819), the third by Biscoe (1830), to whom is owed the first discovery of continental land in Antarctica, namely Enderby Land. From 1838, government and scientific society initiatives followed the research of whalers: noteworthy are the voyages of d’Urville, Wilkes, and especially James Ross, who explored the sea that now bears his name, discovering Victoria Land and the two volcanoes Erebus and Terror. Toward the end of the last century, with the expeditions of the *Belgica* and the *Southern Cross*, the period of wintering-over within the ice began; among these stand out those of Drygalski, Scott, and Nordenskiöld. After an initial attempt by Shackleton (1909), the South Pole was reached on 14 December 1911 by Amundsen and on 18 January 1912 by Scott, who perished on the return journey. The expeditions of Shackleton, Larsen, and Mawson in the following years confirmed the continuity of the continent from Victoria Land to the Weddell Sea, along the quadrant known as Wilkes Land and Enderby Land. Aerial reconnaissance from land bases was then carried out by Byrd and Wilkins; the former crossed the entire continent in 1929, flying over the Pole. Subsequently, important observations were made from aircraft supported by ships, covering ever-smaller territories, thus deepening knowledge in the various sectors already roughly explored by the first heroic pioneers. Graham Land was thus studied by Rymill (1934–37), Ellsworth (1938), Byrd (1939–41), Ronne (1946–48), and some British meteorologists (1947–48). At the beginning of 1947, Admiral Byrd— the only man besides Amundsen to have seen both Poles—organized a new and grand expedition, in which 11 ships and 4,000 men participated, equipped with modern means, including amphibious tractors, automobiles, and aircraft. On that occasion, an area larger than half of the United States and 6,000 km of coastline were explored by air, and the Pole was again overflown.
Antarctica, however, remains in general a terra incognita; only its broad outlines are known, and even these vaguely (it has not yet been established, for example, whether a channel connects the Ross Sea to the Weddell Sea). The best-known areas at present are Graham Land and the Ross Sea.