National Science Foundation - Where Discoveries Begin

Arctic and Antarctic
At a glance, Earth's polar regions seem like mirror images, located some 12,000 miles apart. Both are vast, icy regions covering opposite ends of the globe. Closer examination reveals differences as well as similarities.

To the south, the continent of Antarctica is roughly the size of the United States and Mexico combined. It is depressed into the Earth's crust by a sheet of ice roughly 2 miles thick. NSF's Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station lies deep in the Antarctic interior, roughly 900 miles from the next nearest U.S. station, McMurdo, on Ross Island, near the Antarctic Coast. A few thousand scientists and support personnel, the continent's recent and only human inhabitants, live at a handful of research stations across the continent, of which the U.S. runs three, including Palmer Station. None live there permanently.

To the north, the Arctic Circle defines the area surrounding the North Pole, a point in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. The region inside the Arctic Circle covers vast swathes of the northern reaches of Canada, Greenland, Scandinavia and Russia. The Arctic is home to human populations of varied size and complexity. There, scientists have begun collaborating with indigenous people, who have lived and subsisted in the region for millennia, on observations of sea-ice thickness, animal populations and other natural factors to build a holistic view of the Arctic climate, past and present.

The Expedition Begins

 

Because the ice that covers the Arctic Ocean and the North Pole breaks up and re-forms with the seasons, much of the northern Arctic is inaccessible to most scientists for many months.

NSF's Office of Polar Programs supports comprehensive research programs in both the Arctic and the Antarctic.

The Antarctic, uniquely in the world, is a continent set aside by treaty purely for science. NSF has been designated by a Presidential Memorandum, subsequently affirmed in official documents, as the manager of the U.S. Antarctic Program, the nation's program of research in Antarctica.

The Antarctic Program provides grants to scientists across the U.S. to carry out research on the continent and in the Southern Ocean; manages three year-round stations—McMurdo, Amundsen-Scott South Pole and Palmer—on the continent; and, in partnership with the U.S. military and private contractors, provides the logistical support that makes science possible in this harsh environment.

Several of NSF's Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites are located in the polar regions, including the Palmer and Dry Valleys LTERs in the Antarctic and the Arctic and Beaufort Lagoon LTERs in Alaska.

In the Arctic, OPP supports research carried out in Alaska, Greenland, Russia and in the seas off Alaska and the Arctic Ocean.