February 12 Are we there yet? Water water water everywhere.

We were all at sea for the next 5 days!! bound for distant southern shores so here’s a few bits of info to go on with (of course we will be back by the time I post this, however .... )
Some people confuse the Arctic and the Antarctic - or perhaps it’s simply the names they confuse because they sound alike. The locations are certainly very different in so many ways.

The word Arctic comes from the Greek word arktikos, ‘near the Bear, northern’. The name refers to either one or other of the bear constellations prominent in the northern sky. Antarctica comes from the Greek word antarktiké  meaning ‘opposite to the north’. I think the Antarctic deserves its own name, distinct and indicative of the huge land mass that it is, rather than being simply antipodal to the Arctic.
Unlike the Arctic, which is a region with relatively sparse land mass, Antarctica covers 14 million square km (Australia is 6.7 million square km).  If we want to talk about the ‘land down under’, this truly is it.
Unlike the Arctic, in Antarctica there is little vegetation other than moss, lichen, some fungi and algae most of which are phytoplankton. Yet once there was lush life on the land mass we now call Antarctica. It was once warm and forested; Shackleton found coal seams as well as fossilised wood and leaves. And since then the list of fossil finds in Antarctica has been dated to species living between 40 and 100 million years ago when Antarctica was pretty much in the same location, relative to the equator, as it is today. It is endlessly fascinating - to me!
And then there’s the wildlife - why aren’t there penguins in the Arctic or polar bears in the Antarctic? Distance and proximity - amongst other factors. Terrestrial animals on Antarctica are predominantly insects, invertebrates that are able to survive the extreme cold because they have glycerol in their body fluids - anti-freeze. On the other hand, there are oodles of marine animals and birds. Incidentally penguins are said to have been named such because of their resemblance to the great auks of the far north. In Welsh, pen - head and gywn - white. Or so the story goes.
Antarctica is also colder than the Arctic because it is covered by an ice sheet and has been for the last 15 million years. Today that ice sheet is almost 3 kilometers thick and it continues to grow. The sea ice at the North Pole is only 1-3 metres thick and is shrinking.