Baby, It's Cold Outside Trivia Quiz

Answer: North of the Arctic Circle, every year sees at least 24 hours of continuous sunlight and at least 24 hours of continuous night.

The Antarctic Circle is defined in much the same way, though its long night comes at the same time as the Arctic Circle's long day. (It's this long polar day that gives rise to the phrase "land of the midnight sun.") The tilt of the Earth's axis makes the long polar days and nights possible: at each solstice, one pole is tilted entirely toward the sun while the other is pointed entirely away.

Earth's axial tilt varies, in a range of a few degrees, over a 41,000-year cycle (a geological eyeblink). This change in angle means that the Arctic and Antarctic Circles are moving, too -- racing toward the poles at the breakneck speed of 15 meters (49 feet) a year. Presently, they're at a little over 66.5 degrees north and south latitude, respectively.

Answer: One: parts of Antarctica are north of the Circle.

When you're used to seeing Antarctica only at the bottom of a Mercator-projection map, it's easy to forget how big a land mass it is. It really is a continent, though, and it's bigger than either Europe or Australia. Antarctica accounts for most of the region enclosed by the Antarctic Circle, although some of that region is ocean and some of Antarctica falls outside.

By contrast, the Arctic Circle encloses mostly ocean, but passes through a whopping eight countries. Moving westward from the International Date Line, these are: Russia, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland (via Grimsey Island), Denmark (via its dependency of Greenland), Canada, and the U.S.A. (via the state of Alaska).

Answer: No: the magnetic pole moves at a rate of several kilometers a year.

The line between the Earth's two geographic poles (North and South) is the axis on which the Earth rotates. This axis wobbles a little bit, causing the geographic poles to move -- but only in a range of a few meters (several feet).

The magnetic poles, on the other hand, are defined based on the Earth's magnetic field: they're the places where the field lines point straight up (at the South Magnetic Pole) or straight down (at the North Magnetic Pole). But there's a lot of variation in the Earth's magnetic field, because of changes in the way the molten iron flows, deep within the planet -- so the magnetic poles drift. The North Magnetic Pole, which is better mapped than the South, has been clocked at 41 kilometers (25 miles) of northwest-ward motion in a single year!

Answer: After the ships in Sir James Clark Ross's polar expedition

Having acquired a taste for polar exploration on several Arctic voyages with his father, Ross arrived in the Antarctic in 1839. His ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, had been commissioned as bomb ships, and their thick hulls made them well suited to coping with Antarctica's treacherous, icy waters. They brought Ross's expedition safely around much of the Antarctic coastline, surveying and mapping; it was this group that discovered the gargantuan Ross Ice Shelf. Grateful to his ships, Ross named two volcanoes after them: active Mt. Erebus, and extinct Mt. Terror.

Sadly, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were not invincible. A few years later, they were used in Sir John Franklin's expedition to the Canadian Arctic, where every man perished (apparently due to cold and starvation).

Answer: Bering Strait

In the Ice Age, so much of the world's seawater was locked up in ice sheets and glaciers that sea level was much lower than it is today. (This is the flip side of the modern problem of global warming, where melting ice sheets make sea levels rise and coastlines flood.) As sea level fell in the last Ice Age, the shallow waters of the Bering Strait (only two meters deep in places!) receded, exposing the former sea floor. Local people, ever resourceful, came right across, and the rest is history.

Answer: South America

The name "Antarctic Peninsula" is a bit misleading, as it isn't really one continuous mass of land. Instead, it is made up of both a standard-issue peninsula and a number of island chains, all joined together by massive ice sheets (the largest of which is the Larsen Ice Shelf).

The whole thing stretches up toward Cape Horn, the southernmost tip of South America: the two continents are separated by only about a thousand miles (1600 kilometers).

Answer: The Northwest Passage

The Northwest Passage, named from the perspective of Europeans seeking westward trade routes, was a Holy Grail for explorers from the 15th century to the 19th. Portugal controlled the southeast trade routes (around the tip of Africa) while Spain controlled the southwest (around the tip of South America); this left their rivals, England and France, keen to discover another path. Numerous famed explorers tried and failed to find it, including John Cabot, Jacques Cartier, and Henry Hudson.

In 1906, Roald Amundsen became the first to sail the Northwest Passage, although his path was too shallow in places for commercial vessels. Changes in the distribution of ice packs make this route very different from season to season, but global warming may make it a viable shipping lane. This would please Canada's government, which has already claimed full sovereignty over much of the Passage.

Answer: Murmansk, Russia

Murmansk, the capital of Murmansk Oblast (an administrative district similar to a province), is a relatively new city. It was founded in 1916 to take advantage of the area's ice-free harbor, kept clear for shipping by warm ocean currents from the North Atlantic. Just off the Barents Sea, the city is home to some 330,000 people, as well as a fleet of ice-breaking vessels powered by nuclear reactors.

Answer: Onyx River

The Onyx flows only during the short Antarctic summer, of course. It carries glacial runoff to Lake Vanda. There is no snow or ice cover in this region, so the area is known as the Dry Valleys -- a slightly odd moniker for the home of Antarctica's most important river.

The wrong answer choices are also rivers in the southern hemisphere: the Darling is in Australia, the Deseado in Argentina, and the Orange in South Africa.

Answer: Seeds

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, located inside a mountain on Spitsbergen Island, opened its doors in 2008. Its goal is to serve as a backup repository for the seeds of domesticated and wild food plants. Many nations keep such seed banks themselves, but these repositories are vulnerable to wars and natural disasters, as well as to more mundane problems (like funding cuts). Svalbard makes an excellent backup, even in a global catastrophe.

It's remote -- only 2000 people live in the entire archipelago -- so it's an unlikely target for attack.

The site isn't near any seismic faults, deep layers of permafrost keep it cool, and its altitude protects it from rising sea levels. Even better, it's funded from multiple sources -- both governments and philanthropic organizations.