Region · the poles
The Most Extraordinary Polar Places on Earth
5 places · every one real, mapped, and worth the trip
The polar regions are not one landscape but two very different ones. The Arctic is an ocean surrounded by land, so it has coasts, communities and land mammals that walk in from the south. Antarctica is land surrounded by ocean, isolated by a circumpolar current, and almost entirely buried under ice.
This is our editors' pick of the polar places in the atlas so far. It is deliberately short — polar travel is expensive, tightly regulated and seasonally narrow, and we would rather cover five places properly than pad the list. Each entry states the honest season and what it actually takes to get there.
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Antarctic Peninsula The accessible Antarctic
Antarctic Peninsula
The finger of land reaching north toward South America, and the only part of the continent most visitors ever see — reached across the Drake Passage in the austral summer.
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McMurdo Dry Valleys The driest place on Earth
Victoria Land, Antarctica
Around 4,500 square kilometres of bare rock and gravel with no ice sheet on top, where no significant precipitation has fallen for close to two million years.
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South Georgia The wildlife island
South Georgia, South Atlantic
A sub-Antarctic island whose beaches hold king penguin colonies and elephant seals in numbers that are difficult to believe until you see them.
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Svalbard The Arctic archipelago
Svalbard archipelago, Arctic Ocean
Norwegian islands deep inside the Arctic, with glaciers reaching the sea, polar bears on the pack ice, and months of continuous daylight or darkness.
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Churchill Where the bears wait
Churchill, Manitoba, western Hudson Bay, Canada
The Hudson Bay coast where roughly 900 polar bears gather each autumn, held ashore until the bay freezes and they can hunt seals again.
Polar seasons are narrow and inflexible. Antarctic and sub-Antarctic voyages run in the austral summer, roughly November to March; Svalbard's ship season is the northern summer; and Churchill's bears gather in October and November while its belugas arrive in July. Nothing here is a spontaneous trip — most of these need booking many months ahead, and weather cancels landings routinely.
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