Saw a documentary on climate change tonite. The scientist being interviewed has recently published a book titled Arctica: The Vanishing North.
I've been calling that northern region The Arctic all my life. It seemed to make sense, since Antarctica is a continent with land underneath and deserved a formal name, but The Arctic was just a "region," surrounded by continents, but essentially open ocean with a layer of ice. Maybe 20% of the area within the Arctic Circle is land, but the rest is ocean.
The author of that book (Sebastian Copeland) makes a convincing case that The Arctic also deserves a formal name, hence Arctica. But I'm not sure if he was the first to use that name.
So I went to Ngrams and found this. Apparently, the term Arctica has been in use for some time. All the citations I checked were for species names, like Puccinellia arctica (a type of grass). But the use of Arctica to name that northern region seems to be more recent. Could this be the next "new word" in the OED?
Just wondering if any other forum members have heard or read of this alternative name for The Arctic ?
Traditionally the suffix -a is reserved for continent, a large piece that is more or less contiguous and more or less distinguished from the rest. So in that sense, when they theorize over an ancient Arctic continent, they call it Arctica. Here is one reference:
Arctica was named by Rogers 1996 because the Arctic Ocean formed by the separation of the North American and Siberian cratons.
(That sentence is not great but it got the idea)
In that sense, Arctica was a defunct continent. So Copeland's usage is different, for something of our time, a collection of non-contiguous pieces of land taken from various well defined continents.
I think that Copeland's use is not a great idea, a cause of wonderings of what is included and such.
RobertB said: Traditionally the suffix -a is reserved for continent, a large piece that is more or less contiguous and more or less distinguished from the rest.
There's a lot of exceptions to that "rule" ... Europe, Oceania, Angola etc.
Copeland is an environmentalist and a climatologist. So I guess he can be excused for wanting to use "Arctica" just to call attention to that region (where climate change is already showing significant effects). At least that's how I read his motivation for using that name.
But I agree with your assertion that it's kinda ambiguous as a "region" since parts of several nations lie above the arctic circle. I doubt we'll ever see a map with "Arctica" on it. 🙂
…Transylvania, Mesopotamia, Patagonia, Lybia, Alaska, etc. Living in a state where "The Arctic" is daily conversational fare, I would welcome a word which differentiates between the global region and the Alaskan portion. How is the inclusion of multiple nations ambiguous in defining a region? Sahara, Southeast Asia, Central Europe, Rocky Mountains, The Tropics.
Of course The Tropics and The Arctic (not Arctica) can be defined by lines of latitude, which is about as unambiguous as you can get. Less so with Rocky Mountains and Sahara. But the way Copeland used the term was to specify "the region around the North Pole that is showing significant impact from global warming." He wanted to give it a name to "personalize" it and draw attention. For reasons not yet fully understood, the interaction of ocean currents and atmospheric circulation is "magnifying" climate change in that region.
He did not define Arctica as "the part of the globe north of the arctic circle." But on rereading my first post, I guess I made it sound that way.
The "Arctica" RobertB cited is a geological structure no longer in existence. Totally different thing.