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Antarctica Day
“Antarctica. You know, that giant continent at the bottom of the earth that’s ruled by penguins and seals.”
~ C.B. Cook, Twinepathy
This tartan honors both the region’s natural wonders and the legacy of exploration and survival in one of the harshest environments on Earth. The Antarctica tartan is the only tartan known to include a color-coded tribute to penguins—specifically the Emperor and King penguin. Designed to mark the centenary of Robert Falcon Scott’s 1901 expedition, it blends geographical, botanical, and zoological references in its pattern and colors!
Scott’s team made several groundbreaking discoveries, including Antarctica’s only snow-free valleys, its longest river, the Emperor penguin colony at Cape Crozier, and the western-mountain route to the Polar Plateau, home of the South Pole. Antarctica’s ecosystem, shaped by extreme cold, dryness, and high UV exposure, hosts an extraordinary range of extremophiles—including eight species of penguins. Emperor penguins, the tallest and largest of them all, are also the only species to breed on the Antarctic mainland during the brutal winter.
Antarctica also hides some of the most intriguing features on the planet. Lake Vostok, a vast freshwater lake sealed off for millions of years, has yielded ancient microbe samples adapted to extreme isolation. Fossil forests show that the continent was once green and temperate, clear evidence of past warm periods. The ice sheet acts as a natural collector of meteorites, preserving space rocks that land on its pristine surface. And beneath it all lies a dramatic world of subglacial mountains—entire hidden ranges shaped long before the ice formed.
In 1959, twelve countries—many of them Cold War rivals—signed the Antarctic Treaty, setting aside the entire continent for peaceful scientific research, banning military activity, and freezing territorial claims. Today more than fifty nations have joined, making it one of the most broadly supported agreements in existence. That unusual level of international cooperation naturally invites its own questions for curious and unusually inquiring minds. Ask a penguin! 💙 🤍 🖤 💛 🧡 🐧 🐧 🐧 🧊 🇦🇶
For Antarctica Day we refer to one of several tartans which have as colour inspiration homage to penguins and other animals of the Antarctic.
The Antarctic tartan is very pointedly designed:
Colours: white represents the ice-covered continent, ice flows, and the edge of the Antarctic Ocean; grey represents outcropping rocks, seals and birds; orange represents lichen, Emperor and King penguin (head) plumage; yellow also represents penguin plumage and the summer midnight sun; black and white together depict penguins and whales; pale blue represents crevasses in the ice and shallow blue icy waters on the ice shelves, whilst dark midnight blue represents the deep Antarctic Ocean and the darkness of the Antarctic winter.
The design is based upon the Antarctic's geography: the light square of white at the edge of the sett represents the light of the Antarctic summer on the ice-covered continent. This is quartered by threads of pale blue. These represent the zero / 360, 90, 180, and 270 lines of longitude. The point where they cross represents the South Pole. Two bands of grey surrounding the white heart depicts nunataks, mountain ranges, and exposed coastal rocks. Around the coast Antarctica's life forms are found so the colours that follow in the sett, orange, yellow, black and white, represent the wealth of animal life on land and in the seas. Orange also represents the lichens that encrust the rocks. Surrounding the land, pale blue and white depict the ice shelves whilst the outside is edged by bands of midnight blue for the ocean deeps and dark winters.
Each sett is separated by a thin band of white that represents the edge of Antarctica. Where these cross, the Southern Cross is depicted. This viewed diagonally also represents the Scottish saltire, tribute that 2001 is the centenary of Scott's first expedition to the Antarctic in 1901.
The coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth was minus 128.56 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 89.2 degrees Celsius), registered on July 21, 1983, at Antarctica's Vostok station.
For more amazing facts about the penguins of the Antarctic, click the rookery.