Antarctica Emoji & Symbols

The Antarctica flag emoji 🇦🇶 is not a single picture in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, A and Q (U+1F1E6 U+1F1F6), because AQ is Antarctica's code in the ISO 3166 list of countries and territories, covering everything south of 60° S. Phones and apps draw the pair as a flag; where flags are not supported, Windows' own emoji font for example, you see the letters AQ instead, but the text is the same and still shows as a flag on the reader's phone. On Discord you can also type :flag_aq:.

Antarctica belongs to no country and has no official flag, so each emoji maker had to choose a picture. Most platforms draw the design by the British vexillologist Graham Bartram from the mid-1990s: a white outline of the continent on a plain blue field, the same idea as the flag of the United Nations. Other proposals exist, one being True South, a dark blue and white design by Evan Townsend from 2018, but there is no separate emoji for any of them: 🇦🇶 is the only Antarctica flag emoji, and its look is up to the platform. 🇦🇶 also works in a bio or username as a playful flag of nowhere, or of everywhere.

Antarctica emoji: penguins, ice and the coldest place on Earth

🐧 Penguin is the emoji of Antarctica after the flag. Only two species really live on the continent itself, the emperor and the Adélie, while gentoo and chinstrap penguins breed on the Antarctic Peninsula and the islands around it. Emperor penguins breed in the middle of the dark winter: each male keeps the single egg 🥚 on his feet under a fold of skin for about two months while the females feed at sea. 🐦 and 🪽 cover the petrels, skuas and albatrosses of the Southern Ocean. Leave out 🐻‍❄️: polar bears live only in the Arctic, and penguins and polar bears never meet in the wild.

🧊 Ice and ❄️ snow are the continent itself. The ice sheet holds about 90% of the world's ice and around 70% of its fresh water 💧, and in places it is more than 4 km thick. The lowest air temperature ever measured at a weather station, −89.2 °C (−128.6 °F), was recorded at Russia's Vostok Station on 21 July 1983, which is why 🥶🌡️ and 🌬️ for the fierce winds belong here. Yet Antarctica is also the largest desert on Earth 🏜️: so little snow falls inland that parts of the McMurdo Dry Valleys are bare rock 🪨. 🌋 stands for Mount Erebus, an active volcano with a lava lake on Ross Island, and ☄️ for meteorites, which are easy to spot on the blue ice and are collected there by the thousand.

South of the Antarctic Circle the sun does not set in midsummer and does not rise in midwinter, so ☀️🌅 and 🌑🌙⭐ mark the long polar day and night, and 🌌✨ is the nearest emoji to the aurora australis, the southern lights that winter crews watch over their stations.

Antarctic wildlife emoji: seals, whales and krill

Life in Antarctica comes from the sea. 🦐 is the closest emoji to Antarctic krill, the small shrimp-like animal at the base of the food chain that whales, seals, penguins and fish all depend on. 🦭 Seal covers the Weddell seal, which lives further south than any other mammal, the leopard seal that hunts penguins, and the crabeater seal, one of the most numerous large mammals on the planet.

🐋 and 🐳 are the humpback, minke and blue whales that come south to feed each summer, and 🫍 Orca, one of the newest emoji, stands for the killer whales that hunt seals off the ice. 🐟 and 🦑 complete the Southern Ocean: icefish with clear, antifreeze-filled blood, and the colossal squid of the deep. 🐾 is for the tracks in the snow.

Expedition and research station emoji

Nobody lives in Antarctica permanently. Roughly a thousand people winter over at the research stations, and several thousand work there in summer, from countries all over the world. They arrive by 🚢 icebreaker and supply ship or by ✈️ and 🚁, and most tourists come on expedition cruise ships 🛳️ from Ushuaia in Argentina across the Drake Passage. 🧑‍🔬🔬🔭📡🛰️🧪 are for station science: ice cores that keep a record of the climate going back hundreds of thousands of years, telescopes and detectors at the South Pole, and the measurements in which British Antarctic Survey scientists discovered the ozone hole 🕳️ in 1985.

🛷🎿🧭📍 tell the story of the race to the South Pole: Roald Amundsen's Norwegian party reached it first on 14 December 1911 with ski and sledge dogs 🐕, and Robert Falcon Scott's British party arrived on 17 January 1912 and died on the way back. Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance ⚓ was crushed by the ice in 1915; he sailed a small lifeboat 🛶 to South Georgia to fetch help, and the wreck was found on the floor of the Weddell Sea in 2022. Sledge dogs have been banned from Antarctica since 1994. 🧥🧤🧣🥽🥾 are the layers everyone wears outside, and ✉️📮 the post: the restored base at Port Lockroy on the Antarctic Peninsula runs a post office that sends visitors' postcards home.

A continent for peace: the Antarctic Treaty and its flags

Seven countries claim parts of Antarctica: 🇦🇷 Argentina, 🇦🇺 Australia, 🇨🇱 Chile, 🇫🇷 France, 🇳🇿 New Zealand, 🇳🇴 Norway and 🇬🇧 the United Kingdom, and the claims of Argentina, Chile and the UK overlap on the Antarctic Peninsula. The Antarctic Treaty, signed in Washington on 1 December 1959 by twelve countries (the seven claimants plus 🇺🇸 the United States, 🇷🇺 the Soviet Union, 🇧🇪 Belgium, 🇯🇵 Japan and 🇿🇦 South Africa), freezes those claims and keeps the continent for peaceful purposes and science. 46 additional countries have acceded since 1959, and the 1991 Protocol, in force since 1998, prohibits mineral-resource activities except scientific research. That is why ☮️🕊️🤝📜 sit in this set, and why 1 December is marked as Antarctica Day.

Antarctica has no currency and no language of its own: each station uses its own country's money and language, and even its clock, so the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station keeps New Zealand time because its flights come from Christchurch. The sub-Antarctic islands have their own flag emoji: 🇹🇫 French Southern Territories, 🇬🇸 South Georgia & South Sandwich Islands, 🇭🇲 Heard & McDonald Islands and 🇧🇻 Bouvet Island. See also the collections for Argentina, Chile, Australia, New Zealand and Norway.

Antarctic holidays and how to type ° − ′ ″

The great day of the Antarctic year is Midwinter on 21 June, the shortest day: the winter crews hold a festive dinner 🍽️🎉 and stations around the continent send each other greetings, a tradition that goes back to the early expeditions. Christmas 🎄🎅 falls in high summer, the busiest time of the field season. South of the Antarctic Circle, the sun does not set at midsummer. 25 April is World Penguin Day 🐧.

To write Antarctic temperatures and coordinates you need a few text signs. The degree sign °: Alt + 0176 on Windows, Option + Shift + 8 on a Mac, ° in HTML, or long-press 0 on many phone keyboards. The true minus sign − (U+2212, −) is a little wider than the hyphen and lines up with the plus sign. The prime ′ and double prime ″ (′, ″) write minutes and seconds of latitude, as in 77° 50′ 47″ S; the South Pole is simply 90° S. ℃ and ℉ are single-character unit signs, and ❅ ❆ are text snowflakes that take the colour of the text around them.