The North Pole Unwrapped - Russell Kane, Felicity Aston and Lloyd Peck

December 24, 2025·42 min·4 clips

Discover why there are at least six different North Poles on Earth, from geographic to celestial.

Ads crowd the start. Then the podcast snaps into Christmas mode, with Brian Cox and Robin Ince trading gift jokes about particle accelerators and a wished-for Hubble Space Telescope. The silliness does not really stop. It crashes straight into polar biology, where the guest describes sea spiders that reach 60 to 70 centimetres across. The room gives that the reaction it deserves. The guest adds that these giants can be 5,000 times bigger than the largest sea spiders in temperate latitudes. Good news, sort of: they are not much of a biting threat. They move so slowly that getting bitten means putting a hand under the mouth and leaving it there for three or four hours. Of course, someone turns that into an expedition joke. The science then shifts from comic horror to why Arctic oceans allow animals to get this large. Cold water changes the maths. In high polar oceans, sea temperature stays below zero, and colder water holds more oxygen. The guest keeps the chemistry simple. Slower water molecules leave wider gaps, so polar seawater can hold nearly twice as much oxygen as tropical seawater. That is only half the trick. These animals are cold-blooded, so their body temperature follows the freezing world around them instead of fighting it. Their running costs drop hard. The guest says their respiration and energy needs can be 25 to 30 times lower than comparable animals in the tropics. Twice the oxygen, far less demand. That lets tissues get supplied across longer distances, giving the animals room to grow into ridiculous polar forms. Then comes the naive question everyone wants answered. If their bodies match water below freezing, why do they not freeze? The guest says that usually takes an hour with undergraduates. The answer begins with living cells needing to stay liquid, plus antifreeze proteins and glycoproteins in polar fish, before the clip cuts away. It leaves the show right where it likes to sit: half in the cold, half in the joke.

As heard by us

A festive science panel on sea spiders, frozen seas, and the odd arithmetic of life at the poles.

Brian Cox and Robin Inks open with familiar banter, and the Christmas Day Infinite Monkey Cage episode quickly settles into a chat about polar seas, sea spiders, seawater that stays below zero, and the chemistry that lets polar animals get by.

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Why you'd press play

Christmas-day banter that slides into a polar biology detour.

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