Arctic

The Greenland shark is the longest-living vertebrate. In 2016, radiocarbon dating aged one female at ~400 years; the species may reach 272–512. The secret is a metabolism crawling in the cold, deep Arctic. It takes ~150 years to mature — so one maturing today was born in the 1600s.

A camel's hump stores fat, not water — and evolved for the Arctic, not the desert. 3.5 million years ago, ancestors in Arctic Canada grew fat-storing humps to survive winters. When they migrated south, the hump proved equally useful in the desert.

The world's first sunglasses were invented about 2,000 years ago by Arctic indigenous people. They carved animal bones or ivory to fit the face with thin slits, preventing snow blindness from UV rays reflected off the snow.