Jimmy Reichow, age 11, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for his question:

Does the Antarctic have Arctic tvpe icebergs?

The Arctic icebergs are mere puppies compared with the mighty monsters that drift around the Antarctic Ocean. Both types are hard masses of frozen snow, eventually doomed to melt their fresh water into the salty sea. Both are formed by the same laws of nature that govern weather, glaciers and ocean currents. But the geography of the two opposite poles makes a lot of difference to the size and shapes of their icebergs.

The bergs that drift southward from the Arctic tend to be sculptured like fantastic castles with turreted spires. They may be more than 100 feet thick and several hundred feet wide    and of course only one ninth of the ice floats above the water. But a medium sized south polar iceberg may be 100 miles long and 1,000 feet thick. A grand daddy may be as big as Wisconsin and contain enough frozen fresh water to take care of a city's needs for a whole year.

Throughout the year, both polar regions get the same amount of solar radiation. But geography makes a difference to their climates and their icebergs. The North Pole is under the Arctic Sea and world wide ocean currents make the winters milder. The South Pole is in the middle of a massive land mass and continental climates are more extreme. The Antarctic summer is too short and too cool to recover from the long bitter winter. It arrives around December for a stay of six to eight weeks and only a few days are above freezing.

Meantime, at the North Pole, December freezes a few feet of winter ice on the Arctic Ocean. When spring comes, it cracks apart and drifts away in flat topped ice floes. However, glaciers slide down the steep slopes of Greenland and other

Arctic mountains. When they meet the shore, jagged chunks of ice break off and drift away and become the grim, towering icebergs that menace the shipping lanes of the North Atlantic.

All glaciers must move because ice is a fragile mineral. When it becomes about 200 feet thick it must flow, slowly slowly in a direction dictated by geography. The Antarctic ice cap is more than a mile thick and covers five million square miles. It must creep outward from the center and heave over the coastal mountains to meet the sea.

Sometimes massive shelves of glacial ice push out over the water. They are pounded by tides, waves and winds. The ice crunches and cracks and eventually enormous slabs break free. Dozens of these gigantic icebergs drift on and on around the Antarctic Ocean.

The strong, south polar winds drive a strong current eastward, circling around the Antarctic Ocean. The enormous icebergs are swept around and around the Antarctic Circle. In the north polar region, the smaller icebergs are captured by currents that sweep them away into warmer oceans where they soon melt.