Let's take a little imaginative trip. In your mind's eye, place yourself standing in the middle of Antarctica. You see nothing but snow and ice off into the horizon, and you're chilled by temperatures down to -60 degrees Celsius (-76 degrees Fahrenheit) that can turn the water present around your eyes, mouth, and skin into ice, change your very breath into mist, and prove deadly if you're not extremely well dressed and have equipment nearby to warm up. Nothing can live here, you think to yourself as you shiver. But as you step over a hill of ice, you see a slope down to a partially frozen ocean, its waves lapping in the distance and carrying glaciers on a slow and frigid journey into the open sea. And by the icy shores? You're shocked to witness a stunningly large population of penguins bustling around and leaping into and out of the water below.
Under (and sometimes over) the thick Antarctic sea ice, there often thrives a very highly productive ecosystem. How? The ingredients for a thriving ecosystem near the ocean's surface include abundant nutrients and sunlight near the ocean's surface. There's plenty of sunlight during summer at the poles, and combined with world-traversing ocean currents, the cold water, though near-freezing, allows for "nutrient mixing," a cycle of nutrients from deep in the ocean all the way up to the ocean's surface. This means phytoplankton--microscopic organisms--can photosynthesize and turn water, sunlight, and carbon dioxide into sugars and additional stored energy, very much like plants do. When this is easy for them, they make a lot of excess energy and grow and reproduce very fast. A happy phytoplankton population is hunted by krill, which are then snapped up by small fish, while either or both of the last two categories are eaten by larger creatures such as penguins, seals, and whales. It shouldn't be all surprising, then, that other chilly areas of the world such as the Arctic or the Pacific Ocean can show similarly successful ecosystems. So when you think an "frozen wasteland" as cold and icy as Antarctica is really empty? Keep on looking--you just might be greatly surprised at what you find.
Resources:
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/north-pole/ https://www.antarctica.gov.au/about-antarctica/geography-and-geology/geography
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