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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AdmundfortGeographer" data-source="post: 1934622" data-attributes="member: 4682">The thing to keep in mind is that water doesn't just end up collecting where it is temperate or cold. And ice packs on planets accumulate generally not because there is a lot of snow fall, but because there is never a season when it reaches above freezing. Meaning that an inch or two of snowfall, over tens of thousands of years, just adds up.But if you want polar seas with no water bodies between the two, you simple need to have the lowest elevations be at the poles. After all, water runs down hill. Water will enter the atmosphere by evapo-transpiration, and winds and convection could carry it anywhere else in the planet (generally) over time.True, mountains are the best way to force water out of the atmosphere into rain or snow. But it is true that water collects at the lowest elevation, this is where a planet's seas and oceans are. You could conceivably have dry seabeds in the desert portions of the planet, but you can't have these be linked to either of the polar seas. The polar seas would have to be their own basins. Otherwise, water from the polar sea would have just flowed out to where the lower latitude seas were losing water to evapotranspiration... water will level itself out.You might want to consider the polar seas being indented with peninsulas and dotted with islands. These peninsulas and islands, with modestly high hills or mountains in them, could catch rainfall from the wind coming off the water.A major issue with life at those polar latitudes will be the height of the sun in the sky. It is conceivable that some mountains could cast shadows for tens of miles for entire seasons in length. Assuming this planet you have here is like Earth in that its axis of rotation is tilted, allowing the sun to be always in the sky during one long part of the year, and the sun is set for the another long part of the year... you will have even more challenges that civlizations would have to overcome. Vegetation would have a hard time surviving there, so many civilizations would locate on the equator-facing slopes of hills or mountains just to grow crops. The civlizations would also probably grow crops like mad until the season of the sun's disappearance comes, when they would have to rely on stocks of their grown crops, and to hunt or fish exclusively.  Or maybe have to experiment in subterranean agriculture, mushrooms for example...And mountain ranges do not form according to water. Mountain ranges almost always are occuring where two tectonic plates collide (Andes and Himalayan mountains), or had collided in the past (Appalachian and Ural mountains). Another way mountains have formed is over volcanic hot spots, locations where a continuous plume of hot magma wells up from the mantle in the same place for a long time. The Hawaiian islands are such an example, Iceland is another, The Black Hills formed this way as well. Notice though, volcanic "ranges" are small in comparison to tectonic collisions. Really, about Iceland, it is forming where two tectonic plates are pulling apart, allowing magma to rise up in the gap... this is different that Hawaii's formation, which is of a tectonic plate sliding over a plume, and the plume simple pushing magma right through the plate.So, small rings of mountains is unlikely.  But maybe you should read up on the Fergana Valley in central Asia. Here is a good <a href="http://www.skiouros.net/voyages/uz2000/fergana_c.en.html" target="_blank">map</a>. A fertile valley, along the old Silk Road, in the middle of a vast arid expanse. Totally conceivable that cilizations could grow up in these kinds of locations. The Fergana Valley is situation in such a way that wind is funneled into the vast valley, where it then ends up depositing what little water there is in the air in the mountains above the valley.Anyway, just some ramblings of a geographer to consider.</blockquote>

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