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Antarctica - Wikipedia
"Antipodea" redirects here. For Australia and New Zealand, see Australasia. AntarcticaArea14,200,000 km25,500,000 sq mi[1]Population1,300 (winter) 5,100 (summer)Population density0.00009/km2 to 0.00036/km2 (seasonal)Countries7 territorial claimsTime zonesAll time zonesInternet TLD.aqLargest settlementsMcMurdo StationOther research stationsUN M49 code010 Antarctica ()[note 1] is Earth's southernmost and least-populated continent. Situated almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle and surrounded by the Southern Ocean (also known as the Antarctic Ocean), it contains the geographic South Pole. Antarctica is the fifth-largest continent, being about 40% larger than Europe, and has an area of 14,200,000 km2 (5,500,000 sq mi). Most of Antarctica is covered by the Antarctic ice sheet, with an average thickness of 1.9 km (1.2 mi). Antarctica is, on average, the coldest, driest, and windiest of the continents, and has the highest average elevation. It is mainly a polar desert, with annual precipitation of over 200 mm (8 in) along the coast and far less inland. About 70% of the world's freshwater reserves are frozen in Antarctica, which, if melted, would raise global sea levels by almost 60 metres (200 ft). Antarctica holds the record for the lowest measured temperature on Earth, −89.2 °C (−128.6 °F). The coastal regions can reach temperatures over 10 °C (50 °F) in the summer. Native species of animals include mites, nematodes, penguins, seals and tardigrades. Where vegetation occurs, it is mostly in the form of lichen or moss. The ice shelves of Antarctica were probably first seen in 1820, during a Russian expedition led by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev. The decades that followed saw further exploration by French, American, and British expeditions. The first confirmed landing was by a Norwegian team in 1895. In the early 20th century, there were a few expeditions into the interior of the continent. British explorers Douglas Mawson, Edgeworth David, and Alistair Mackay were the first to reach the magnetic South Pole in 1909, and the geographic South Pole was first reached in 1911 by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen.[4] Antarctica is governed by about 30 countries, all of which are parties of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty System. According to the terms of the treaty, military activity, mining, nuclear explosions, and nuclear waste disposal are all prohibited in Antarctica. Tourism, fishing and research are the main human activities in and aro...
Antarctica | History, Map, Climate, & Facts | Britannica
Top Questions What’s notable about Antarctica?What is the lowest temperature recorded in Antarctica?How big is Antarctica?Do any plants grow in Antarctica?Is tourism allowed in Antarctica? News • Antarctica, the world’s southernmost and fifth largest continent. Its landmass is almost wholly covered by a vast ice sheet.Often described as a continent of superlatives, Antarctica is not only the world’s southernmost continent. It is also the world’s highest, driest, windiest, coldest, and iciest continent. Antarctica is about 5.5 million square miles (14.2 million square km) in size, and thick ice covers about 98 percent of the land. The continent is divided into East Antarctica (which is largely composed of a high ice-covered plateau) and West Antarctica (which is largely an ice sheet covering an archipelago of mountainous islands).Lying almost concentrically around the South Pole, Antarctica’s name means “opposite to the Arctic.” It would be essentially circular except for the outflaring Antarctic Peninsula, which reaches toward the southern tip of South America (some 600 miles [970 km] away), and for two principal embayments, the Ross Sea and the Weddell Sea. These deep embayments of the Southern Ocean make the continent somewhat pear-shaped, dividing it into two unequal-sized parts. East Antarctica lies mostly in the east longitudes and is larger than West Antarctica, which lies wholly in the west longitudes. East and West Antarctica are separated by the approximately 2,100-mile- (about 3,400-km-) long Transantarctic Mountains.The continental ice sheet contains approximately 7 million cubic miles (about 29 million cubic km) of ice, representing about 90 percent of the world’s ice and 80 percent of its fresh water. Its average thickness is about 5,900 feet (1,800 metres). Ice shelves, or ice sheets floating on the sea, cover many parts of the Ross and Weddell seas. These shelves—the Ross Ice Shelf and the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf—together with other shelves around the continental margins, fringe about 45 percent of Antarctica. Around the Antarctic coast, shelves, glaciers, and ice sheets continually “calve,” or discharge, icebergs into the seas.The continent is a cold dry desert where access to water determines the abundance of life. While the terrestrial ecosystem contains more than a thousand known species of organisms, most of these are microorganisms. Maritime Antarctica—the islands and coasts—supports more life than inland Antarctica, and the surroun...
What They Found 2 Miles Under the Ice in Antarctica Changed Everything ...
WHAT THEY FOUND 2 MILES UNDER THE ICE IN ANTARCTICA CHANGED EVERYTHING. In 2016, then-Secretary of State John Kerry flew to Antarctica. Not to a research station. To a location that does not appear on any public map. He arrived on Election Day, November 8th, the single most important political day in the United States. No Secretary of State had ever visited Antarctica before. Weeks later, Buzz ...
Antarctica hides huge caches of gold, silver, copper and iron. As the ...
16 hours ago ... "The continent will still remain a very challenging environment for mineral resource extraction," he wrote, adding that the transformation of the Antarctic ...
