The Antarctic ends at a shifting line in the sea, not at the coast
The Antarctic is more than the frozen continent. Its natural border is the Antarctic Convergence, a band of ocean roughly 32 to 48 km wide where frigid southern water meets warmer water from the north, and its position drifts with the seasons. Inside that line lies some 20 percent of the Southern Hemisphere.
Antarctica itself, about 14 million km2, is only a small part of that region. Most of the continent is buried under permanent ice and snow, with less than 1 percent of the land exposed. Just two flowering plants grow there, Antarctic hair grass and Antarctic pearlwort, alongside mosses, liverworts, lichens and fungi. On the scattered islands, life is thin for linked reasons: few plants mean few plant-eating insects, and native bird numbers track the insects they feed on.
Politics draws its own boundary. Everything south of 60 degrees south is governed by the Antarctic Treaty System, and no country is permanently established there. The Convergence does not fit neatly on a map, so the convention protecting its marine life approximates the line by joining fixed points of latitude and longitude, and a commission based in Hobart, Australia, polices fishing with quotas, licences, onboard inspectors and satellites. Some islands between 60 degrees south and the Convergence, such as Bouvet Island and Heard Island, belong to individual nations.
The region also holds enormous marine reserves. The South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands protected area, created in 2012, covers 1.07 million km2, larger than Greenland's national park, and the Ross Sea reserve set up in 2016 is bigger still at 1.55 million km2, though its protection expires in 35 years.
People are newcomers. A Spaniard, Gabriel de Castilla, reported snowy peaks far to the south in 1603, but the first confirmed sighting of the continent came in 1820 from a Russian expedition under Bellingshausen and Lazarev. The first person born in the Antarctic region arrived in 1859 aboard a sealing ship at Kerguelen and was named James Kerguelen Robinson. Today only a few thousand staff live at research stations, while more than 40,000 tourists visit each year. And because the lines of longitude meet at the pole, Antarctica technically lies in every time zone.
Source: Antarctic
