Antarctica's ice holds enough water to lift seas almost 60 metres
About 70% of the world's freshwater is locked in Antarctic ice, averaging 1.9 km thick. The continent is a polar desert that once grew forests, has logged Earth's lowest measured temperature, −89.2 °C, and hosts only about 5,000 people in summer, shrinking to roughly 1,000 through the winter.
Antarctica sits almost wholly south of the Antarctic Circle, ringed by the Southern Ocean and containing the geographic South Pole. At 14.2 million km² it is the fifth-largest continent, roughly 40% bigger than Europe and nearly twice the size of Australia, with a coastline close to 18,000 km. On average it is the coldest, driest and windiest continent and the highest. Coasts receive over 200 mm of precipitation a year, the interior far less, and Dome Argus, the loftiest ice feature at 4,091 m, can fall to −90 °C. Its wildlife includes mites, nematodes, tardigrades, penguins and seals, with lichens and mosses where anything grows.
The Transantarctic Mountains, running from Victoria Land to the Ross Sea, separate West from East Antarctica. Vinson Massif in the Ellsworth Mountains tops out at 4,892 m, while Mount Erebus on Ross Island, the southernmost active volcano, erupts about ten times a day and has scattered ash 300 km away. Beneath Russia's Vostok Station lies Lake Vostok, the largest subglacial lake, whose water is now thought to be renewed roughly every 13,000 years. The longest river is the Onyx.
The land was not always frozen. From the late Neoproterozoic to the Cretaceous it belonged to Gondwana, which began breaking apart around 183 million years ago. For much of the last 400 million years it stayed temperate enough for forests despite its high latitude, and in the Permian the seed plant Glossopteris flourished in waterlogged soils, leaving thick coal seams.
A Russian expedition under Bellingshausen and Lazarev probably spotted the ice shelves in 1820, a Norwegian party made the first confirmed landing in 1895, Mawson's team reached the magnetic pole in 1909 and Roald Amundsen the geographic pole in 1911. Aristotle wrote of an Antarctic region around 350 BC, but the continent's name was only adopted in the 1890s after Terra Australis was given to Australia in 1824. Today 29 nations govern it under the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which bans military activity, mining, nuclear explosions and nuclear waste.
Source: Antarctica
