Antarctica
The coldest, windiest, and driest continent, Antarctica contains 90 percent
of all of the ice on the planet in an area just under one and a half times
the size of the United States. Let's take a look at one of the world's most desolate regions.
At the beginning of the 20th century, two groups
of explorers set out across the desolate Antarctic landscape in a race to walk where no man had walked before.
The first team to reach the
South Pole was led by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. Amundsen spent 99 days racing Robert Scott,
an English naval officer, to the South Pole.
Amundsen, a veteran polar traveler, led a team of 18 men across the frozen continent ,
finally reaching the pole on Dec. 14, 1912. Scott and his crew made it to the pole four weeks later on Jan. 17,
1913, but did not make it back alive. A search party found Scott and his two remaining companions inside their
sleeping bags in a small tent out on the ice, just 11 miles (17 kilometers) from the nearest cache of food and supplies.
The searchers covered the tent with snow and left the dead men where they lay.
Antarctica consists of two major regions: W Antarctica
(c.2,500,000 sq mi/6,475,000 sq km), a mountainous archipelago that includes the Antarctic
Peninsula, and E Antarctica (c.3,000,000 sq mi/7,770,000 sq km), geologically a continental shield.
They are joined into a single continental mass by an ice sheet thousands of feet thick. At the seaward
margins of the ice sheet masses of ice break off and float away as icebergs, leaving ice cliffs.
Where the outward creep of the ice is channeled
into ice streams (zones of more rapid flow), great floating
ice tongues project into the sea; where mountains retard outward movement, the flow is channeled into great valley glaciers.
Some facts about Antarctica:
1.The Dry Valleys of Antarctica are the driest place on Earth, with low humidity and almost no snow or ice cover.
2.On Average,Antarctica is the windiest continent. Winds in some places of the continent can reach 200 mph (320 km/h).
3.Antarctica is the fifth largest continent.
4.The Antarctic Ice Sheet is the largest single mass of ice on Earth.
5.Ninety-nine percent of Antarctica is covered by ice.
6.Antarctica is home to about 70 percent of the planet's fresh water, and 90 percent of the planet's freshwater ice.
7.The average thickness of Antarctic ice is about 1 mile (1.6 kilometers).
8.Including its islands and attached floating plains of ice,
Antarctica has an area of about 5.4 million square miles (14 million square kilometers),
about one-and-a-half times the size of the United States.
9.The largest of Antarctica's ice shelves (floating tongues of ice) is the Ross Ice Shelf,
which measures some 197,000 square miles (510,680 square kilometers), or 3.7 percent of the total area of Antarctica.
10.At rift that could rival the Grand Canyon was discovered beneath the Antarctic ice during an expedition conducted during 2009-2010.
It is roughly 6 miles (10 kilometers) across and at least 62 miles (100 km) long, possibly far longer if it extends into the sea.
It extends nearly a mile down (1.5 km) at its deepest.
11.The Transantarctic Mountains divide the continent into East and West sections.
At 2,175 miles (3,500 kilometers) long, the Transantarctic range is one of the longest mountain ranges on Earth.
12.The highest point on Antarctica is the Vinson Massif at 16,362 feet (4,987 meters).
13.Nearly 30 countries operate more than 80 research stations around the continent, according to
2009 numbers from the Council of Managers of National Antarctic Programs.
14.There are no indigenous populations of people on Antarctica.
15.Like the Arctic to the north, most of Antarctica is completely
dark during the region's winter months. Because of the Earth's tilt, during the austral winter,
the sun disappears below the horizon for the duration of winter, from the autumnal to the vernal equinox.
16.During the summer months, when the sun is constantly above the horizon, more sunlight reaches the surface at the South Pole than over a similar period of time at the equator, according to the CIA World Factbook.
