Antarctica

1. Antarctica The last great wilderness

2. What is cool about Antarctica? Wait, what isn’t? • It is the 5th largest continent. • There are no permanent residents • Therefore, the continent gets 6 months of daylight during the summer and then 6 months of darkness during the winter. • The average winter temperature is -30 degrees Fahrenheit and the average summer temperature is 20 degrees Fahrenheit • Because this continent receives very little snow or rain, it is basically considered a desert. The little amount of snow that does fall does melt but it builds up over thousands of years to form large, thick ice sheets. • Only one warm-blooded animal remains on the Antarctic continent during the bitter winter--the emperor penguin.

4. Physical geography • Antarctica is divided into two main areas - East Antarctica (sometimes called Greater Antarctica), and West Antarctica (Lesser Antarctica) separated by the Transantarctic Mountains that stretch 3,540 kilometres across the continent. • About 99% of Antarctica is covered with a vast ice sheet. It is the largest single mass of ice on Earth and is bigger than the whole of Europe. • It holds about 70% of the world’s fresh water.

5. Physical Geography • Antarctica’s ice sheet is constantly on the move. Huge rivers of ice known as glaciers are pulled slowly by gravity from the interior towards the sea. • The glaciers spill out over the water’s surface and create gigantic floating blocks of ice called ice shelves. The largest, the Ross Ice Shelf, is the size of France. • Much of the surrounding ocean freezes over during the winter. With this extra winter sea-ice, Antarctica almost doubles in size

6. Climate? • In the last fifty years the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed by 2.50°C, faster than anywhere else on Earth, and temperatures are now at their highest for 1,800 years. • In 2002, the Larsen B ice shelf broke away from the Antarctic Peninsula. • Five hundred billion tonnes of ice floated off into the sea, breaking up into thousands of vast icebergs. • This collapse dumped more ice into the Southern Ocean than all the icebergs over the previous fifty years put together.