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The frozen continent of Antarctica was the last continent humanity set foot on. The first documented landings made below the Antarctic Circle took place in 1820, when Admiral Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and the crew of the Vostok and Mirny, as part of the Russian Antarctic Expedition, made land at Peter I Island and Alexander Island.
The East Antarctic Shield or Craton is a cratonic rock body that covers 10.2 million square kilometers or roughly 73% of the continent of Antarctica. [1] The shield is almost entirely buried by the East Antarctic Ice Sheet that has an average thickness of 2200 meters but reaches up to 4700 meters in some locations.
In 2022, a study narrowed the warming of the Central area of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet between 1959 and 2000 to 0.31 °C (0.56 °F) per decade, and conclusively attributed it to increases in greenhouse gas concentrations caused by human activity. [50] East Antarctica cooled in the 1980s and 1990s, even as West Antarctica warmed (left-hand side).
The Antarctic continental shelf is a submerged piece of the Antarctic continent that underlies a portion of the Southern Ocean — the ocean which surrounds Antarctica. The shelf is generally narrow and unusually deep, its edge lying at depths averaging 500 meters (the global mean is around 100 meters), with troughs extending as far as 2000 ...
A speculative representation of Antarctica labelled as ' Terra Australis Incognita ' on Jan Janssonius's Zeekaart van het Zuidpoolgebied (1657), Het Scheepvaartmuseum The name given to the continent originates from the word antarctic, which comes from Middle French antartique or antarctique ('opposite to the Arctic') and, in turn, the Latin antarcticus ('opposite to the north').
A half-mile of ice isn't enough to suffocate life. A team of scientists who drilled into one of Antarctica's subglacial lakes last year says the lake is pretty well-packed with living things.
Cape Adare is a prominent cape of black basalt forming the northern tip of the Adare Peninsula and the north-easternmost extremity of Victoria Land, East Antarctica. [ 1 ] It is the site of the first confirmed landing on the Antarctic mainland—undertaken from Antarctic in 1895—and the first base on the Antarctic mainland—established by ...
A map of West Antarctica. The total volume of the entire Antarctic ice sheet is estimated at 26.92 million km 3 (6.46 million cu mi), [2] while the WAIS contains about 2.1 million km 3 (530,000 cu mi) in ice that is above the sea level, and ~1 million km 3 (240,000 cu mi) in ice that is below it. [20]