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[73] [74] [75] According to one study, if the Paris Agreement is followed and global warming is limited to 2 °C (3.6 °F), the loss of ice in Antarctica will continue at the 2020 rate for the rest of the 21st century, but if a trajectory leading to 3 °C (5.4 °F) is followed, Antarctica ice loss will accelerate after 2060 and start adding 0.5 ...
Antarctica is the largest ice desert in the world. Some 98% of Antarctica is covered by the Antarctic ice sheet , the world's largest ice sheet and also its largest reservoir of fresh water . Averaging at least 1.6 km thick, the ice is so massive that it has depressed the continental bedrock in some areas more than 2.5 km below sea level ...
Location and diagram of Lake Vostok, a prominent subglacial lake beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. East Antarctic Ice Sheet is located directly above the East Antarctic Shield – a craton (stable area of the Earth's crust) with the area of 10,200,000 km 2 (3,900,000 sq mi), which accounts for around 73% of the entire Antarctic landmass. [19]
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]
Antarctica’s vast expanse of sea ice regulates Earth’s temperature, as the white surface reflects the Sun’s heat back into the atmosphere.
Greenland ice sheet as seen from space. An ice sheet is a body of ice which covers a land area of continental size - meaning that it exceeds 50,000 km 2. [4] The currently existing two ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica have a much greater area than this minimum definition, measuring at 1.7 million km 2 and 14 million km 2, respectively.
However, it has been disputed that Vostok Station is the coldest-known location on Earth. The now inactive Plateau Station, located on the central Antarctic plateau, is believed to have recorded an average yearly temperature that was consistently lower than that of Vostok Station during the 37-month period that it was active in the late 1960s ...
The "mega-berg," as some call it, is a sprawling ice sheet that once covered around 1,500 square miles but on its journey northward from Antarctica lost about 200 square miles of mass.