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Antarctica's average ice mass change since 2002 has been on the order of 100 billion metric tons per year. ... Antarctica is defined as all land and ice shelves south ...
The Marie Byrd Land makes up a large portion of West Antarctica, consisting of the Area below the Antarctic Peninsula. The Marie Byrd land is a large formation of volcanic rock, characterized by 18 exposed and subglacial volcanoes. 16 of the 18 volcanoes are entirely covered by the antarctic ice sheet. [10]
Mass change of ice in Antarctica, 2002–2020. Contrasting temperature trends across parts of Antarctica mean that some locations, particularly at the coasts, lose mass while locations further inland continue to gain mass. These contrasting trends and the remoteness of the region make estimating an average trend difficult. [67]
The warming of the Southern Ocean around Antarctica has caused the weakening or collapse of ice shelves, which float just offshore of glaciers and stabilize them. Many coastal glaciers have been losing mass and retreating, causing net-annual ice loss across Antarctica, [25]: 1264 although the East Antarctic ice sheet continues to gain ice inland.
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.
Wilkes Land crater is an informal term that may apply to two separate cases of conjectured giant impact craters hidden beneath the ice cap of Wilkes Land, East Antarctica. These are distinguished by the names Wilkes Land anomaly and Wilkes Land mascon (mass concentration), based on terms used in their principal published reference sources.
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.
A satellite composite image of Antarctica. Earth's south polar land mass, Antarctica, is covered by the Antarctic ice sheet. It covers an area of about 14.6 million km 2 and contains between 25 and 30 million km 3 of ice. Around 70% of the fresh water on Earth is contained in this ice sheet.