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Nearly all of Antarctica is covered by a sheet of ice that is, on average, at least 1,500 m (5,000 ft) thick. Antarctica contains 90% of the world's ice and more than 70% of its fresh water. If all the land-ice covering Antarctica were to melt—around 30 × 10 ^ 6 km 3 (7.2 × 10 ^ 6 cu mi) of ice—the seas would rise by over 60 m (200 ft). [22]
The weather in Antarctica can be highly variable, and weather conditions will oftentimes change dramatically in a short period of time. Weather conditions on the continent are classified in a number of ways, and restrictions placed upon workers and other staffs vary both by stations and by nations. [1]
A katabatic wind (named from Ancient Greek κατάβασις 'descent') is a downslope wind caused by the flow of an elevated, high-density air mass into a lower-density air mass below under the force of gravity.
The AMRC is one of the primary archives of meteorological data from Antarctica and its surrounding geographic areas. [1] The Antarctic Meteorological Forecast Center (AMFC) at UW-Madison was devised during the same time as the founding of the AMRC as a provider of weather forecasts for research vessels operating in the vicinity of Antarctica.
The ACC varies with time. Evidence of this is the Antarctic Circumpolar Wave, a periodic oscillation that affects the climate of much of the southern hemisphere. [7] There is also the Antarctic oscillation, which involves changes in the location and strength of Antarctic winds. Trends in the Antarctic Oscillation have been hypothesized to ...
The Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC), or the West Wind Drift, is an ocean current that flows from west to east around Antarctica. The ACC is the dominant circulation feature of the Southern Ocean and, at approximately 125 Sverdrups , the largest ocean current. [ 12 ]
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The East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) lies between 45° west and 168° east longitudinally. It was first formed around 34 million years ago, [3] and it is the largest ice sheet on the entire planet, with far greater volume than the Greenland ice sheet or the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), from which it is separated by the Transantarctic Mountains.