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Geologically, an ocean is an area of oceanic crust covered by water. Oceanic crust is the thin layer of solidified volcanic basalt that covers the Earth's mantle. Continental crust is thicker but less dense. From this perspective, the Earth has three oceans: the World Ocean, the Caspian Sea, [citation needed] and the Black Sea.
Antarctica provides the water hemisphere with the majority of Earth's ice. Most of the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean, and the whole Southern Ocean, are in the water hemisphere. The water hemisphere is approximately 89 percent water (almost all pertaining to the World Ocean), 6 percent dry land and 5 percent polar ice cap. [1]
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 ...
Seven sovereign states – Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom – have made eight territorial claims in Antarctica.These countries have tended to place their Antarctic scientific observation and study facilities within their respective claimed territories; however, a number of such facilities are located outside of the area claimed by their ...
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 ...
The Southern Ocean, also known as the Antarctic Ocean, [1] [note 4] comprises the southernmost waters of the world ocean, generally taken to be south of 60° S latitude and encircling Antarctica. [5] With a size of 21,960,000 km 2 (8,480,000 sq mi), it is the second-smallest of the five principal oceanic divisions, smaller than the Pacific ...
The Antarctic Convergence is a zone approximately 32 to 48 km (20 to 30 mi) wide, varying in latitude seasonally and in different longitudes, extending across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans between the 48th and 61st parallels of south latitude. Although the northern boundary varies, for the purposes of the Convention on the ...
A map of the Antarctic region, including the Antarctic Convergence and the 60th parallel south The Antarctic Plate. The Antarctic (/ æ n ˈ t ɑːr t ɪ k / or / æ n ˈ t ɑːr k t ɪ k /, American English also / æ n t ˈ ɑːr t ɪ k / or / æ n t ˈ ɑːr k t ɪ k /; commonly / æ ˈ n ɑːr t ɪ k /) [Note 1] is a polar region around Earth's South Pole, opposite the Arctic region around ...