Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The climate of Antarctica is the coldest on Earth. The continent is also extremely dry (it is a desert [1]), averaging 166 mm (6.5 in) of precipitation per year. Snow rarely melts on most parts of the continent, and, after being compressed, becomes the glacier ice that makes up the ice sheet. Weather fronts rarely penetrate far into the ...
The Antarctic ice sheet is a continental glacier covering 98% of the Antarctic continent, with an area of 14 million square kilometres (5.4 million square miles) and an average thickness of over 2 kilometres (1.2 mi). It is the largest of Earth's two current ice sheets, containing 26.5 million cubic kilometres (6,400,000 cubic miles) of ice ...
The cooling strengthens the polar vortex and so prevents the outflow of the cold air near the South Pole, which in turn cools the continental mass of the East Antarctic ice sheet. The peripheral areas of Antarctica, especially the Antarctic Peninsula, are then subjected to higher temperatures, which accelerate the melting of the ice. [ 104 ]
The polar climate regions are characterized by a lack of warm summers but with varying winters. Every month a polar climate has an average temperature of less than 10 °C (50 °F). Regions with a polar climate cover more than 20% of the Earth's area. Most of these regions are far from the equator and near the poles, and in this case, winter ...
The geography of Antarctica is dominated by its south polar location and, thus, by ice. The Antarctic continent, located in the Earth 's southern hemisphere, is centered asymmetrically around the South Pole and largely south of the Antarctic Circle. It is washed by the Southern (or Antarctic) Ocean or, depending on definition, the southern ...
Climate change in Antarctica. Antarctic surface ice layer temperature trends between 1981 and 2007, based on thermal infrared observations made by a series of NOAA satellite sensors. Climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions from human activities occurs everywhere on Earth, and while Antarctica is less vulnerable to it than any other ...
The Antarctic bottom water (AABW) is a type of water mass in the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica with temperatures ranging from −0.8 to 2 °C (35 °F) and absolute salinities from 34.6 to 35.0 g/kg. [1] As the densest water mass of the oceans, AABW is found to occupy the depth range below 4000 m of all ocean basins that have a ...
McMurdo Dry Valleys. The McMurdo Dry Valleys are a row of largely snow-free valleys in Antarctica, located within Victoria Land west of McMurdo Sound. [1] The Dry Valleys experience extremely low humidity and surrounding mountains prevent the flow of ice from nearby glaciers. The rocks here are granites and gneisses, and glacial tills dot this ...