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Around 98% of continental Antarctica is covered in ice up to 4.7 kilometres (2.9 mi) thick. [1] Antarctica's icy deserts have extremely low temperatures, high solar radiation, and extreme dryness. [2] Any precipitation that does fall usually falls as snow, and is restricted to a band around 300 kilometres (186 mi) from the coast.
The beauty of Antarctica's icy conditions is a sight to behold but soon, it may look (and feel) rather different. Antarctic ice shelves have lost nearly 4 trillion metric tons of ice since the mid ...
Most of Antarctica is covered by the Antarctic ice sheet, with an average thickness of 1.9 km (1.2 mi). Antarctica is, on average, the coldest, driest, and windiest of the continents, and it has the highest average elevation. It is mainly a polar desert, with annual precipitation of over 200 mm (8 in) along the coast and far less inland.
Antarctica's two flowering plant species, the Antarctic hair grass (Deschampsia antarctica) and Antarctic pearlwort (Colobanthus quitensis) are found on the northern and western parts of the Antarctic Peninsula, including offshore islands, where the climate is relatively mild. Lagotellerie Island in Marguerite Bay is an example of this habitat.
Two natural wonders in the United States made the list. “While plenty of countries offer spectacular man-made sights like the Egyptian Pyramids, Machu Picchu or the Great Wall of China, it's the ...
The continent of Antarctica is so cold that it has supported only 2 vascular plants for millions of years, and its flora presently consists of around 250 lichens, 100 mosses, 25–30 liverworts, and around 700 terrestrial and aquatic algal species, which live on the areas of exposed rock and soil around the shore of the continent.
Blood Falls, 2006 Blood Falls, at the toe of Taylor Glacier, 2013. Blood Falls is an outflow of an iron(III) oxide–tainted plume of saltwater, flowing from the tongue of Taylor Glacier onto the ice-covered surface of West Lake Bonney in the Taylor Valley of the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Victoria Land, East Antarctica.
The Ross Ice Shelf is one of many such shelves. It reaches into Antarctica from the north, and covers an area of about 520,000 km 2 (200,000 sq mi), nearly the size of France. [2] [3] The ice mass is about 800 km (500 mi) wide and 970 km (600 mi) long. In some places, namely its southern areas, the ice shelf can be almost 750 m (2,450 ft) thick.