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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 ...
It is washed by the Southern (or Antarctic) Ocean or, depending on definition, the southern Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans. It has an area of more than 14.2 million km 2 . Antarctica is the largest ice desert in the world.
Antarctica is the coldest, driest continent on Earth, and has the highest average elevation. [19] Antarctica's dryness means the air contains little water vapor and conducts heat poorly. [18] The Southern Ocean surrounding the continent is far more effective at absorbing heat than any other ocean. [20]
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, [84]: 1264 although the East Antarctic ice sheet continues to gain ice inland.
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 colder, stabler East Antarctica had been experiencing cooling until the 2000s. [22] [23] Around Antarctica, the Southern Ocean has absorbed more oceanic heat than any other ocean, [24] and has seen strong warming at depths below 2,000 m (6,600 ft). [25]: 1230 Around the West Antarctic, the ocean has warmed by 1 °C (1.8 °F) since 1955. [21]
The Antarctic sea ice cover is highly seasonal, with very little ice in the austral summer, expanding to an area roughly equal to that of Antarctica in winter.It peaks (~18 × 10^6 km 2) during September (comparable to the surface area of Pluto), which marks the end of austral winter, and retreats to a minimum (~3 × 10^6 km 2) in February.