Antarctica History, Map, Climate, & Facts

The ice shelves of Antarctica were probably first seen in 1820, during a Russian expedition led by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev. It is mainly a polar desert, with annual precipitation of over 200 mm (8 in) along the coast and far less inland. Antarctica is the fifth-largest continent, being about 40% larger than Europe, and has an area of 14,200,000 km2 (5,500,000 sq mi).

• Amundsen’s team relied on dog sleds and skiing to reach the pole, covering as much as 64 kilometers (40 miles) per day.
• For legal purposes of the Antarctic Treaty, the arbitrary boundary of latitude 60° S is used, south of which lies the Antarctic Treaty Area.
• A sea level rise of 3.3 m (10 ft 10 in) would occur if the ice sheet collapses, which would leave ice caps on the mountains, and a rise of 4.3 m (14 ft 1 in) would occur if those ice caps also melt.
• The far more stable East Antarctic ice sheet may cause a sea level rise of only 0.5 m (1 ft 8 in) to 0.9 m (2 ft 11 in) from the current level of warming, a small fraction of the 53.3 m (175 ft) contained in the full ice sheet.
• Antarctica is divided into West Antarctica and East Antarctica by the Transantarctic Mountains, which stretch from Victoria Land to the Ross Sea.

Conservation and environmental protection

Climatologists track the history of Earth’s climate using ice cores from Antarctica’s pristine ice sheet. The number of scientists conducting research varies throughout the year, from about 1,000 in winter to around 5,000 in summer.Researchers from a variety of scientific backgrounds study the Antarctic not only as a unique environment, but also as an indicator of broader global processes. Their feathers retain a layer of air, helping them keep warm in the freezing water.Cultural GeographyA Culture of ScienceWhile the Antarctic does not have permanent human residents, the region is a busy outpost for a variety of research scientists.

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The Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, an international treaty that came into force in 1980, regulates fisheries, aiming to preserve ecological relationships. There exists a community of extremophile bacteria in the highly alkaline waters of Lake Untersee. It is thought to be likely that there exists a native bacterial community within the subterranean water body of Lake Vostok.

Antarctica

Maritime Antarctica—the islands and coasts—supports more life than inland Antarctica, and the surrounding ocean is as rich in life as the land is barren. Around the Antarctic coast, shelves, https://prabhu365-nepal.com/app glaciers, and ice sheets continually “calve,” or discharge, icebergs into the seas. Ice shelves, or ice sheets floating on the sea, cover many parts of the Ross and Weddell seas.

During the Nimrod Expedition led by the British explorer Ernest Shackleton in 1907, parties led by Edgeworth David became the first to climb Mount Erebus and to reach the south magnetic pole. The first confirmed landing on the continental mass of Antarctica occurred in 1895 when the Norwegian-Swedish whaling ship Antarctic reached Cape Adare. The American sealer Nathaniel Palmer, whose sealing ship was in the region at this time, may also have been the first to sight the Antarctic Peninsula. The oldest known human remains in the Antarctic region was a skull, dated from 1819 to 1825, that belonged to a young woman on Yamana Beach at the South Shetland Islands. Ecosystems are impacted by local and global threats, notably pollution, the invasion of non-native species, and the various effects of climate change. The pressure group Greenpeace established a base on Ross Island from 1987 to 1992 as part of its attempt to establish the continent as a World Park.