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May 9, 2024 · Often described as a continent of superlatives, Antarctica is not only the world’s southernmost continent. It is also the world’s highest, driest, windiest, coldest, and iciest continent. Antarctica is about 5.5 million square miles (14.2 million square km) in size, and thick ice covers about 98 percent of the land.
Antarctica is the Earth 's southernmost and least populous continent. It is on the South Pole. It is almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle. Around Antarctica is the Southern Ocean. It is the fifth-largest continent in area after Asia, Africa, North America, and South America. [2]
The history of Antarctica emerges from early Western theories of a vast continent, known as Terra Australis, believed to exist in the far south of the globe. The term Antarctic, referring to the opposite of the Arctic Circle, was coined by Marinus of Tyre in the 2nd century AD.
The continent of Antarctica makes up most of the Antarctic region. The Antarctic is a cold, remote area in the Southern Hemisphere encompassed by the Antarctic Convergence.The Antarctic Convergence is an uneven line of latitude where cold, northward-flowing Antarctic waters meet the warmer waters of the world’s oceans.The Antarctic covers approximately 20 percent of the Southern Hemisphere.
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.
The population of people doing and supporting scientific research on the continent and its nearby islands south of 60 degrees south latitude (the region covered by the Antarctic Treaty) [2] varies from approximately 4,000 in summer to 1,000 in winter.
Tourism started in Antarctica by the sea in the 1960s. Air overflights started in the 1970s with sightseeing flights by airliners from Australia and New Zealand, and were resumed in the 1990s. The (summer) tour season lasts from November to March. Most of the estimated 14,762 visitors to Antarctica from 1999–2000 were on sea cruises.
