* Glasgow Digital Library: Scotland and the Antarctic: Nineteenth Century, retrieved on March 2, 2005

The first detailed topographic mapping of the island was made by the Antarctic Place-names Commission and the Military Topographic Service of the Bulgarian Army and published in 2009 in both English and Bulgarian.

More recently, complete mitochondrial sequencing indicates the two Antarctic groups that eat seals and fish should be recognized as distinct species, as should the North Pacific transients, leaving the others as subspecies pending additional data.

It took several other attempts to establish the Antarctic losses as real and significant, especially after NASA had retrieved matching data from its satellite recordings.

The Antarctic ozone hole is mapped from weather satellite data.

This data is collected from several thousand meteorological stations, Antarctic research stations and satellite observations of sea-surface temperature.

An international effort, the Antarctic Pack Ice Seal initiative ( APIS ), is currently underway to evaluate systematically collected survey data and obtain reliable estimates of all Antarctic seal abundances.

The Antarctic ozone hole is mapped from weather satellite data.

During a narrowing window of opportunity for data archaeology, the National Snow and Ice Data Center ( NDISC ) and NASA were able to recover data that allowed the reconstruction of high-resolution Nimbus 2 images from 1966 showing the entire Arctic and Antarctic ice caps.

Aging data collected during an ongoing CCAMLR tagging programme in the Ross Sea indicate Antarctic toothfish are relatively fast growing.

Analysis of paleontologic, stratigraphic, and sedimentologic data acquired from the study of drill core and siesmic acquired during the Shallow Drilling on the Antarctic Continental Shelf ( SHALDRIL ) and other projects and from fossil collections from and rock outcrops within Alexander, James Ross, King George, Seymour, and South Shetland islands has yielded a record of the changes in terrestrial vegetation that occurred within the Antarctic Peninsula over the course of the past 37 million years.

The TDRSS system has been used to provide data relay services to many orbiting observatories, and also to Antarctic facilities such as McMurdo Station by way of the TDRSS South Pole Relay.

If this relationship holds also for the previous glacials, Antarctic data suggest that D-O events were present in previous glacial periods as well.

In the 1980s and 1990s, support to NSIDC widened with NASA funding for the Snow and Ice Distributed Active Archive Center ( DAAC ) and NSF funding to manage selected Arctic and Antarctic data and metadata.

Recently published data collected from satellites support this hypothesis, suggesting that the west Antarctic ice sheet is beginning to show signs of instability.

In ScanSAR Wide Beam mode the SAR has a nominal swath width of 500 km and an imaging resolution of 100 m. Its left looking capability allows the spacecraft the unique capability to image the Antarctic on a routine basis providing data in support of scientific research.

Marine geophysical data indicates that motion between the South American plate and the Antarctic plate shifted from N-S to WNW-ESE accompanied by an eightfold increase in the separation rate.

It provides topography and vegetation data around the globe, in addition to the polar-specific coverage over the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

This is to support research in the region related to global climate processes, provide real-time operational meteorological data for numerical weather forecast centres and establish a basis for on-going monitoring of atmospheric and oceanic climate in the Antarctic sea-ice zone.

Typical landscape for the Antarctic Peninsula area, with fjords, high coastal mountains and islands.

Thirty stations, operated by 16 national governments party to the Antarctic Treaty, have landing facilities for either helicopters and / or fixed-wing aircraft ; commercial enterprises operate two additional air facilities.

Antarctic airports are subject to severe restrictions and limitations resulting from extreme seasonal and geographic conditions ; they do not meet ICAO standards, and advance approval from the respective governmental or nongovernmental operating organization is required for landing ( 1999 est.

These countries had established over 50 Antarctic stations for the IGY.

* Agreed Measures for the Conservation of Antarctic Fauna and Flora ( 1964 ) ( entered into force in 1982 )

* The Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals ( 1972 )

* The Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources ( 1980 )

* The Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty was signed October 4, 1991 and entered into force January 14, 1998 ; this agreement prevents development and provides for the protection of the Antarctic environment through five specific annexes on marine pollution, fauna and flora, environmental impact assessments, waste management, and protected areas.

The Antarctic Treaty System's yearly Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings ( ATCM ) are the international forum for the administration and management of the region.

Trends in the Antarctic Oscillation have been hypothesized to account for an increase in the transport of the Circumpolar Current over the past two decades.

The maritime part of the region constitutes the area of application of the international Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources ( CCAMLR ), where for technical reasons the Convention uses an approximation of the Convergence line by means of a line joining specified points along parallels of latitude and meridians of longitude.

In December 2009, the growth of tourism, with consequences for both the ecology and the safety of the travellers in its great and remote wilderness, was noted at a conference in New Zealand by experts from signatories to the Antarctic Treaty.

On July 19, 2007, the Iles Eparses entry and redirects for each island were dropped due to the group becoming a district of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands in February.

The second letter describes the thermal characteristic of its source region: T for tropical, P for polar, A for Arctic or Antarctic, M for monsoon, E for equatorial, and S for superior air ( dry air formed by significant downward motion in the atmosphere ).

* 1959 – Cold War: Opening date for signature of the Antarctic Treaty, which sets aside Antarctica as a scientific preserve and bans military activity on the continent.

The country also maintains a captive register for French-owned ships in Iles Kerguelen ( French Southern and Antarctic Lands ).

Some 98 % of Antarctica is covered by the Antarctic ice sheet, the world's largest ice sheet and also its largest reservoir of fresh water.

Western Antarctica is covered by the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

The Antarctic Treaty and related agreements, collectively called the Antarctic Treaty System or ATS, regulate international relations with respect to Antarctica, Earth's only continent without a native human population.

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current ( ACC ) is an ocean current that flows clockwise from west to east around Antarctica.

The Antarctic comprises the continent of Antarctica and the ice shelves, waters, and island territories in the Southern Ocean situated south of the Antarctic Convergence.

Chile also claims about of Antarctica, although all claims are suspended under the Antarctic Treaty.

After the tectonic creation of Drake Passage, when South America fully detached from Antarctica during the Oligocene, the climate cooled significantly due to the advent of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current which brought cool deep Antarctic water to the surface.

The islands are located from the Isla de los Estados in Argentina ( and from the Argentine mainland ); from Chile ; west of the Shag Rocks ( South Georgia ) and north of the British Antarctic Territory ( which overlaps with the Argentine and Chilean claims to Antarctica in that region ).

* 1961 – Cold War: the Antarctic Treaty, which sets aside Antarctica as a scientific preserve and bans military activity on the continent, comes into force after the opening date for signature set for the December 1, 1959.

The Kerguelen Islands, along with the islands of Amsterdam and St. Paul, and the Crozet archipelago were officially annexed by France in 1893, and were included as possessions in the French constitution in 1924 ( in addition to that portion of Antarctica claimed by France and known as Adélie Land ; as with all Antarctic territorial claims, France's possession on the continent is held in abeyance until a new international treaty is ratified that defines each claimant's rights and obligations ).

* Vostok, the lead ship of Faddey Bellingshausen, who discovered Antarctica during the First Russian Antarctic Expedition.

* December 1 – Cold War – Antarctic Treaty: 12 countries, including the United States and the Soviet Union, sign a landmark treaty, which sets aside Antarctica as a scientific preserve and bans military activity on that continent ( the first arms control agreement established during the Cold War ).

* February 11 – Burgess Ice Rise lying off the west coast of Alexander Island, Antarctica is first mapped by the British Antarctic Survey ( BAS ).

* January 28, 1820 – A Russian expedition led by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Petrovich Lazarev approaches the Antarctic coast ( see History of Antarctica ).

* January 30, 1820 – Edward Bransfield lands on the Antarctic mainland ( see History of Antarctica ).

There are also many abandoned scientific and military bases in Antarctica, especially in the Antarctic Peninsula.

South America was originally part of the supercontinent of Gondwana, which included Africa, Australia, India, New Zealand, and Antarctica, and the Neotropic shares many plant and animal lineages with these other continents, including Marsupial mammals and the Antarctic flora.

Tens of millions of years ago, continental plate movement formed a land-free gap around Antarctica, allowing formation of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current | ACC which keeps warm waters away from Antarctica.

A consortium, the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica ( EPICA ), has drilled at Dome C in the East Antarctic ice sheet and retrieved an ice core which dates to roughly 740, 000 years old.