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.

For all ice shelfs see List of Antarctic ice shelves.

For all ice shelfs see List of Antarctic ice shelves.

Antarctic sea ice cycles seasonally, in February – March the amount of sea ice is lowest, and in August – September the sea ice is at its greatest extent.

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.

Penguins on the dimly lit Antarctic ice ; ... a family of gorillas, the male beating his chest, ... an American grizzly bear standing on his hind legs, ten or twelve feet tall, and staring me right in the eye.

The total number of degree confluences is 64, 442, of which 21, 543 are on land, 38, 409 on water, and 4, 490 on the Antarctic and Arctic ice caps.

Probably the largest population lives in Antarctic waters, where they range up to the edge of the pack ice and are believed to venture into the denser pack ice, finding open leads much like beluga whales in the Arctic.

In 1969, the 10th Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition found nine meteorites on a blue ice field near the Yamato Mountains.

On its journey from New Zealand to the Antarctic, Terra Nova was trapped in pack ice for 20 days, far longer than other ships had experienced, which meant a late-season arrival and less time for preparatory work before the Antarctic winter.

" Daily Telegraph columnist Jasper Rees, likening the changes in explorers ' reputations to climatic variations, suggests that " in the current Antarctic weather report, Scott is enjoying his first spell in the sun for twenty-five years ". The New York Times Book Review was more critical, pointing out Crane's support for Scott's discredited claims regarding the circumstances of the freeing of the Discovery from the pack ice, and concluded " For all the many attractions of his book, David Crane offers no answers that convincingly exonerate Scott from a significant share of responsibility for his own demise.

The Belgica, whether by mistake or design, became locked in the sea ice at 70 ° 30 ′ S off Alexander Island, west of the Antarctic Peninsula.

In the Antarctic two species occur as shallow as 33 meters under the ice.

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.

On 17 January 1773 the Antarctic Circle was crossed for the first time in history and the two ships reached by, where their course was stopped by ice.

The existence of a subglacial lake in the Vostok region was first suggested by Russian geographer Andrey Kapitsa based on seismic soundings made during the Soviet Antarctic Expeditions in 1959 and 1964 to measure the thickness of the ice sheet.

Russian geographer Andrey Kapitsa used seismic soundings in the region of Vostok Station made during the Soviet Antarctic Expedition in 1959 and 1964 to measure the thickness of the ice sheet.

Later research by Robin Bell and Michael Studinger from the Lamont – Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University suggested that the water of the lake is continually freezing and being carried away by the motion of the Antarctic ice sheet, while being replaced by water melting from other parts of the ice sheet in these high pressure conditions.

He has an exceptional mastery of underwater navigation, taking upon himself the most difficult submarine passages, such as those under the Isthmus of Suez and the Antarctic ice sheet.

A recent trend in GCMs is to apply them as components of Earth system models, e. g. by coupling to ice sheet models for the dynamics of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and one or more chemical transport models ( CTMs ) for species important to climate.

Earth seen from Apollo 17 — the Antarctic ice sheet at the bottom of the photograph contains 61 % of the fresh water, or 1. 7 % of the total water, on Earth.

Because of this, Adhemar reasoned that because the southern hemisphere had more hours of darkness in winter, it must be cooling, and attributed the Antarctic ice sheet to this.

Adhemar predicted the Antarctic ice sheet and theorised about its thickness by comparing the depths of the Arctic and circum-Antarctic oceans.

Finding the Antarctic oceans deeper ( the measurements he used may not have been fully representative ) and attributing this to the gravitational attraction of the Antarctic ice sheet, he postulated a truly enormous ice sheet approximately 90 km thick.

Lake Vostok lies some 4, 000 meters ( 13, 000 ft ) below the surface of the central Antarctic ice sheet and covers an area of 14, 000 km² ( 5, 400 sq mi ).

This had the unusual effect of allowing fossils of plants that once grew on present-day Greenland to be much better preserved than with the slowly forming Antarctic ice sheet.

The Antarctic ice sheet is the largest single mass of ice on Earth.

The Antarctic ice sheet is divided by the Transantarctic Mountains into two unequal sections called the East Antarctic ice sheet ( EAIS ) and the smaller West Antarctic Ice Sheet ( WAIS ).

Still further south lies the Polar front, which is marked by a transition to very cold, relatively fresh, Antarctic Surface Water at the surface.

Further south still is the Southern Antarctic Circumpolar Current Front ( SACCF ), which is determined as the southernmost extent of Circumpolar Deep Water ( temperature of about 2 ° C at 400m ).

There is also the Antarctic oscillation, which involves changes in the location and strength of Antarctic winds.

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.

Its detectors got a trial run at the Antarctic Viper telescope as ACBAR ( Arcminute Cosmology Bolometer Array Receiver ) experiment — which has produced the most precise measurements at small angular scales to date — and at the Archeops balloon telescope.

* 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 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.

Similarly the warming of the oceans is extending the oceanic thermocline layer of tropical oceans into the Arctic and Antarctic waters, preventing the rise of oceanic nutrients into the surface waters and eliminating the algal blooms of phytoplankton on which oceanic food chains depend.

The South Equatorial Current, flowing west along the equator, swings southward east of New Guinea, turns east at about 50 ° S, and joins the main westerly circulation of the Southern Pacific, which includes the Earth-circling Antarctic Circumpolar Current.

They also speculate that it may have contributed in some way to the separation of Australia from the Antarctic landmass, which were both part of a supercontinent called Gondwana.

The trend was partly caused by the formation of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which significantly cooled oceanic water temperatures.

" This provision contrasts with the rejected Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities, which would have allowed mining under the control and taxation of an international managing body similar to the International Seabed Authority.

However, having taken this step, his name became inseparably associated with the Antarctic, the field of work to which he remained committed during the final twelve years of his life.

The base at King Edward Point was expanded as a research facility in 1949 / 1950 by the British Antarctic Survey, which until 1962 was called the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey.

The King Edward Point base, which had become a small military garrison after the Falklands war, returned to civilian use in 2001 and is now operated by the British Antarctic Survey.

SiP, as it is commonly known, began as a three-issue mini-series published by Antarctic Press in 1993, which focused entirely on the relationship between the three main characters and Francine's unfaithful boyfriend.

* 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 ).

Early models failed to take PSCs into account and predicted a gradual global depletion, which is why the sudden Antarctic ozone hole was such a surprise to many scientists.