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The geography of Antarctica is dominated by its south polar location and, thus, by ice. The Antarctic continent, located in the Earth 's southern hemisphere, is centered asymmetrically around the South Pole and largely south of the Antarctic Circle. It is washed by the Southern (or Antarctic) Ocean or, depending on definition, the southern ...
Antarctica is the fifth-largest continent, being about 40% larger than Europe, and has an area of 14,200,000 km 2 (5,500,000 sq mi). Most of Antarctica is covered by the Antarctic ice sheet, with an average thickness of 1.9 km (1.2 mi).
Antarctica provides the water hemisphere with the majority of Earth's ice. Most of the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean, and the whole Southern Ocean, are in the water hemisphere. The water hemisphere is approximately 89 percent water (almost all pertaining to the World Ocean), 6 percent dry land and 5 percent polar ice cap. [1]
The Antarctic (/ ænˈtɑːrtɪk / or / ænˈtɑːrktɪk /, American English also / æntˈɑːrtɪk / or / æntˈɑːrktɪk /; commonly / æˈnɑːrtɪk /) [Note 1] is a polar region around Earth 's South Pole, opposite the Arctic region around the North Pole. The Antarctic comprises the continent of Antarctica, the Kerguelen Plateau, and other ...
West Antarctica was partially in the northern hemisphere, and during this period large amounts of sandstones, limestones and shales were deposited. East Antarctica was at the equator, where sea-floor invertebrates and trilobites flourished in the tropical seas. By the start of the Devonian period (416 Ma) Gondwana was in more southern latitudes ...
The Antarctic bottom water (AABW) is a type of water mass in the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica with temperatures ranging from −0.8 to 2 °C (35 °F) and absolute salinities from 34.6 to 35.0 g/kg. [1] As the densest water mass of the oceans, AABW is found to occupy the depth range below 4000 m of all ocean basins that have a ...
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 20,327,000 km 2 (7,848,000 sq mi), it is the second-smallest of the five principal oceanic divisions, smaller than the Pacific ...
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. Weather fronts rarely penetrate far into the ...