2014
Nothing has melted on Antarctica over the last 40 million years! The Earth’s fifth largest continent, including the South Pole, is its coldest, windiest, and driest continent. Since nothing melts on Antarctica, today it contains 90% of all of the Earth’s ice. Over these millions of years, the ice sheet has accumulated to more than a mile in height, making Antarctica the earth’s highest continent, with an average elevation greater than 5,000′.
Because of such minimal precipitation, however — only 2″ per year in the interior — Antarctica is considered desert. While its coastal regions receive 8″ of falling moisture annually, unlike most desert regions, frozen moisture can’t soak into the ground, so it too, adds to the ice sheet.
Stretching diagonally northwest-to-southeast nearly 2,000 miles across Antarctica, the Transantarctic Mountain Range (Mt. Kirpatrick, 14,856′ elev.) separates the continent’s east and west regions. Two thirds of Antarctica, lying east of this mountain range, is the size of Australia, while the western third includes a series of frozen islands comprising the Antarctic peninsula – which originally was a continuation of the Andes Mountain Range.
The ice sheets covering Antarctica slowly migrate: glaciers inch across the continent, cracking and breaking. As ice sheets crack along the coast, ice shelves and glaciers break off into the sea as icebergs.
