1. ANTARCTICA THE LAST GREAT WILDERNESS

2. WHAT IS COOL ABOUT ANTARCTICA? WAIT, WHAT ISN’T? It is the 5 th largest continent. There are no permanent residents Therefore, the continent gets 6 months of daylight during the summer and then 6 months of darkness during the winter. The average winter temperature is -30 degrees Fahrenheit and the average summer temperature is 20 degrees Fahrenheit Because this continent receives very little snow or rain, it is basically considered a desert. The little amount of snow that does fall does melt but it builds up over thousands of years to form large, thick ice sheets. Only one warm-blooded animal remains on the Antarctic continent during the bitter winter--the emperor penguin.

4. PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY Antarctica is divided into two main areas - East Antarctica (sometimes called Greater Antarctica), and West Antarctica (Lesser Antarctica) separated by the Transantarctic Mountains that stretch 3,540 kilometres across the continent. About 99% of Antarctica is covered with a vast ice sheet. It is the largest single mass of ice on Earth and is bigger than the whole of Europe. It holds about 70% of the world’s fresh water.

5. PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY Antarctica’s ice sheet is constantly on the move. Huge rivers of ice known as glaciers are pulled slowly by gravity from the interior towards the sea. The glaciers spill out over the water’s surface and create gigantic floating blocks of ice called ice shelves. The largest, the Ross Ice Shelf, is the size of France. Much of the surrounding ocean freezes over during the winter. With this extra winter sea-ice, Antarctica almost doubles in size

6. CLIMATE? In the last fifty years the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed by 2.50°C, faster than anywhere else on Earth, and temperatures are now at their highest for 1,800 years. In 2002, the Larsen B ice shelf broke away from the Antarctic Peninsula. Five hundred billion tonnes of ice floated off into the sea, breaking up into thousands of vast icebergs. This collapse dumped more ice into the Southern Ocean than all the icebergs over the previous fifty years put together.