Antarctica is the coldest, windiest, driest and emptiest continent on Earth, and no country owns it. It is about 14 million square kilometres — bigger than Europe, bigger than Australia — and around 98% of it is covered in ice. Nobody lives there permanently. There are no towns, no shops and no children born there who stayed. The only people are scientists and support staff, between about 1,000 in winter and 5,000 in summer.
The Coldest Place Ever Measured
The lowest air temperature ever recorded at ground level was minus 89.2 degrees Celsius, at Russia's Vostok Station on 21 July 1983. Satellites have since measured surface temperatures on the high plateau below minus 94.
To picture that: boiling water thrown into the air at those temperatures turns to ice crystals before it lands. Breathing through your mouth can freeze parts of your throat, and exposed skin freezes in under a minute.
Even in summer, the interior stays well below freezing. Only the coastal fringes and the Antarctic Peninsula ever climb above zero, and the warmest reading ever taken on the continent is around 18.3 degrees, on the peninsula in February 2020.
It Is a Desert
This surprises almost everyone. A desert is defined by how little precipitation it gets, not by how hot it is, and Antarctica gets very little.
The interior receives the equivalent of about 50 millimetres of water a year — less than the Sahara. It falls as snow and almost never melts, so it piles up year after year, which is how the ice got so thick.
The Dry Valleys of Victoria Land are the strangest part. They are ice-free, and some of them have had no rain or snow for around two million years. NASA has studied them because they are the closest thing on Earth to conditions on Mars.
How Thick Is the Ice?
The Antarctic ice sheet averages about 1.9 kilometres thick and reaches around 4.8 kilometres at its deepest. It holds roughly 90% of all the ice on Earth and about 70% of all the fresh water.
The ice is so heavy that it has pushed the rock beneath it down by hundreds of metres. If the ice all melted, the land would slowly rise back up — and global sea levels would rise by around 58 metres, which would put most coastal cities underwater.
Buried under all that ice are mountains, valleys and more than 400 lakes of liquid water, kept unfrozen by pressure and the Earth's heat. The biggest, Lake Vostok, is about the size of Lake Ontario and has been sealed off from the outside world for perhaps 15 million years.
Penguins
Only two penguin species breed on the Antarctic mainland: the emperor and the Adélie. Others, including the chinstrap, gentoo and macaroni, live on the peninsula and nearby islands.
Emperor penguins are the largest, standing up to 1.2 metres. They are the only animal that breeds during the Antarctic winter, in total darkness at minus 40 with 150-kilometre-an-hour winds.
The male holds the single egg on his feet under a fold of skin for around 65 days without eating anything at all, losing up to half his body weight. Thousands of males huddle together and slowly rotate so that everyone takes a turn in the warm middle. The female returns from the sea with food just as the chick hatches.
No Polar Bears
Polar bears live in the Arctic, at the opposite end of the planet. There are no polar bears in Antarctica and no penguins in the Arctic, and the two groups have never met in the wild.
A useful way to remember it: Arctic comes from the Greek word for bear, arktos, and Antarctic means the opposite of the Arctic — so the Arctic is the one with the bears.
There are also no land mammals in Antarctica at all. The largest purely land animal is a wingless midge about 6 millimetres long. Everything bigger — seals, whales, penguins — gets its food from the sea.
Krill Hold Everything Up
Antarctic krill are shrimp-like creatures about 6 centimetres long, and there may be around 400 million tonnes of them in the Southern Ocean. That is more than the combined weight of every human on Earth.
Almost everything eats them. Whales, seals, penguins, squid and fish all depend on krill, and krill depend on the algae that grow on the underside of sea ice.
Blue whales eat up to four tonnes of krill a day in the feeding season. A single swarm of krill can be so dense — over 10,000 in a cubic metre — that it turns the water pink and shows up on ship sonar as a solid object.
Make Your Own Blubber Glove
Here is a way to feel how Antarctic animals stay warm. Fill a large bowl with cold water and ice. Put one hand in and count how long you can keep it there. Not long.
Now take two sealable plastic bags, put a thick layer of vegetable shortening or lard between them, and seal the edges so you have a mitten with fat inside. Put your hand in it and try the ice water again.
You will barely feel the cold. That is blubber, and seals, whales and penguins all use it — a layer of fat under the skin that traps heat far better than fur does in water. Emperor penguins add a second trick: they have about 100 feathers per square inch, more densely packed than any other bird.
Six Months of Day, Six Months of Night
At the South Pole itself the sun rises once a year, in September, and sets once a year, in March. In between it circles the sky without ever going down, and after it sets there is no sunrise for six months.
This happens because the Earth is tilted by about 23.4 degrees. For half the year the South Pole leans towards the sun and for half it leans away. The same thing happens at the North Pole, six months out of step.
Time zones are meaningless there — every line of longitude meets at a single point, so you can walk through all 24 in a few steps. Stations simply use whichever time zone their supply flights come from, which is why the American base at the pole runs on New Zealand time.
Nobody Owns It
Seven countries have claimed parts of Antarctica — Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway and the United Kingdom — and some of the claims overlap. None of them is recognised by most of the world.
The Antarctic Treaty, signed in 1959 and in force since 1961, put all the claims on hold. It says the continent is to be used only for peaceful purposes and scientific research, bans military activity and nuclear testing, and guarantees that scientists from any signatory can inspect any base.
It now has 58 signatories. A later agreement, the Madrid Protocol of 1991, bans all mining until at least 2048. The treaty is often described as one of the most successful international agreements ever made, partly because it was signed at the height of the Cold War by countries that agreed on almost nothing else.
Living at a Research Station
There are around 70 research stations, run by about 30 countries. The largest is the American McMurdo Station, which holds over 1,000 people in summer and has a shop, a gym and its own fire station.
Winter is the hard part. From about March to October no aircraft can reach most stations, and the sun does not rise at all for months at the poles. Winter crews are typically a few dozen people who cannot leave under any circumstances, which is why they are screened for medical and psychological fitness first.
There is no hospital. Doctors have famously had to treat themselves — one Soviet doctor removed his own appendix at a station in 1961, guided by a mirror and two assistants who had no medical training.
The Race to the Pole
The South Pole was first reached on 14 December 1911 by a Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen, using dogs and skis. A British team led by Robert Falcon Scott arrived 34 days later, found the Norwegian flag already there, and died on the return journey.
Ernest Shackleton's expedition of 1914 never reached the pole at all, because his ship Endurance was crushed by pack ice. What followed is one of the great survival stories: he got all 28 men home alive after nearly two years, including an 1,300-kilometre open-boat voyage across the roughest sea in the world. The wreck of Endurance was found on the seabed in 2022, remarkably well preserved.
Today you can fly to the South Pole in a few hours. Amundsen-Scott Station sits on top of it, and the ice it stands on is moving about 10 metres a year, so the marker for the exact pole has to be repositioned every New Year's Day. To keep exploring, read about how glaciers work and the five oceans, one of which surrounds Antarctica.
