Denver, The Mile - High City, is about 1,600 meters high. The Antarctic plateau, a big mound of snow & ice, is over 4000 meters high.

Highest Driest Coldest

This famous photograph of Earth shows Antarctica near the height of the austral summer and thus almost fully illuminated by the Sun. The Apollo 17 crew took the picture on 7 December 1972 while traveling toward the Moon, the first time the Apollo trajectory made it possible to photograph the antarctic ice sheet. Notice the weather...

The continent of Antarctica is 5.4 million square miles, all but 2.6 percent of which is ice- covered. The contiguous United States is 3.6 million square miles.

Sea ice around Antarctica varies from about 8 million square miles in September or October…. to about 1 million square miles in January or February. So, at maximum, the sea ice area is larger than the land area, and twice as large as the US.

This is a cutaway painting of the land under ice. The thickness of the antarctic ice sheet averages 2,160 meters and at one point is 4,776 meters — just short of 3 miles. This ice is 90 percent of all the world's ice; it is 70 percent of all the world's fresh water. Portions of the bedrock are below sea level.

The map locates the three year-round stations — McMurdo, Amundsen-Scott South Pole, and Palmer — and shows the operating areas of research ships and the Coast Guard icebreaker. Vostok, also shown, is a Russian station that collaborates with the United States and other nations in collecting a deep ice core.

The copper pipe marks the exact spot of 90 degrees South latitude as determined each January using the satellite-based Global Positioning System, or GPS. In the mid-background are flags of the original 12 signatory nations to the Antarctic Treaty. In the background is the geodesic dome housing facilities of Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is named to commemorate the Norwegian and English explorers who were the first humans to reach the pole in December 1911 and January The research station has been in continuous operation since Its population during the winter isolation (February-October) is about 27, and the summer population can exceed 180. Astronomy, astrophysics, atmospheric studies, glaciology, and seismology are performed here. The station is supplied entirely by air from McMurdo.

Palmer Station, smallest and northernmost of America's three year-round research stations in Antarctica. The summer population is 43; winter, about 10. Marine biology is the major scientific pursuit, and the area is a designated National Science Foundation Long Term Ecological Research site. The station is supplied by ship from South America.

McMurdo Station. The segmented, tan building (46,500 square feet) at center is the Albert P. Crary Science & Engineering Center, built in the 1990s to replace several aging research facilities. Beyond the lab are dormitories (brown buildings) and the research ship Nathaniel B. Palmer in tiny Winter Quarters Bay. Beyond the bay are Hut Point and McMurdo Sound. McMurdo is the logistics hub of most of the US Antarctic Program. Most cargo and all fuel come to McMurdo by one cargo ship and one tanker per year.

A typical dormitory room at McMurdo. Each room normally houses two people and shares a bath with another room.

The US Antarctic Program removes all its solid and hazardous waste from Antarctica. About 70 percent is recycled. Sorting of waste at the source is a responsibility of all. Here are recycle containers in front of McMurdo Station dormitories. South Pole and all camps send all their trash to McMurdo for removal from Antarctica.

A USAF C-5B lands on the McMurdo Sound sea ice runway. The annual airlift of people and priority cargo that opens the austral summer season uses Air Mobility Command (US Air Force) C- 141s and C-5s. The runway is usable until early December, when the sea ice deteriorates from summer warmth.

A helicopter is unloaded from a C5 at McMurdo. A contractor (Petroleum Helicopters Inc., or PHI) operates four helicopters in summer, supporting scientists within about 100 miles from McMurdo or from camps established nearly anywhere in Antarctica

work. Camps placed by airplane or helicopter enable researchers to get where they need to go for the amount of time they need to complete their work. These tents are similar to Robert F. Scott's, although more modern designs also are used.

Nathaniel B. Palmer, the 308-ft research icebreaker built in Louisiana in 1992 to support US research in the ice-covered seas around Antarctica. The ship operates year-round. It and Palmer Station are named for Nathaniel B. Palmer, a Connecticut sealer (later a ship builder) who may have been the first person to see Antarctica — in Edison Chouest Offshore built the ship and operates it under charter to the US Antarctic Program.

Ice coring provides a history book of former climates and atmospheric constituents going back as much as 250,000 years. One of Antarctica's most important scientific exports, ice cores provide clues to future global climates.

Air samples are collected at the clean air facility at South Pole Station. This air, far from industrial sources, is the cleanest on Earth. Measurements of minute changes of trace amounts of constituents over the years has enabled documentation of changes in the planet's background levels of "greenhouse" gases such as carbon dioxide.

A NASA instrument — called TOMS (Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer) — records ozone depletion above Antarctica. Commonly called the “antarctic ozone hole,” the depleted area is three times larger than the entire land mass of the United States — the largest such area ever observed.

This 29-million-cubic-foot balloon being launched by the National Scientific Balloon Facility near McMurdo takes a 4,000- pound research payload to 125,000 feet altitude. If all goes well it circumnavigates Antarctica; staying aloft 8 to 10 days to record galactic cosmic rays, gamma rays, and X-rays to help understand the far reaches of the universe.

The discovery in Antarctica of fossil plants, reptiles, and marsupials that are the same species as those found on the other southern continents has virtually clinched the argument that the continents were joined millions of years ago and that Antarctica's climate once was temperate.

In the McMurdo Dry Valleys, it hasn’t rained for a million years. These are the driest places on earth. But there’s life, even here...

Cold-adapted algae live in favorable microclimates just beneath the surface of porous rocks facing the Sun. The top predator in this food chain is a microscopic worm which is able to “wake up” from long periods of freeze-drying. This environment is the closest to Mars, and offers lots of clues as to how life might evolve under severe water and energy restrictions.

CARA (Center for Astrophysical Research in Antarctica), an NSF-funded project headed by Yerkes Observatory, University of Chicago, and involving other institutions, takes advantage of the extremely clear (because it is cold and dry) atmosphere at the South Pole to make observations in a number of wavelengths, particularly the infrared.

Study of the abundant marine ecosystems around Antarctica often involves diving through holes in the sea ice.

The Weddell seal population in McMurdo Sound has been well documented over the last 3 decades. Study of these seals, whose population is stable, helps scientists understand stressed populations such as those in the Hawaiian Islands and the Bering Sea.

The scientists of over 46 nations work, live, and cooperate in Antarctica, a continent without countries or borders. Antarctica is a unique preserve: it has the cleanest, driest, highest, and darkest air for astronomy… in its 2 miles of ice, it holds a climate record going back millions of years… its ecosystems serve as models for Mars, and barometers of change on Earth.