58 Fun Facts About Antarctica

Antarctica ranks where among the continents by area?

Fifth-largest. Nearly twice the size of Australia, it is so buried in ice that whole mountain ranges and valleys lie hidden beneath it.

About how thick is the Antarctic ice sheet on average?

2 kilometres. Under the pressure of all that ice, water stays liquid at its base, and hundreds of lakes lie hidden beneath it.

If all of Antarctica's ice melted, by roughly how much would global sea levels rise?

60 metres. Much of the West Antarctic ice sheet rests on rock below sea level, which makes it potentially unstable.

Earth's coldest known surface spots, on the East Antarctic ice sheet, were found using what?

Satellites. They found hollows colder than -90°C, yet the official record stays a thermometer reading, since satellites gauge the ice surface rather than the air.

Besides being the coldest and windiest continent, Antarctica also holds which two records?

Driest and highest average elevation. Its thin, dry air is why astronomers built the South Pole Telescope there to map faint microwave light from space.

What is the highest peak in Antarctica?

Vinson Massif is named for US congressman Carl Vinson, who championed government funding for Antarctic exploration.

Which mountain range runs from Victoria Land to Coats Land, marking the boundary between the continent's east and west?

The Transantarctic Mountains hold seams of coal, left by forests that once grew where ice lies today.

Which Antarctic glacier have reporters nicknamed the 'Doomsday Glacier' for the sea-level rise its collapse could cause?

Thwaites Glacier rests on the seabed rather than dry land, so warm ocean water can flow beneath it and melt it from underneath.

Blood Falls, a red outflow from the Taylor Glacier in the Dry Valleys, gets its colour from what?

Iron oxide in salty water: iron in the ancient brine beneath the glacier rusts red the moment it meets the air.

Antarctica was once part of which supercontinent, which began breaking apart about 180 million years ago?

Gondwana: while Antarctica was part of it, dinosaurs lived there, and their bones have been dug from its mountains.

Which is the largest purely terrestrial animal native to Antarctica?

A flightless midge takes the title because Antarctica's land has no native mammals, reptiles or amphibians.

Which small crustacean is the keystone species of the Southern Ocean food web?

Antarctic krill: studies link falling krill numbers to shrinking sea ice, and chinstrap penguins that eat them declined for decades.

Which penguin is the only species that breeds through the Antarctic winter?

The emperor penguin male incubates the single egg for about nine weeks of winter darkness without eating, while the female feeds at sea.

Which Southern Ocean seabird can have wings spanning about 3 metres from tip to tip?

The wandering albatross is famous for its long migrations, but commercial fishing threatens it.

Which Antarctic seal is a top predator that hunts penguins and even the pups of other seals?

In 2003 a leopard seal dragged British biologist Kirsty Brown underwater as she snorkelled, the first recorded human death caused by the species.

Whose ships made the first recorded crossing of the Antarctic Circle?

James Cook wrote that no man would ever venture farther south than he had, and that any lands beyond the ice would never be explored.

Which country sent the Bellingshausen–Lazarev expedition credited with first sighting an Antarctic ice shelf in 1820?

Their sighting came three days before Britain's Edward Bransfield saw land and ten months before American sealer Nathaniel Palmer.

The first confirmed landing on the Antarctic mainland was made in 1895 by a team from which country?

Norway's whaling expedition landed its party at Cape Adare, and one of them, Carsten Borchgrevink, returned in 1899 to build huts there.

Who led the first expedition to reach the geographic South Pole, on 14 December 1911?

Roald Amundsen hid his real goal even from his crew until the Fram reached Madeira, then reached the Pole 34 days before Scott's party.

Which Everest pioneer later drove a tractor all the way to the South Pole?

Edmund Hillary spent the rest of his life on charity work for the Sherpa villages of Nepal.

Which member of Scott's polar party walked into a blizzard to his death on his 32nd birthday?

Lawrence Oates walked out to his death, yet Scott, Wilson and Bowers died in their tent less than two weeks later, just 11 miles from a food depot.

Which party claimed to be the first to reach the south magnetic pole, in 1909?

Mawson, David and Mackay reached what they took to be the pole; on a later expedition, Mawson struggled back to base alone after both his sledging companions died.

Shackleton's ship Endurance was crushed by ice in which sea in 1915?

The Weddell Sea's pack ice held Endurance for months before crushing it, and in 2022 searchers found the wreck 3,008 m down.

Shackleton sailed an open lifeboat 800 miles for help, leaving 22 men stranded on which island?

Elephant Island's 22 castaways lived on seal and penguin meat for months until a small steam tug reached them, and every man survived.

Which US Navy officer led the first flight over the South Pole, in 1929?

Richard E. Byrd did not fly the plane himself: he was the navigator, while Bernt Balchen was the pilot.

A Soviet surgeon, the only doctor at his Antarctic station in 1961, removed what from himself?

His appendix: Leonid Rogozov numbed his belly with a local anaesthetic, and about two weeks later he was back at his normal duties.

After Scott in 1912, nobody stood at the South Pole again until 1956, when a US Navy group arrived how?

By aircraft: a permanent US research station went up at the Pole later that year, as part of Operation Deep Freeze.

What helped Børge Ousland become the first person to cross Antarctica alone coast to coast in 1996-97?

A kite pulled Børge Ousland along on a few windy days, but he hauled his sledge himself most of the way and took no resupply.

Signed in 1959, the Antarctic Treaty banned what?

Military activity is banned, yet the treaty lets troops and military equipment support scientific research.

Which Asian country was among the 12 original signatories of the Antarctic Treaty?

Japan qualified by running a research station during the 1957-58 International Geophysical Year, while China and India joined only in 1983.

Soviet explorers set a bust of which leader on their station at Antarctica's Pole of Inaccessibility?

Vladimir Lenin's bust was mounted on the station's roof, and by 2007 snow had buried the building, leaving the bust just above the surface.

What shape do most national claims to Antarctica take?

Pie slices: they narrow to a single point at the South Pole, and where three of them overlap on the Antarctic Peninsula, rival countries claim the same land.

Which name won a 2016 public vote for Britain's new polar research ship, only to be passed over?

Boaty McBoatface won with 124,109 votes, but officials named the ship after Sir David Attenborough and gave the joke name to one of its robotic submarines.

Which stop-motion children's TV penguin lives with his family at the South Pole and speaks in made-up babble?

Pingu's original voices came from Italian performer Carlo Bonomi, and because he spoke a made-up language, viewers of any language could follow the show.

Which is the largest research base in Antarctica, able to house more than 1,000 people?

McMurdo ran on a small nuclear reactor, nicknamed 'Nukey Poo', until leaks and suspected cracking shut it down in 1972.

Emilio Marcos Palma, the first person born on the Antarctic mainland, was born in 1978 at which country's base?

Argentina flew his mother to Esperanza when she was seven months pregnant, hoping a birth there would strengthen its claim to the Antarctic Peninsula.

British scientists discovered the ozone hole in 1985 using data from which station?

Halley's scientists at first blamed a faulty instrument for the low ozone readings, and published only after years of checking that the losses were real.

The 1987 international agreement that restricted ozone-depleting chemicals is known as what?

The Montreal Protocol is one of the rare treaties ratified by every country, and the ozone hole over Antarctica is expected to heal by about 2066.

What does the Madrid Protocol, the Antarctic Treaty's environmental add-on, ban across the continent?

Mining is banned indefinitely, after Australia and France turned their backs on a 1988 convention that would have regulated it.

Which Antarctic landmark did Air New Zealand Flight 901 fly into in 1979, killing all 257 aboard?

A Ross Island volcano, Mount Erebus, lay on the plane's path because its navigation coordinates had been changed without telling the crew, who were flying in whiteout.

Which campaign group built its own base at Cape Evans in 1987 to press for Antarctica to become a 'World Park'?

Greenpeace's campaign piled pressure on the treaty nations, which in 1991 agreed to protect Antarctica as a natural reserve.

The word "antarctic" ultimately means what?

Opposite to the north: the Greek word for northern meant 'of the Bear', after a bear constellation in the northern sky.

Why does the South Pole get more solar radiation than the equator in midsummer?

It gets 24 hours of sunlight a day, yet bright snow reflects much of that light away, which cuts how much it can warm the Pole.

What is the name for the storm-force air currents that pour off the polar plateau to the coast?

Katabatic winds form when air over the high ice sheet chills, grows dense and slides downhill, speeding up as valleys funnel it toward the coast.

Why is Antarctica an especially good place to hunt for meteorites?

Dark stones show up on the ice, and flowing ice carries buried meteorites to spots where it rises and wears away, concentrating them there.

What inside Antarctic ice cores records carbon dioxide levels from thousands of years ago?

Trapped air bubbles form as snow is squeezed into ice, sealing in a sample of the atmosphere from that time.

Which Tierra del Fuego port, a gateway for Antarctic cruises, claims to be the world's southernmost city?

Ushuaia began in 1870 as a small settlement of British missionaries, long before government officials came to stay.

The Patagonian toothfish, illegally fished in Antarctic waters, is sold in the US under what name?

Chilean sea bass was a 1970s marketing name, chosen to sell an ugly, unfamiliar fish, and demand soared until stocks fell dangerously low.

The Southern Ocean, which surrounds Antarctica, ranks where in size among the five oceans?

The second-smallest ocean earns its own name because the Antarctic Circumpolar Current keeps its waters distinct from the oceans to the north.

Which BBC nature series was first to film a 'brinicle', an underwater icicle of brine, growing in Antarctica?

Frozen Planet's crew filmed the brinicle creeping down to the seabed, where it froze starfish and sea urchins to death in its path.

Which Southern Ocean creature has the largest eyes ever found in any animal?

The colossal squid's huge eyes may let it spot large predators such as sperm whales by the glow of the plankton they disturb in the dark.

What do the antifreeze proteins in many Antarctic fish latch onto?

Tiny ice crystals: the proteins cling to them and keep them small, so the fish can live in water colder than the normal freezing point of their tissue.

The opening of which seaway helped a current encircle Antarctica, cutting it off from warmer waters?

Drake Passage lies off Cape Horn, a key route for trading ships until the Panama Canal opened in 1914 and gave them a shortcut.

One of Antarctica's only two native flowering plants is what kind of plant?

A grass: Antarctic hair grass grows beside Antarctic pearlwort, and both have been spreading rapidly as the region warms.

Solveig Gunbjørg Jacobsen, the first child born and raised in the Antarctic region, was born in 1913 where?

Grytviken, South Georgia was a whaling station, and her father worked his way up there from blubber cooker to station manager.

Which country's Princess Elisabeth station was the first zero-emission research base in Antarctica?

Belgium's station runs on wind and sun, yet in December 2021 Covid still reached it, and 11 of its staff caught the virus.

Which rock band became the first to play all seven continents with a 2013 show in Antarctica?

Metallica played to about 120 scientists and contest winners, and the audience listened to the show through headphones.

Which John Carpenter horror film is set at a US research station in Antarctica?

The Thing was slated by critics on its 1982 release, but it has since been reappraised as one of the best science-fiction horror films ever made.