Antarctica
The frozen continent at the bottom of the world
Antarctica is the coldest, driest, windiest, and highest continent on average, a 14.2-million-square-kilometer (5.5-million-square-mile) dome of ice centered on the South Pole. Almost the entire landmass — about 98 percent — lies buried beneath an ice sheet that averages nearly two kilometers thick and locks up roughly two-thirds of the planet's fresh water. No country owns it, and no human population permanently lives there — its only residents are rotating crews of scientists and the wildlife of its coasts.
Beneath the ice lies a true continent of mountains, valleys, and even subglacial lakes, but at the surface the ice rules. The Transantarctic Mountains split the landmass in two, and the Vinson Massif rises to 4,892 meters (16,050 feet). The lowest natural air temperature ever recorded on Earth, about −89.2 °C (−128.6 °F), was measured here at Vostok Station. Around the edges, vast floating ice shelves calve icebergs into the Southern Ocean, while penguins, seals, and seabirds crowd the narrow ice-free margins.
Governed by the Antarctic Treaty since 1961, the continent is set aside for peaceful scientific research, with military activity and mineral mining banned. Its ice holds a frozen archive of Earth's climate stretching back hundreds of thousands of years, and the stability of its ice sheets is among the most consequential questions in modern climate science, since their melting would reshape coastlines worldwide.