Antarctic Expedition

Why Antarctic Expedition works

Antarctica is Earth's southernmost continent, positioned asymmetrically around the South Pole and almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle, surrounded on all sides by the Southern Ocean. It is the fifth-largest continent, about 40% larger than Europe and nearly double the area of Australia, with a coastline stretching almost 18,000 kilometres. Most of that coastline is ice rather than exposed rock: as of a 1983 survey, 44% is floating ice shelf, 38% is ice walls resting on rock, and only about 5% is bare rock. Beneath the ice sheet that covers most of the continent lie subglacial lakes, including Lake Vostok, discovered under Russia's Vostok Station and one of the largest lakes in the world, its water thought to be slowly renewed by melting and freezing roughly every 13,000 years.

European awareness of a southern polar landmass predates its discovery: early maps such as the 1513 Piri Reis chart show a hypothetical Terra Australis, a continent classical scholars assumed had to exist to balance the lands of the northern hemisphere, though it bore no real relation to Antarctica itself. Captain James Cook's ships crossed the Antarctic Circle in January 1773, coming within about 120 kilometres of the coast before ice forced them back; by 1775 Cook judged a polar continent "probable." The first confirmed sightings came in 1820, when the First Russian Antarctic Expedition under Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev recorded an ice shelf on 27 January, three days before British captain Edward Bransfield sighted the Trinity Peninsula — with American sealer Nathaniel Palmer, also active in the area at the time, a possible contender for an even earlier sighting.

Tourists have visited Antarctica since 1957, and visits today are governed by the Antarctic Treaty and its Environmental Protocol, with the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators acting as the industry's self-regulatory body. Most visitors arrive by small or medium expedition ship at specific scenic landing sites chosen for their accessible concentrations of wildlife, and much of that tourism centres on birdwatching given the continent's large penguin populations — McDonald Beach, for instance, is a high-traffic site for viewing its Adélie penguin colony. The Southern Ocean around the continent supports penguins, blue whales, orcas, colossal squid, and fur seals, with Antarctic krill — which gathers in vast schools — acting as the keystone species that whales, seals, squid, and many seabirds depend on, and leopard seals ranging the Southern Ocean as apex predators.

Antarctica is the coldest, windiest, and driest of Earth's continents. Coastal temperatures can exceed 10°C in summer but fall below −40°C in winter, while the elevated interior may reach only about −30°C in summer and drop below −80°C in winter — the lowest natural air temperature ever recorded on Earth, −89.2°C, was measured at Russia's Vostok Station in 1983. Despite the ice, Antarctica is technically a polar desert: the continent receives an average of only about 150 millimetres of precipitation a year, mostly as snow, with the dry interior receiving less than 50 millimetres and the coast typically more than 200 millimetres.

Deposits of coal, hydrocarbons, iron ore, platinum, and other minerals have been identified on the continent, but not in quantities that make extraction viable, and the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, in force since 1998, restricts exploitation of Antarctic resources in any case. Life on the continent otherwise runs on research-station rhythms: McMurdo Station hosts Icestock, billed as the world's southernmost music festival, held annually since 1989 for the personnel stationed there and at nearby Scott Base, and the continent marks two shared holidays, Midwinter Day at the southern winter solstice and Antarctica Day on 1 December, commemorating the 1959 signing of the Antarctic Treaty.

• Antarctica — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

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