Introduction
The coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth was minus 128.56 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 89.2 degrees Celsius), registered on July 21, 1983, at Antarctica's Vostok station.
It's seriously dry
The Dry Valleys of Antarctica are the driest place on Earth, with low humidity and almost no snow or ice cover.
There's a lot of wind
On average, Antarctica is the windiest continent. Winds in some places of the continent can reach 200 mph (320 km/h).
It's a big place
Antarctica is the fifth largest continent.
There's lots of ice
The Antarctic Ice Sheet is the largest single mass of ice on Earth.
Antarctica is an icy land
Ninety-nine percent of Antarctica is covered by ice.
It stores a lot of fresh water
Antarctica is home to about 70 percent of the planet's fresh water, and 90 percent of the planet's freshwater ice.
It's melting
If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melted entirely, it would raise global average sea levels by 16 feet (5 meters), according to some estimates.
The ice is thick
The average thickness of Antarctic ice is about 1 mile (1.6 kilometers).
It's bigger than the U.S.
Including its islands and attached floating plains of ice, Antarctica has an area of about 5.4 million square miles (14 million square kilometers), about one-and-a-half times the size of the United States.
The Ross Ice Shelf is the largest
The largest of Antarctica's ice shelves (floating tongues of ice) is the Ross Ice Shelf, which measures some 197,000 square miles (510,680 square kilometers), or 3.7 percent of the total area of Antarctica.
