A BRIEF GEOGRAPHICAL SURVEY
The Antarctic continent extends around the South Pole and is circumscribed by the Antarctic Circle to 66 ° 33' S, excluding the Antarctic Peninsula, which extends northwards and is facing South America.
Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans bathe the continent, and determine a wide sea zone which surrounds it completely. Distance to other continents are: South America, 1,000 km (621 miles); Africa, 3,600 km (2,236 miles); Tasmania, 2,250 km (1,398 miles); New Zeland, 2,200 km (1,367 miles). Such an isolation from the rest of continents, through the stormiest seas around the world, is an insurmontable barrier which explains the complete lack of a superior fauna. The existing fauna is only a coastal one, including birds and aquatic adapted specimens whose food source is situated in the sea.
An ice sheet covers the Antarctica, hiding its perimeter, its physical relief and its real dimensions; as a result, its area is not known exactly, but is estimated about 14 million square kilometers (8.6 million square miles). If the continent is taken to include the surrounding islands and iced seas, this figure increases significantly. The whole area is called the Antarctic.
Great indentations determined by Ross and Wedell seas divide the Antarctica into two regions of different sizes called: East (or Greater) Antarctica, and West (or Lesser) Antarctica, including the Antarctic Peninsula.
The general aspect of the Antarctic continent is like a big inland plateau, the "Polar Plateau", whose height at the South Pole reaches 3,000 meters (9,842 feet), 2,700 meters of which correspond to the ice thickness. This cover, that makes the Antarctica the highest average continent in the world (2,000 meters upon sea level), hides the underlying relief, allowing the only outcrop of those mountain formations that exceed in height the ice’s thickness covering them and called "Nunatak".
The ice sheet resulting from precipitation flows by gravity down and towards the periphery, and it projects into the sea through valleys, which generates alpin-type glaciers, or it flows though less accidented terrains or through indentations of its perimeter, originating ice shelves.
When moving to the sea, these formations float and calve off forming icebergs that are carried northwards by marine streams, where they finish by being destroyed by pounding waves and heigh temperatures.
The highest peak in Antarctica is Vinson Massif (5,620 m, 18,438 ft) on Elsworth Land. There is a volcano in activity, the Mount Erebus, on Ross island, in Ross sea.
In the Argentine Antarctic sector, Deception Island is the crater of a volcano that erupted on December 4, 1967.
On the Antarctic Continent are situated the Geographical South Pole, the South Magnetic Pole, the South Geomagnetic Pole, the Cold Pole with -89.3°C (-128.7°F) and the Pole of inaccessibility.
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