Antarctica

Introduction

fifth in size among the world's continents. Its landmass is almost wholly covered by a vast ice sheet.

Lying almost concentrically around the South Pole, Antarctica—the name of which means “opposite to the Arctic”—is the southernmost continent, a circumstance that has had momentous consequences for all aspects of its character. It covers about 5.5 million square miles (14.2 million square km), and would be essentially circular except for the outflaring Antarctic Peninsula, which reaches toward the southern tip of South America (some 600 miles [970 km] away), and for two principal embayments, the Ross Sea and the Weddell Sea. These deep embayments of the southernmost Pacific and Atlantic oceans make the continent somewhat pear-shaped, dividing it into two unequal-sized parts. The larger is generally known as East Antarctica because most of it lies in east longitudes. The smaller, wholly in west longitudes, is generally called West Antarctica. East and West Antarctica are separated by the 1,900-mile-long Transantarctic Mountains. Whereas East Antarctica consists largely of a high, ice-covered plateau, West Antarctica consists of an archipelago of mountainous islands covered and bonded together by ice.

The continental ice sheet contains approximately 7 million cubic miles (29 million cubic km) of ice, representing about 90 percent of the world's total. The average thickness is about 1.5 miles (2.45 km). Many parts of the Ross and Weddell seas are covered by ice shelves, or ice sheets floating on the sea. These shelves—the Ross Ice Shelf and the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf—together with other shelves around the continental margins, constitute about 10 percent of the area of Antarctic ice. Around the Antarctic coast, shelves, glaciers, and ice sheets continually “calve,” or discharge, icebergs into the seas.

Because of this vast ice, the continent supports only a primitive indigenous population of cold-adapted land plants and animals. The surrounding sea is as rich in life as the land is barren. With the decline of whaling and sealing, the only economic base in the past, Antarctica now principally exports the results of scientific investigations that lead to a better understanding of the total world environment. The present scale of scientific investigation of Antarctica began with the International Geophysical Year (IGY) in 1957–58. Although early explorations were nationalistic, leading to territorial claims, modern ones have come under the international aegis of the Antarctic Treaty. This treaty, which was an unprecedented landmark in diplomacy when it was signed in 1959 by 12 nations, preserves the continent for nonmilitary scientific pursuits.

Antarctica, the most remote and inaccessible continent, is no longer as unknown as it was at the start of IGY. All its mountain regions have been mapped and visited by geologists, geophysicists, glaciologists, and biologists. Some mapping data are now obtained by satellite rather than by observers on the surface. Many hidden ranges and peaks are known from geophysical soundings of the Antarctic ice sheets. By using radio-echo sounding instruments, systematic aerial surveys of the ice-buried terrains can be made.

The ice-choked and stormy seas around Antarctica long hindered exploration by wooden-hulled ships. No lands break the relentless force of the prevailing west winds as they race clockwise around the continent, dragging westerly ocean currents along beneath. The southernmost parts of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans converge into a cold, oceanic water mass with singularly unique biologic and physical characteristics. Early penetration of this Southern (or Antarctic) Ocean, as it has been called, in the search for fur seals led in 1820 to the discovery of the continent. Icebreakers and aircraft now make access relatively easy, although still not without hazard in stormy conditions. Many tourists have visited Antarctica, and it seems likely that, at least in the short run, scenic resources have greater potential for economic development than do mineral and biological resources.

The term Antarctic regions refers to all areas—oceanic, island, and continental—lying in the cold Antarctic climatic zone south of the Antarctic Convergence, an important boundary with little seasonal variability, where warm subtropical waters meet and mix with cold polar waters. For legal purposes of the Antarctic Treaty, the arbitrary boundary of latitude 60° S is used. The familiar map boundaries of the continent known as Antarctica, defined as the South Polar landmass and all its nonfloating grounded ice, are subject to change with future changes of climate. The continent was ice-free during most of its lengthy geologic history, and there is no reason to believe it will not become so again in the probably distant future.

Geologic record

Antarctica and continental drift

The geologic evolution of Antarctica has followed a course similar to that of the other southern continents. The earliest chapters in Antarctica's rather fragmentary record extend far back, perhaps as much as 3 billion years, into early Precambrian time. Similarity in patterns of crustal and biological evolution in the southern continents can be traced back some 150 million years, and evolutionary courses began to diverge conspicuously by about 70 million years ago, or the early Cenozoic Era. Plant and animal migration routes that apparently had interconnected all the southern continents were largely cut off by the outset of the Cenozoic. Antarctica became isolated at a time when land mammals diversified and flourished elsewhere, populating all the other continents of the world. Antarctica had long been thought to be a migratory path for marsupials moving between southern continents in early Cenozoic time. But documentation for the theory was not discovered until 1982, when the first mammal remains, a marsupial fossil, were found on Seymour Island in the Weddell Sea. The subsequent growth of Antarctica's ice sheets cut off any further migrations by land animals.
Now bathed by polar ice, Antarctica has abundant fossil evidence that its climate and terrain at one time supported far more populous flora and fauna than today's few seedless plants and primitive insects. Much of Antarctica was densely forestedMesozoic times (251 to 65.5 million years ago), dominated by southern conifers of podocarps and araucarias, with undergrowth of rain-forest-type ferns. Angiosperm trees, particularly the southern beech, Nothofagus, appeared during the Cretaceous Period (145.5 to roughly 65.5 million years ago) and lingered in places until Pliocene time (5.3 to 1.8 million years ago) as Antarctica drifted poleward, cooled, and became glaciated. Remains of luxuriant extinct floras, as well as fossils of Mesozoic reptiles, dinosaurs, and amphibians, have been discovered, and these compare so closely to those of other southern continents that many geologists have postulated former contiguity of these lands in a single, giant continent called Gondwana. Continental stratigraphic evidence and the dating of seafloors seem to indicate that the supercontinent broke apart along Jurassic rift faults 180 to 160 million years ago, and fragments such as Africa and Australia separated from Antarctica in Jurassic to Cretaceous and early Cenozoic times. Early stages of rifting were marked by immense outpourings of plateau lavas (Kirkpatrick Basalt, on Mount Kirkpatrick) and by related sill intrusions (Ferrar Dolerites) across Antarctica, including one of the world's largest layered gabbroic igneous complexes, the Dufek intrusion, in the Pensacola Mountains. in
Modern theory ties mobile zones to the interaction and jostling of immense crustal plates (see plate tectonics). Modern plate boundaries may be far different from ancient ones presumably marked by old fold belts. Ancient Antarctic mobile belts, such as are followed by today's Transantarctic Mountains, terminate at continental margins abruptly, as if sliced off, and seemingly reappear in other lands across young ocean basins. Much research has been concentrated on attempting to match intercontinentally the detailed structure of opposed coasts, such as between Antarctica and Australia, in an effort to learn whether they had been actually connected before the latest cycle of crustal spreading from intervening mid-oceanic ridges. Similarities between ancient mobile belts now suggest to some geologists that Antarctica may even have been connected to southwestern North America more than 600 million years ago, in late Precambrian time.

Structural framework

Most of the Antarctic geologic record lies hidden beneath the vast regions of snow and ice that make up more than 95 percent of the continent's surface terrain. No one knows what important segments of the record lie concealed in buried ranges such as the Gamburtsev Mountains, the topography of which has been mapped only by seismic reflections through the great East Antarctic Ice Sheet. The extraordinarily thick cover, the extremely difficult working conditions, and the tremendous expense of mounting expeditions into remote areas have long held geologic knowledge of Antarctica far behind that of other continents. Great advances by geologists of many Antarctic Treaty nations, however, have yielded geologic maps of at least reconnaissance scale for virtually all exposed mountain areas.
From results mainly of British expeditions early in the 20th century, the concept arose that Antarctica is made up of two structural provinces—a long, stable Precambrian shield in East Antarctica and a much younger Mesozoic and Cenozoic mobile belt in West Antarctica—separated by the fault-block belt, or horst, of the Transantarctic Mountains. East and West Antarctica have come to be known respectively as the Gondwana and Andean provinces, indicating general affinities of each sector with other regions—that is, the east seems to have affinity with the Gondwana region of peninsular India, and the west seems to represent a southerly continuation of the South American Andes. As new expeditions study and restudy each range in ever-increasing detail, concepts of the geologic structure are continually modified. Antarctica's structural record is now known to be more complex than that implied in the past.
The average thickness of the terrestrial crust for both East and West Antarctica approximates that of other continents. Although it has been postulated that West Antarctica might be an oceanic island archipelago if the ice were to melt, its crustal thickness of about 20 miles indicates an absence of oceanic structure. This thickness is similar to that of coastal parts of other continents. The crust thickens sharply along the Transantarctic Mountains front, possibly a deep crustal fault system, and averages about 25 miles thick in East Antarctica. Significant earthquakes are not recorded along this or other known faults in Antarctica, the most seismically quiet of all continents, in which mostly minor activity is associated with surrounding oceanic ridges or volcanoes. However, the occurrence of one unusually large earthquake of magnitude 6.4 in the Bellingshausen Sea in 1977 suggests that the Antarctic Plate may have greater seismicity than generally believed.
The ancient crust of Antarctica must have been highly mobile and the configuration of the continent many hundreds of millions of years ago in the Precambrian far different from today's. Ancient marine and lake basins were filled with a variety of sedimentary and volcanic debris eroded from primeval lands. During mountain-building episodes these materials were complexly deformed and recrystallized deep within the crust to form, particularly in East Antarctica, great crystalline-rock complexes. At the surface, rocks were uplifted and mountains were carved by erosion as sediments filled new basins and new folds of the Earth's crust were formed. Again and again this cycle was repeated during the evolution of Antarctica. Mobility ceased approximately 400 million years ago in the Transantarctic Mountains. Between that time, in the Devonian Period (416 million to 359.2 million years ago), and the middle part of the Jurassic Period (about 160 million years ago), a series of mainly quartzose sediments was laid down in ancient lakes and shallow seas in the sites of former mountain chains that had been carved away by erosion. Known as the Beacon Sandstone, this formation of platform sediments contains a rich record of extinct Antarctic life-forms, including freshwater fish fossils in Devonian-age rocks; ancient, temperate forests of trees known as Glossopteris in coal deposits of Permian age (about 245 to 286 million years old) and as Dicroidium in Triassic-age coals (those roughly 208 to 245 million years old); and large reptiles, such as Lystrosaurus, and amphibians in Triassic-age rocks. In 1990–91 the first dinosaur fossils were found in the Transantarctic Mountains near the South Pole; they resembled those of early Jurassic age known from China, and, together with associated plant fossils, they suggest the presence of mild climates at this time in Antarctica when this part of the continent is believed to have been at a latitude of about 65° S.
Tillites—rocks deposited by ancient glaciers—underlie Permian-age coal beds in numerous places in Antarctica just as they do in the other southern, including now tropical, continents. The widespread occurrence of glacial erratics, containing microfossils of Cretaceous and Cenozoic age, is an indication of the presence of rocks that are younger than the Beacon Sandstone lying underneath ice sheets near the Transantarctic Mountains. The youngest mountain chain in Antarctica is the southward extension of the Andes Mountains of South America that makes up the Antarctic Peninsula, Ellsworth Land, and part of Marie Byrd Land.

Relief

There are two faces of the present-day continent of Antarctica. One, seen visually, consists of the exposed rock and ice-surface terrain. The other, seen only indirectly by seismic or other remote-sensing techniques, consists of the ice-buried bedrock surface. Both evolved through long and slow geologic processes.
Effects of glacial erosion and deposition dominate everywhere in Antarctica, and erosional effects of running water are relatively minor. Yet, on warm summer days, rare and short-lived streams of glacial meltwater do locally exist. The evanescent Onyx River, for example, flows from Lower Wright Glacier terminus to empty into the nondrained basin of Lake Vanda near McMurdo Sound. Glacially sculptured landforms now predominate, as they must have some 300 million years ago, in an earlier period of continental glaciation of all of Gondwana.
Antarctica, with an average elevation of about 7,200 feet (2,200 metres) above sea level, is the world's highest continent. (Asia, the next, averages about 3,000 feet.) The vast ice sheets of East Antarctica reach heights of 11,500 feet or more in four main centres: Dome A (Argus) at 81° S, 77° E; Dome C at 75° S, 125° E; Dome Fuji at 77° S, 40° E; and Vostok station at 77° S, 104° E. Without its ice, however, Antarctica would probably average little more than about 1,500 feet. It would then consist of a far smaller continent (East Antarctica) and a nearby island archipelago. A vast lowland plain between 90° E and 150° E (today's Polar and Wilkes subglacial basins) would be fringed by the ranges of the Transantarctic Mountains and of the Gamburtsev Mountains, 6,500 to 13,000 feet high. The rest might be a hilly to mountainous terrain. Relief in general would be great, with elevations ranging from 16,066 feet (4,897 metres) at Vinson Massif in the Sentinel Range, the highest point in Antarctica, to more than 8,200 feet below sea level in an adjoining marine trough to the west (Bentley Subglacial Trench). Areas that are now called “lands,” including most of Ellsworth Land and Marie Byrd Land, would be beneath the sea.
Ice-scarred volcanoes, many still active, dot western Ellsworth Land, Marie Byrd Land, and sections of the coasts of the Antarctic Peninsula and Victoria Land, but principal activity is concentrated in the volcanic Scotia Arc. Only one volcano, Gaussberg (90° E), occurs along the entire coast of East Antarctica. Long dormant, Mount Erebus, on Ross Island, showed increased activity from the mid-1970s. Lava lakes have occasionally filled, but not overspilled, its crater, but the volcano's activity has been closely monitored because Antarctica's largest station (McMurdo Station, U.S.) lies on its lower flank. One of several violent eruptions of Deception Island, a volcanic caldera, in 1967–70 destroyed nearby British and Chilean stations. Whereas volcanoes of the Antarctic Peninsula and Scotia Arc are mineralogically similar to the volcanoes typical of the Pacific Ocean rim, the others in Antarctica are chemically like those of volcanoes along the East African Rift Valley.

Climate

The unique weather and climate of Antarctica provide the basis for its familiar appellations—Home of the Blizzard and White Desert. By far the coldestVostok Station (Russia) on July 21, 1983, on the high inland ice sheet to −76° F (−60° C) near sea level. Temperatures vary greatly from place to place, but direct measurements in most places are generally available only for summertime. Only at fixed stations operated since the IGY have year-round measurements been made. Winter temperatures rarely reach as high as 52° F (11° C) on the northern Antarctic Peninsula, which, because of its maritime influences, is the warmest part of the continent. Mean temperatures of the coldest months are −4° to −22° F (−20° to −30° C) on the coast and −40° to −94° F (−40° to −70° C) in the interior, the coldest period on the polar plateau being usually in late August just before the return of the sun. Whereas midsummer temperatures may reach as high as 59° F (15° C) on the Antarctic Peninsula, those elsewhere are usually much lower, ranging from a mean of about 32° F (0° C) on the coast to between −4° and −31° F (−20° and −35° C) in the interior. These temperatures are far lower than those of the Arctic, where monthly means range only from about 32° F in summer to −31° F in winter. continent, Antarctica has winter temperatures that range from −128.6° F (−89.2° C), the world's lowest recorded temperature, measured at
International concern is increasing over the possibility of global warming (an amplification of Earth's greenhouse effect). The glaciers and ice sheets of Antarctica may document such change. Some investigators have reported recent disintegration of some of Antarctica's ice shelves, but others have found no long-term consistent change in other places.
Wind chill—the cooling power of wind on exposed surfaces—is the major debilitating weather factor of Antarctic expeditions. Fierce winds characterize most coastal regions, particularly of East Antarctica, where cold, dense air flows down the steep slopes off interior highlands. Known as katabatic winds, they are a surface flow that may be smooth if of low velocity but that may also become greatly turbulent, sweeping high any loose snow, if a critical velocity is surpassed. This turbulent air may appear suddenly and is responsible for the brief and localized Antarctic “blizzards” during which no snow actually falls and skies above are clear. During one winter at Mirnyy Station, gusts reached more than 110 miles per hour on seven occasions. At Commonwealth Bay on the Adélie Coast the wind speed averaged 45 miles per hour (20 metres per second). Gusts estimated at between 140 and 155 miles per hour on Dec. 9, 1960, destroyed a Beaver aircraft at Mawson Station on the Mac. Robertson Land coast. Winds on the polar plateau are usually light, with monthly mean velocities at the South Pole ranging from about 9 miles per hour (4 metres per second) in December (summer) to 17 miles per hour (8 metres per second) in June and July (winter).
The Antarctic atmosphere, because of its low temperature, contains only about one-tenth of the water-vapour concentration found in temperate latitudes. This atmospheric water largely comes from ice-free regions of the southern oceans and is transported in the troposphere into Antarctica mostly in the 140° sector (80° E to 140° W) from Wilkes Land to Marie Byrd Land. Most of this water precipitates as snow along the continental margin. Rainfalls are almost unknown. Despite the tremendous volume of potential water stored as ice, Antarctica must be considered one of the world's great deserts; the average precipitation (water equivalent) is only about 2 inches (50 mm) per year over the polar plateau, though considerably more, perhaps 10 times as much, falls in the coastal belt. Lacking a heavy and protective water-vapour-rich atmospheric layer, which in other areas absorbs and reradiates to Earth long-wave radiation, the Antarctic surface readily loses heat energy into space.
Many factors determine Antarctica's climate, but the primary one is the geometry of the Sun-Earth relationship. The 23.5° axial tilt of the Earth to its annual plane of orbit, or ecliptic, around the Sun results in long winter nights and long summer days alternating between both polar regions and causing seasonal variations in climate. On midwinter day, about June 21, the Sun's rays reach to only 23.5° (not exact, because of refraction) from the South Pole along the latitude of 66.5° S, a line familiarly known as the Antarctic Circle. Although “night” theoretically is six months long at the geographic pole, one month of this actually is a twilight period. Only a few coastal fringes lie north of the Antarctic Circle. The amount of incoming solar radiation, and thus heat, depends additionally on the incident angle of the rays and therefore decreases inversely with latitude to reach a minimum at the geographic poles. These and other factors are essentially the same for both polar regions. The reason for their great climatic difference primarily lies in their reverse distributions of land and sea: the Arctic is an ocean surrounded by land, while Antarctica is a continent surrounded by ocean. The Arctic Ocean, a climate-ameliorating heat source, has no counterpart at the South Pole, the great elevation and perpetually reflective snow cover of which instead intensify its polar climate. Moreover, during Antarctic winters, freezing of the surrounding sea effectively more than doubles the size of the continent and removes the oceanic heat source to nearly 1,800 miles from the central polar plateau.
Outgoing terrestrial radiation greatly exceeds absorbed incoming solar radiation. This loss results in strong surface cooling, giving rise to the characteristic Antarctic temperature inversions in which temperature increases from the surface upward to about 1,000 feet above the surface. About 90 percent of the loss is replaced by atmospheric heat from lower latitudes, and the remainder by latent heat of water-vapour condensation.
Great cyclonic storms circle Antarctica in endless west-to-east procession, exchanging atmospheric heat to the continent from sources in the southern Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. Moist maritime air interacting with cold polar air makes the Antarctic Ocean in the vicinity of the Polar Front one of the world's stormiest. Few storms bring snowfalls to interior regions. With few reporting stations, weather prediction has been exceedingly difficult but is now greatly aided by satellite imagery.
A major focus of upper atmospheric research in Antarctica is to understand the processes leading to the annual springtime depletion in stratospheric ozone—the “ozone hole.” Ozone depletion has been steadily increasing since it was first detected in 1977. Ozone is destroyed as the result of chemical reactions on the surfaces of particles in polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs). These clouds are isolated within an atmospheric circulation pattern known as the “polar vortex,” which develops during the long, cold Antarctic winter. The chemical reactions take place with the arrival of sunlight in spring and are facilitated by the presence of halogens (chlorine and fluorine), which are mostly products of human activity. This process of ozone destruction, which also occurs to a lesser extent in the Arctic, increases the amount of ultraviolet-B radiation reaching Earth's surface, a type of radiation shown to impair photosynthesis in plants, cause an increase in skin cancer in humans, and damage DNA molecules in living things.

Solar-terrestrial and astrophysical studies

Antarctica, and particularly the South Pole, attracts much interest in astronomical and astrophysical studies as well as research on the interactions between the Sun and the upper atmosphere of Earth. The South Pole is a unique astronomical location (a station from which the Sun can be viewed continuously in summer) sitting at a high geomagnetic latitude with unequaled atmospheric clarity. It possesses a thick section of pure material (ice) that can be used as a cosmic particle detector. Automatic geophysical observatories on the high polar plateau now record information on the polar ionosphere and magnetosphere, providing data that are critical to an understanding of Earth's response to solar activity.
The Center for Astrophysical Research in Antarctica (CARA) is a joint project facilitated by the United States and Germany with collaborators in other countries. CARA supports a submillimetre-wave telescope, several other telescopes, and a program to measure the properties of relict radiation left over from the big bang—useful in testing cosmological models.
One of the most unique astrophysical observatories on Earth is AMANDA, the Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array. This involves an array of hundreds of optical devices set at depths of up to 1.2 miles (2 km) in the ice below the South Pole. It is essentially a telescope built within the ice sheet to detect high-energy neutrinos that pass through the Earth from distant sources.

Glaciers and seas

Glaciation

Antarctica provides the best available picture of the probable appearance 20,000 years ago of northern North America under the great Laurentide Ice Sheet. Mountain glaciers, which formed on such highlands as the Sentinel Range perhaps as early as 50 million years ago, advanced down valleys to calve into the sea. Fringing ice shelves were built and later became grounded as glaciation intensified. Local ice caps developed, covering West Antarctic island groups as well as the mountain ranges of East Antarctica. The ice caps eventually coalesced into great ice sheets that tied together West and East Antarctica into the single continent that is known today. Except for a possible major deglaciation as recently as 3 million years ago, the continent has been largely covered by ice since the first glaciers appeared.
Causal factors leading to the birth and development of these continental ice sheets and then to their decay and death are, nevertheless, still poorly understood. The factors are complexly interrelated. Moreover, once developed, ice sheets tend to form independent climatic patterns and thus to be self-perpetuating and eventually perhaps even self-destructing. Cold air masses draining off Antarctic lands, for example, cool and freeze surrounding oceans in winter to form an ice pack, which reduces solar energy input by increasing reflectivity and makes interior continental regions even more remote from sources of open oceanic heat and moisture. The East Antarctic Ice Sheet has grown to such great elevation and extent that little atmospheric moisture now nourishes its central part.
The volume of South Polar ice must have fluctuated greatly at times since the birth of the ice sheets. Glacial erratics and glacially striated rocks on mountain summits now high above current ice-sheet levels testify to an overriding by ice at much higher levels. General lowering of levels caused some former glaciers flowing from the polar region through the Transantarctic Mountains to recede and nearly vanish, producing such spectacular “dry valleys” as the Wright, Taylor, and Victoria valleys near McMurdo Sound. Doubt has been shed on the common belief that Antarctic ice has continuously persisted since its origin by the discovery reported in 1983 of Cenozoic marine diatoms—believed to date from the Pliocene Epoch—in glacial till of the Beardmore Glacier area. The diatoms are believed to have been scoured from young sedimentary deposits of basins in East Antarctica and incorporated into deposits of glaciers moving through the Transantarctic Mountains. If so, Antarctica may have been free or nearly free of ice as recently as about 3 million years ago, when the diatom-bearing beds were deposited in a marine seaway; and the Antarctic Ice Sheet may have undergone deglaciations perhaps similar to those that occurred later during interglacial stages in the Northern Hemisphere. Evidence of former higher sea levels found in many areas of the Earth seems to support the hypothesis that such deglaciation occurred. If Antarctica's ice were to melt today, for example, global sea levels would probably rise about 150 to 200 feet.
The Antarctic Ice Sheet seems to be approximately in a state of equilibrium, neither increasing nor decreasing significantly according to the best estimates. Snow precipitation is offset mainly by continental ice moving seaward by three mechanisms—ice-shelf flow, ice-stream flow, and sheet flow. The greatest volume loss is by calving from shelves, particularly the Ross, Ronne, Filchner, and Amery ice shelves. Much loss also occurs by bottom melting, but this is partly compensated by a gain in mass by accretion of frozen seawater. The quantitative pattern and the balance between gain and loss are known to be different at different ice shelves, but melting probably predominates. The smaller ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula are currently retreating, breaking up into vast fields of icebergs, likely due to rising temperature and surface melting.
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) has been the subject of much recent research because it may be unstable. The Ross Ice Shelf is largely fed by huge ice streams descending from theWAIS along the Siple Coast. These ice streams have shown major changes—acceleration, deceleration, thickening, and thinning—in the last century or so. These alterations have affected the grounding line, where grounded glaciers lift off their beds to form ice shelves or floating glacier tongues. Changes to the grounding line may eventually transform the WAIS proper, potentially leading to removal of this ice sheet and causing a major rise in global sea level. Although the possibility of all this happening in the next 100 years is remote, major modifications in the WAIS in the 21st century are not impossible and could have worldwide effects.
These ice sheets also provide unique records of past climates from atmospheric, volcanic, and cosmic fallout; precipitation amounts and chemistry; temperatures; and even samples of past atmospheres. Thus ice-core drilling, and the subsequent analysis of these cores, has provided new information on the processes that cause climate to change. A deep coring hole at the Russian station Vostok brought up a climate and fallout history extending back more than 400,000 years. Although near the bottom, drilling has stopped because a huge freshwater lake lies between the ice and the bed at this location. Lake Vostok has probably been isolated from the atmosphere for tens of millions of years, leading to speculation of what sort of life may have evolved in this unusual setting. Research is being conducted on how to answer this question without contaminating the water body. Lake Vostok has also attracted the attention of the planetary science community, because it is a possible test site for future study of Jupiter's moon Ganymede. Ganymede possesses a layer of liquid water beneath a thick ice cover and thus has a potential for harbouring life.
Thousands of meteorites have been discovered on “blue ice” areas of the ice sheets. Only five fragments had been found by 1969, but since then more than 9,800 have been recovered, mainly by Japanese and American scientists. Most specimens appear to have landed on Antarctic ice sheets between about 700,000 and 10,000 years ago. They were carried to blue ice areas near mountains where the ancient ice ablated and meteorites became concentrated on the surface. Most meteorites are believed to be from asteroids and a few from comets, but some are now known to be of lunar origin. Other meteorites of a rare class called shergottites had a similar origin from Mars. One of these Martian shergottites has minute structures and a chemical composition that some workers have suggested is evidence for life, though this claim is very controversial.

The surrounding seas

The seas around Antarctica have often been likened to the moat around a fortress. The turbulent “Roaring Forties” and “Furious Fifties” lie in a circumpolar storm track and a westerly oceanic current zone commonly called the West Wind Drift, or Circumpolar Current. Warm, subtropical surface currents in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans move southward in the western parts of these waters and then turn eastward upon meeting the Circumpolar Current. The warm water meets and partly mixes with cold Antarctic water, called the Antarctic Surface Water, to form a mass with intermediate characteristics called Subantarctic Surface Water. Mixing occurs in a shallow but broad zone of approximately 10° latitude lying south of the Subtropical Convergence (at about 40° S) and north of the Antarctic Convergence (between about 50° and 60° S). The Subtropical Convergence generally defines the northern limits of a water mass having so many unique physical and biological characteristics that it is often given a separate name, the Antarctic, or sometimes the Southern, Ocean; it contains about 10 percent of the global ocean volume.
The two convergences are well defined and important oceanic boundary zones that profoundly affect climates, marine life, bottom sedimentation, and ice-pack and iceberg drift. They are easily identified by rapid changes in temperature and salinity. Antarctic waters are less saline than tropical waters because of their lower temperatures and lesser evaporational concentration of dissolved salts. When surface waters move southward from the Subtropical Convergence zone into the subantarctic climatic belt, their temperatures drop by as much as about 9° to 16° F (5° to 9° C). Across the Antarctic Convergence, from the subantarctic into the Antarctic climatic zone, surface-water temperature drops further.
Whereas the pattern of surface currents, controlled largely by the Earth's rotation, winds, water-density differences, and the geometry of basins, is relatively well understood, that of deeper water masses is more complex and less well known. North-flowing Antarctic Surface Water sinks to about 3,000 feet beneath warmer Subantarctic Surface Water along the Antarctic Convergence to become the Subantarctic Intermediate Water. This water mass, as well as the cold Antarctic Bottom Water, spreads far north beyond the Equator to exchange with waters of the Northern Hemisphere. The movement of the Antarctic Bottom Water is identifiable in the Atlantic as far north as the Bermuda Rise. Currents near the continent result in a circumferential belt of surface-water divergence accompanied by upwelling of deeper water masses.
Two forms of floating ice masses build out around the continent: (1) glacier-fed semipermanent ice shelves, some of enormous size, such as the Ross Ice Shelf, and (2) an annually frozen and melted ice pack that in winter reaches to about 56° S in the Atlantic and 64° S in the Pacific. Antarctica has been called the pulsating continent because of the annual buildup and retreat of its secondary ice-fronted coastline. Pushed by winds and currents, the ice pack is in continual motion. This movement is westward in the coastal belt of the East Wind Drift at the continent edge and eastward (farther north) at the belt of the West Wind Drift. Icebergs—calved fragments of glaciers and ice shelves—reach a northern limit at about the Subtropical Convergence. With an annual areal variation about six times as great as that for the Arctic ice pack, the Antarctic pack doubtless plays a far greater role in varying heat exchange between ocean and atmosphere and thus probably in altering global weather patterns. Long-term synoptic studies, now aided by satellite imagery, show long-period thinning in the Antarctic ice-pack regimen possibly related to global climate changes.
As part of the Deep Sea Drilling Project conducted from 1968 to 1983 by the U.S. government, the drilling ship Glomar Challenger undertook several cruises of Antarctic and subantarctic waters to gather and study materials on and below the ocean floor. Expeditions included one between Australia and the Ross Sea (1972–73); one in the area south of New Zealand (1973); one from southern Chile to the Bellingshausen Sea (1974); and two in the Drake Passage and Falkland Islands area (1974 and 1979–80). Among the ship's most significant findings were hydrocarbons discovered in Tertiary sediments (those 2.58 to 65.5 million years old) in the Ross Sea and rocks carried by icebergs from Antarctica found in late Oligocene sediments (those roughly 23.7 to 36.6 million years old) at numerous locations. Researchers inferred from these ice-borne debris that Antarctica was glaciated at least 25 million years ago.
Internationally funded drilling operations began in 1985 with the Ocean Drilling Program, using the new drilling vessel JOIDES Resolution to expand earlier Glomar Challenger studies. Studies in the Weddell Sea (1986–87) suggested that surface waters were warm during Late Cretaceous to early Cenozoic time and that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet did not form until about 10 million to 5 million years ago, which is much later than inferred from evidence on the continent itself. Drilling of the Kerguelen Plateau near the Amery Ice Shelf (1987–88) entailed the study of the rifting history of the Indian-Australian Plate from East Antarctica and revealed that this submerged plateau—the world's largest such feature—is of oceanic origin and not a continental fragment, as had been previously thought.

Plant life

The cold desert climate of Antarctica supports only an impoverished community of cold-tolerant land plants that are capable of surviving lengthy winter periods of total or near-total darkness during which photosynthesis cannot take place. Growth must occur in short summer bursts lasting only a few days, a few weeks, or a month or two, depending upon such diverse factors as latitude, seasonal snowpacks, elevation, topographic orientation, wind, and moisture, in both the substrate and the atmosphere. Moisture is the most important single variable and is provided mainly by atmospheric water vapour and by local melt supplies from fallen snow, drift snow, and permafrost. Stream runoff is exceedingly rare. Extreme cold, high winds, and aridity inhibit growth even in summer in most areas. There are, however, certain areas at high latitude and high elevation that have local microclimates formed by differential solar heating of dark surfaces, and these areas are able to support life. The importance of such microclimates was demonstrated by the second Byrd Antarctic Expedition (1933–35), which found that lichens in Marie Byrd Land grow preferentially on darker-coloured heat-absorbing rock.
Antarctic plants total about 800 species, of which 350 are lichens. Lichens, although slow-growing, are particularly well adapted to Antarctic survival. They can endure lengthy high-stress periods in dormancy and almost instantly become photosynthetic when conditions improve. Bryophytes (mosses and liverworts), totaling about 100 species, predominate in maritime regions, but mosses can grow nearly everywhere that lichens grow. Liverworts are reported only from coastal and maritime regions. Numerous species of molds, yeasts, and other fungi, as well as freshwater algae and bacteria, complete the listing of Antarctic plants. These forms are extremely widespread and are reported as far as latitude 87° S. In addition, Antarctic seas are highly productive in plankton plant life, particularly in near-shore, nutrient-rich zones of upwelling. Diatoms, a type of algae, are especially abundant.
Although soils are essentially not of humic type, they commonly are not sterile either, in that they may contain such microorganisms as bacteria or a variety of blue-green algae. The blue-green algae Nostoc locally contribute minor organic compounds to soils.
Today's barren Antarctic landscape little resembles ancient Paleozoic and Mesozoic ones with their far greater floral displays. Antarctic glaciation, probably beginning 50 million years ago, forced the northward migration of all vascular plants (ferns, conifers, and flowering plants). Only nonwoody forms have again populated subantarctic regions and have scarcely repenetrated the Antarctic zone.
Unlike Antarctica, lying south of the Antarctic Convergence, the islands north of the Convergence in the subantarctic botanical zone—including the South Georgia, Crozet, Kerguelen, and Macquarie islands—are characterized by an abundance of vascular plants of many species, at least 50 being identified on South Georgia alone. Whereas plants reproducing by spores are characteristic of Antarctica, seed plants chiefly characterize subantarctic regions.
Humans have greatly influenced the natural ecosystem in many Antarctic and subantarctic regions. Alien species of vascular plants near whaling stations have been introduced, and doubtless many alien microorganisms exist near all Antarctic stations. Alien herbivores, chiefly sheep and rabbits, have decimated plant communities on many subantarctic islands. Rabbits have exterminated the native cabbage Pringlea antiscorbutica over wide areas on Kerguelen, and sheep have decimated tussock communities on South Georgia. Increasing numbers of tourists will have an impact on Antarctica's fragile ecosystem.

Animal life

Land fauna

The native land fauna is wholly invertebrate. Apparently climatically less tolerant and less easily dispersed, the fauna follows plant colonization of newly deglaciated regions and therefore is not as widely distributed. The Antarctic microfauna includes heliozoans, rotifers, tardigrades, nematodes, and ciliate protozoans. The protozoans dominate soil and freshwater communities. The terrestrial macrofauna consists entirely of arthropods, many species being parasitic on birds and seals. The principal arthropod groups represented include Acarina (mites), Mallophaga (biting lice), Collembola (springtails), Anoplura (sucking lice), Diptera (midges), and Siphonaptera (fleas). Two species of beetles, probably alien, are known from islands near the Antarctic Peninsula. The dominant free-living forms, mites and springtails, live under stones and are associated with spore-reproducing plants.