8 Things You Didn't Know About Antarctica

Though it's larger than both Europe and Australia Antarctica remains almost entirely uninhabited this mysterious continent is home to Hardy wildlife and the occasional scientist but most of the region remains completely enigmatic but with advancements in science we are slowly learning more about this frozen continent today we are exploring

8 interesting facts about Antarctica

8. We don't normally associate ice and volcanoes but both of these elements exist in abundance on Antarctica in fact Antarctica is home to the largest volcanic region on earth it is home to at least 91 different volcanoes most of which are deep although the vast ice sheet with the highest as tall as the Eiger which stands at almost 4000 meters in Switzerland there have been no eruptions in Antarctica for more than 2,000 years but by some measurements the region is overdue measuring volcanism in Antarctica is problematic as the traditional means of assessing volcanoes heat and smoke are difficult to assess in sources buried deep below the ice and the activity of this range could have worrying consequences if one of these volcanoes were to erupt it could further destabilize West Antarctica ice sheets set glacier expert Robert Bingham of the many volcanoes that protrude above the surface the most active is Mount Erebus which stands at about twelve thousand four hundred feet above sea level it is located in the Ross dependency on Ross Island which is also home to three inactive volcanoes Mount Terror Mount Byrd and Mount Terra Nova the volcano has been active since about 1.3 million years ago

7. Though it appears to be a frozen wasteland Antarctica is actually home to plentiful natural resources the vast majority of the continent is coated in thick ice making exploration difficult but the resources are present all the same for example 90% of the world's freshwater ice and 70% of the total freshwater is stored on Antarctica to put that in perspective if even a single ice sheet were to melt the Earth's oceans would rise by a whopping 16 feet at the moment Antarctica is mostly a hub for scientific research rather than commercial projects but through recent exploration it is believed to contain large mineral deposits primarily copper some also believe that Antarctica is home to large petroleum deposits but no one has confirmed this fact due to the Antarctic signed in 1959 no commercial mining is allowed on Antarctica this was a fortunate choice because the continent is home to numerous unique species that would suffer from large-scale industry it would be further complicated by the fact that no one formerly owns Antarctica and opening the area to commercial pursuits would lead to a land graph and maybe even a proxy war among the world's many nations

6. In the vast history of the earth many areas have undergone cataclysmic changes ocean floors often become deserts and vice versa but would you believe that Antarctica was once home to a tropical climate in fact for most of the past 100 million years whose South Pole was a tropical paradise it was a green beautiful place said professor Jane Francis of Leeds University School of Earth and environment lots of furry mammals including opossums and beavers live there the weather was tropical it is only in the recent geological past that it got so cold the study also underlined the extreme contrast between modern and past climate conditions in Antarctica and the extent of global warming during periods of elevated carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere the exceptionally warm period 55 to 48 million years ago was the warmest era in the Earth's history during the past 70 million years this is particularly important because it means the atmospheric carbon dioxide is trapped in the ice from this period as the ice melts it will release the carbon dioxide and create a feedback loop if it continues unabated this will result in a major climate shift with cataclysmic results it's possible that an arctic ax will return to a tropical state in the near future

5. In total eleven babies have been born on Antarctica and remarkably none of them died as infants Antarctica therefore has the lowest infant mortality rate of any continent at 0% the first human born on the continent was Emilio Marcos Palma who was born at Argentine Army's Esperanza base near the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula on January 7 1978 his birth was not happenstance however at that time Britain Chile and Argentina were competing to affirm the sovereignty of the icy island one way for a government to demonstrate its commitment in a certain aura of authority was to populate the land with native-born citizens so the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet airlifted a pregnant Chilean woman on the barren landscape so she could give birth to a Chilean baby on an Arctic soil the ensuing joke apparently was that Chileans were sending recently married couples to their own Antarctic base in order to claim the first baby both conceived and born in the territory to this day Chile is the only country with non-scientific settlements on the South Pole the latin-american country has two full-time military outarticals with populations in the low hundreds

4. Though most of the continent is coated in snow there are parts of Antarctica that have been dubbed the driest place on earth an area called the Dry Valleys has seen no rain for nearly two million years there is absolutely no precipitation in this region and it makes up a 4,800 square kilometer region of almost no water ice or snow though there are technically some small water features they have not had any net gain or loss of water in over two million years the similarity between terrain and nature with Mars surface has allowed NASA to conduct experiments it became the perfect place to test the high slope ability of Viking spacecraft but that pales in comparison to the friis Hills which have not seen water in 14 million years the next driest place in the world is the Atacama Desert in Chile and Peru there are no Blazers that feed water to this area and thus very little life can survive some weather stations in this region have not received rain for years while another station reports an average of one millimeter per year

3. Scientists from Sweden found a fossilized cocoon in Antarctica containing the world's old its sperm the discovery of the fossilized sperm found inside the walls of a 50 million year old warm cocoon has been branded remarkable by scientists the findings published by the Royal Society in 2015 say that the specimen is the oldest animal sperm ever found the prehistoric sex cells belong to a class of earthworms and leeches called [ __ ] alotta in date from 50 million years ago in the early Eocene period when the first horses rhinos and sheep emerged the fossil was able to form and survive so long because the sperm became trapped in the jelly-like wall of the [ __ ] a lot of cocoon before it hardened in a manner similar to bugs becoming trapped in amber the creature was then fossilized and preserved over millions of years spermatozoa being very transient and delicate are hardly ever preserved in the fossil said the lead author of the study the ancient worm is thought to have secreted the cocoon while mating egg and sperm would then be released into the cocoon and protected by surrounding material the cocoon finally being sealed it would take several hours for the surrounding material to harden biological materials would then become trapped in this wall researchers suggest that this is how the sperm fossil was able to form and be preserved for millions of years

2. There is a small waterfall near McMurdo Station that has a very distinctive and ominous appearance called blood falls this haunting waterfall appears to consist of human blood due to its bright red color for years researchers straight away from these Falls believing that they were bad luck but in recent years they were able to explain this strange phenomenon imaging from underneath the glacier help solve the mystery revealing a complex network of sublation rivers and a subglacial Lake all filled with brine high and iron giving the Falls its reddish tint the research team calculates that the brine water takes approximately 1.5 million years to finally reach the blood Falls as it makes its way through fissures and channels in the glacier perhaps most amazingly this unique ecosystem is home to a community of microbes which has been present for more than two million years proving that life can exist in the most extreme locations

1. The Ross Ice Shelf is the largest ice shelf of Antarctica it is several hundred meters thick the current estimate of its area is about 182 thousand square miles making it roughly the size of France the Shelf has served as an important gateway for explorations of the Antarctic interior including those carried out by many of the most famous expeditions as the idiom ghost the visible part of the Ross Ice Shelf is just the tip of the iceberg though it rises 50 metres above the surface of the water the vast majority lies below the oceans waves just as the rest of Antarctica is melting the Ross Ice Shelf is slowly dissolving into the water but it is a common misconception that the ice shelf itself leads to rising tides melting of these ice shelves has no direct effect on global sea levels since the ice is already at equilibrium with the surrounding water but the ice shelves greatly slow the flow of glaciers on the continent that would otherwise slide faster into the ocean causing water levels to rise if it continues at its current rate the Ross Ice Shelf could cause water levels to rise as much as 38 feet