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The Antarctic ice sheet is a continental glacier covering 98% of the Antarctic continent, with an area of 14 million square kilometres (5.4 million square miles) and an average thickness of over 2 kilometres (1.2 mi). It is the largest of Earth's two current ice sheets, containing 26.5 million cubic kilometres (6,400,000 cubic miles) of ice ...
The ice sheet has an average thickness of around 2.2 km (1.4 mi). The thickest ice in Antarctica is located near Adélie Land close to the ice sheet's southeast coast, at the Astrolabe Subglacial Basin, where it measured 4,897 m (16,066 ft) around 2013.
A map of West Antarctica. The total volume of the entire Antarctic ice sheet is estimated at 26.92 million km 3 (6.46 million cu mi), while the WAIS contains about 2.1 million km 3 (530,000 cu mi) in ice that is above the sea level, and ~1 million km 3 (240,000 cu mi) in ice that is below it.
The geography of Antarctica is dominated by its south polar location and, thus, by ice. The Antarctic continent, located in the Earth 's southern hemisphere, is centered asymmetrically around the South Pole and largely south of the Antarctic Circle. It is washed by the Southern (or Antarctic) Ocean or, depending on definition, the southern ...
The geology of Antarctica covers the geological development of the continent through the Archean, Proterozoic and Phanerozoic eons . The geological study of Antarctica has been greatly hindered by the fact that nearly all of the continent is continuously covered with a thick layer of ice. However, techniques such as remote sensing have begun to ...
The Ross Ice Shelf is one of many such shelves. It reaches into Antarctica from the north, and covers an area of about 520,000 km 2 (200,000 sq mi), nearly the size of France. [2] [3] The ice mass is about 800 km (500 mi) wide and 970 km (600 mi) long. In some places, namely its southern areas, the ice shelf can be almost 750 m (2,450 ft) thick ...
An image of Antarctica differentiating its landmass (dark grey) from its ice shelves (minimum extent, light grey, and maximum extent, white) Edge of Ekstrom Ice Shelf Ice shelves are attached to a large portion of the Antarctic coastline.
An ice sheet is a body of ice which covers a land area of continental size - meaning that it exceeds 50,000 km 2. [4] The currently existing two ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica have a much greater area than this minimum definition, measuring at 1.7 million km 2 and 14 million km 2, respectively. Both ice sheets are also very thick, as ...