ANTARCTICA

PRESENTED BY: GROUP 7

Lara Faith P. Alcantara
Lhainey Marie S. Lagundi
Divine Ashley Kate M. Mena
Patrick James Pagulayan
 FACTS ABOUT ANTARCTICA
 Antarctica is the land of extremes.
 It is the coldest, windiest, and highest continent anywhere on earth.
It has the coldest temperature (-89.4℃ and -129℉)
 With an average elevation about 7,544 ft/ 2,300 meters above sea
level it is the highest continent.
 Even though it is covered in ice it receives some of the least amount
of rainfall, getting just slightly more rainfall than the Sahara
Dessert, making it the largest dessert on earth.
 Antarcticais the only continent that has never had an indigenous
population of humans because it has aways been such an extreme
environment.
THE HISTORY OF ANTARCTICA
 Itwas the ancient Greeks who first came up with the idea of
Antarctica. They knew about the Arctic - named Arktos – The
Bear, from the constellation the great bear, and they decided
that in order to balance the world there should be a similar
cold southern land mass that was the same but the opposite
“Ant-Arktos” – opposite The Bear.
 In 1773, James Cook circumnavigated Antarctica and although
he did not sight land, he found deposits of rock on the icebergs
showing that a continent must exist. The next to cross the
Antarctica Circle was Thaddeus Bellinghausen. He made the
first sighting of the continent in 1820.
 BENTLEY SUBGLACIAL TRENCH, ANTARCTICA
 Is the deepest ice on earth.
 The deepest known ice rest 2,555 meters below sea level, where the ice
is over 4 kilometers thick.
 The Bentley Subglacial Trench is a vast topographic trench in Marie
Byrd land, West Antarctica 80°S, 115°W. At 2,555 meters (8,382 ft)
below sea level, it (along with the deepest points within the
adjacent Byrd Subglacial Basin) is among the lowest points on the
surface of the Earth not covered by ocean, although it is covered by
ice.
 The trench was named in 1961 after Charles R. Bentley who was the
geophysicist in charge of the scientific expeditions in West Antarctica
in 1957–59 that led to its discovery.
MOUNT VINSON
 With an elevation of 16,607 feet above sea level. Mount Vinson is the
highest mountain in Antarctica. It is located on the southern part of
the main ridge of the Sentinel Range of the Ellsworth Mountains. Also
called Vinson Massif, Mount Vinson is more than 750 miles from the
South Pole, making it the most remote of the Seven Summits. It was
also the last discovered, last climbed and last named of the Seven
Summits. Antarctica's highest peak has a prominence of 16,066 feet
(4,897 meters), making it the eighth most prominent mountain in the
world.
 Mount Vinson is named for U.S. Rep. Carl Vinson of Georgia, who
served in Congress from 1935 to 1961 and was the former chairman of
the House Armed Services Committee.
MOUNT SIDLEY
 Mount Sidley is a massive, mainly snow-covered shield volcano which
is the highest and most imposing of the five volcanic mountains that
comprise the Executive Committee Range of Marie Byrd Land.
 Mount Sidley (77°02′S 126°06′W) is the highest dormant volcano
in Antarctica, a member of the Volcanic Seven Summits, with a
summit elevation of 4,181–4,285 meters (13,717–14,058 feet).
 The mountain was discovered by Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd on an
airplane flight on 18 November 1934 and named by him for Mabelle E.
Sidley, the daughter of William Horlick who was a contributor to the
1933–35 Byrd Antarctic Expedition.
 The first recorded ascent of Mount Sidley was by New Zealander Bill
Atkinson on 11 January 1990, while working in support of a United
States Antarctic Program scientific field party
MOUNT EREBUS
 Mount Erebus is an alkaline stratovolcano just off the shore of the Antarctic main land
(77 33'S, 167 10'E).
 It is the sixth-highest ultra mountain on the continent. With a summit elevation of
3,794 meters (12,448 feet), it is located in the Ross Dependency on Ross Island, which is
also home to three inactive volcanoes: Mount Terror, Mount Bird, and Mount Terra
Nova.
 The volcano has been active since about 1.3 million years ago and is the site of the
Mount Erebus Volcano Observatory run by the New Mexico Institute of Mining and
Technology.
 Mount Erebus was discovered on January 27, 1841 (and observed to be in eruption), by
polar explorer Sir James Clark Ross, who named it and its companion, Mount Terror,
after his ships, Erebus and Terror (which were later used by Sir John Franklin on his
disastrous Arctic expedition). Present with Ross on the Erebus was the young Joseph
Hooker, future president of the Royal Society and close friend of Charles
Darwin. Erebus is a dark region in Hades in Greek mythology, personified as
the Ancient Greek primordial deity of darkness, the son of Chaos.
BYRD GLACIER
 The Byrd Glacier is a major glacier in Antarctica, about
136 km long and 24 km wide, draining an extensive area of
the polar plateau and flowing eastward between
the Britannia Range and Churchill Mountains to discharge
into the Ross Ice Shelf at Barne Inlet. Its valley below the
glacier is the lowest point not to be covered by water on
Earth which reaches 2,780 m (9,121 feet) below sea level.
 It
was named by the NZ-APC after Rear Admiral Byrd, US
Navy, American Antarctic explorer.
ROSS ICE SHELF
 The Ross Ice Shelf is the largest ice shelf of Antarctica (as of 2013 an area of
roughly 500,809 square kilometers (193,363 sq mi) and about 800 kilometers
(500 mi) across: about the size of France). It is several hundred meters thick. The
nearly vertical ice front to the open sea is more than 600 kilometers (370 mi)
long, and between 15 and 50 meters (50 and 160 ft) high above the water
surface.[3]Ninety percent of the floating ice, however, is below the water surface.
 The ice shelf is named after Captain Sir James Clark Ross, who discovered it on 28
January 1841. It was originally called The Barrier, with various adjectives
including Great Ice Barrier, as it prevented sailing further south. Ross mapped
the ice front eastward to 160°W. In 1947, the US Board on Geographic Names
applied the name Ross Shelf Ice to this feature and published it in the original US
Antarctic Gazetteer. In January 1953 the name was changed to Ross Ice Shelf; that
name was published in 1956.
LAKE VOSTOK
 is the largest of Antarctica's almost 400 known subglacial lakes. Lake
Vostok is located at the southern Pole of Cold, beneath Russia's Vostok
Station under the surface of the central East Antarctic Ice Sheet, which is at
3,488 m (11,444 feet) above mean sea level. The surface of this fresh
water lake is approximately 4,000 m (13,100 feet) under the surface of the
ice, which places it at approximately 500 m (1,600 ft) below sea level.
 Russian scientist Peter Kropotkin first proposed the idea of fresh water
under Antarctic ice sheets at the end of the 19th century. He theorized that
the tremendous pressure exerted by the cumulative mass of thousands of
vertical meters of ice could decrease the melting point at the lowest
portions of the ice sheet to the point where the ice would become liquid
water. Kropotkin's theory was further developed by Russian glaciologist I.
A. Zotikov, who wrote his Ph.D. thesis on this subject in 1967.
MCMURDO DRY VALLEYS
 The McMurdo Dry Valleys are a row of largely snow-free valleys in Antarctica,
located within Victoria Land west of McMurdo Sound. The Dry Valleys
experience extremely low humidity and surrounding mountains prevent the
flow of ice from nearby glaciers. The rocks here are granites and gneisses, and
glacial tills dot this bedrock landscape, with loose gravel covering the ground.
 The region is one of the world's most extreme deserts, and includes many
features including Lake Vida, a saline lake, and the Onyx River, a meltwater
stream and Antarctica's longest river. Although no living organisms have been
found in the permafrost here, endolithicphotosynthetic bacteria have been
found living in the relatively moist interior of rocks and anaerobic bacteria,
with a metabolism based on iron and sulfur, live under the Taylor Glacier.
ENDERBY LAND
 Enderby Land is a projecting land mass of Antarctica.
Its shore extends from Shinnan Glacier at
about 67°55′S 44°38′E to William Scoresby
Bay at 67°24′S 59°34′E, approximately 1⁄24 of the
earth's longitude. It was first documented in western
and eastern literature in February 1831 by John
Biscoe aboard the whaling brig Tula, and named after
the Enderby Brothers of London, the ship's owners who
encouraged their captains to combine exploration with
sealing.
ALEXANDER ISLAND
 Alexander Island, which is also known as Alexander I Island, Alexander I
Land, Alexander Land, Alexander I Archipelago, and Zemlja Alexandra I, is the
largest island of Antarctica. It lies in the Bellingshausen Sea west of Palmer
Land, Antarctic Peninsula from which it is separated by Marguerite
Bay and George VI Sound. George VI Ice Shelf entirely fills George VI Sound and
connects Alexander Island to Palmer Land. The island partly surrounds Wilkins
Sound, which lies to its west. Alexander Island is about 390 kilometers (240 mi)
long in a north-south direction, 80 kilometers (50 mi) wide in the north, and 240
kilometers (150 mi) wide in the south. Alexander Island is the second largest
uninhabited island in the world, after Devon Island.
 Alexander Island was discovered on January 28, 1821, by a Russian expedition
under Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, who named it Alexander I Land for
the reigning Tsar Alexander I of Russia.
BEARDMORE GLACIER
 isone of the largest valley glaciers in the world, being 200 km
(125 mi) long and having a width of 40 km (25 mi). It descends about
2,200 m (7,200 ft) from the Antarctic Plateau to the Ross Ice
Shelf and is bordered by the Commonwealth Range of the Queen
Maud Mountains on the eastern side and the Queen Alexandra
Range of the Central Transantarctic Mountains on the western.
 The glacier was discovered and climbed by Ernest Shackleton during
his Nimrod Expedition of 1908. Although Shackleton turned back
before reaching the South Pole, he established the first proven route
towards the pole and, in doing so, became the first person to set foot
upon the polar plateau.