Antarctica

Assembled from 35 blocks · 2 evidence · 62 related

1. Story
2. A continent of roughly 14 million square kilometres surrounded on every side by open ocean, of which about 98 per cent is buried under an ice sheet holding the great majority of the world's fresh water - enough, if it all melted, to raise global sea level by something close to sixty metres. Its mean surface elevation is the highest of any continent because the ice itself is kilometres thick. It has no native land vertebrates at all: no land mammal, no reptile, no amphibian, no flightless land bird other than penguins that feed at sea. The largest exclusively terrestrial animal on the continent is a wingless midge, Belgica antarctica, a few millimetres long. Every large animal associated with Antarctica - penguin, seal, whale - takes its food from the sea and uses the land or the ice only as a platform.
3. Knowledge
4. Antarctica
5. Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC)
6. Connections
7. Arctic Ocean
8. Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC)
9. Emperor Penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri)
10. Halley Bay Emperor Penguin Colony
11. The Antarctic Treaty (1959)
12. McMurdo Station
13. Vostok Station
14. Cook crosses the Antarctic Circle
15. Antarctica is sighted - by whom is disputed
16. Amundsen reaches the South Pole
17. Scott reaches the South Pole and finds he is second
18. The International Geophysical Year puts twelve nations on the ice at once
19. The Antarctic Treaty is signed at Washington
20. The continuous satellite sea-ice record begins
21. Vostok records minus 89.2 degrees Celsius
22. Antarctic sea ice reaches a record low, a year after the previous one
23. The Madrid Protocol becomes open to a review conference
24. Southern Ocean
25. Antarctica
26. Antarctic Polar Front (Antarctic Convergence)
27. Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)
28. Drake Passage
29. Southern Ocean
30. Drake Passage
31. A circumpolar current becomes possible
32. Drake Passage is measured and the ACC turns out to be larger
33. Evidence
34. The Treaty reserves Antarctica for peaceful purposes and prohibits military activity (Article I), guarantees freedom of scientific investigation, freezes the territorial claims question so that no act while it is in force constitutes a basis for asserting, supporting or denying a claim and no new claim may be made (Article IV), applies to the area south of 60 degrees south (Article VI), and provides for inspection of all stations, installations and equipment by observers designated by consultative parties (Article VII). V55 VERIFICATION BASIS: this session had NO working research channel - WebFetch to ats.aq was refused by the network egress proxy and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before production began. The citation rests on the producer's prior knowledge of the treaty text, not on consultation during production, and must be opened before publication.
35. The lowest air temperature reliably measured at the surface of the Earth is minus 89.2 degrees Celsius, recorded at Vostok Station, Antarctica, on 21 July 1983. V55 VERIFICATION BASIS: the archive was not opened during production; no research channel was available. The value and date rest on the producer's prior knowledge and should be confirmed against the WMO archive entry.