Antarctica

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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.