The nearest countries to Antarctica are South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Chile and Argentina. On Antarctica there are no cities or villages, 98% of the continent is covered by ice. The map shows also the location of scientific research stations operated by various countries on the continent.

A Lack of Infrastructure. It is fair to say that there isn’t much infrastructure on Antarctica at all, let alone towers and airports and other structures which can help airplanes take off, land, and navigate. The lack of such an infrastructure can make flying over Antarctica like flying over the sea.

If all the ice covering Antarctica , Greenland, and in mountain glaciers around the world were to melt, sea level would rise about 70 meters (230 feet). The ocean would cover all the coastal cities. And land area would shrink significantly. Scientists are studying exactly how ice caps disappear.

Colonization of Antarctica refers to having humans, including families, living permanently on the continent of Antarctica. Antarctica is the only continent on Earth without indigenous human inhabitants, despite its proximity to Argentina and Chile at the Antarctic Peninsula.

Modern-day Antarctica hardly brings beaches and sunshine to mind. But according to new research, the continent and its surroundings used to be a much balmier place. To figure out just how hot things got, the researchers turned to two isotopes found in ancient shell fossils.

Geologists taking sediment cores from the seafloor beneath the giant Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf on the southern edge of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea discovered what biologists believe are types of sponge. The finding was published Monday in Frontiers in Marine Science.

Yes. In fact, there are sand-dunes in Antarctica [1:15].

Antarctic coniferous trees The roots of these coniferous trees are still attached to the carbonaceous soil deposits today. Their root systems indicate that these trees thrived on the rich plains alongside large meandering rivers. On the coastal plain, the open canopy forests were thick with conifers and ferns.

There are only two vascular plants that grow in Antarctica and these are found only on the coastal region of the Antarctic Peninsula. They are Antarctic hair grass (Deschampsia antarctica) and Antarctic pearlwort (Colobanthus quitensis). For starters, like all plants, mosses need water to survive.