Antarctica is the highest, driest, and coldest place on Earth. It is also the remotest, a fact which accounts for its unspoiled environment. It is difficult for people to get there, and not a comfortable place for people to stay once they arrive. It is widely described as the last true wilderness on our planet.
The Antarctic continent has mountain ranges similar in size to the European Alps. But whereas the Alps' snowcaps are just deep enough for skiing, Antarctic mountains are swallowed up by their caps, and lie buried beneath an ice sheet that is five kilometers thick.
The cold climate is responsible for maintaining the continent's year-round ice fields: They never melt. Even though Antarctica receives more sunlight than the equator, the temperatures are lower because the ice sheet reflects the heat back into space. Thus, the coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth was in Antarctica in July, 1983: Soviet scientists shivered through temperatures that fell to minus 89.2 degrees Celsius.
For centuries, Europeans wondered about the existence of a South-Polar continent, but no one actually knew for certain Antarctica was there until 1820 when European explorers "discovered" it. Since then, men have gone to Antarctica in search of adventure. Testing their abilities, several teams of explorers set out in 1911 to be the first men to stand at the South Pole. Norwegian Roald Amundsen and his men reached the pole; so did Robert F. Scott, an Englishman, but he and his team died on the return trip.
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