How Much Do You Know About Antarctica?

Most of us know that it's cold in Antarctica, but have you ever thought about why it's so cold? Until today I always assumed it was because of the tilt of the earth on its axis. Although that's partially so, there are a number of additional reasons it's the coldest place on earth. And it's intriguing how logical it all is.

Here are a few of the noteworthy features of this massive continent. In addition to being the coldest place on Earth, it is also the driest and windiest continent on Earth. The average temperature in Antarctica is -56.7°C (-69.9°F), and the coldest temperature ever recorded was -89.2°C (-128.6°F). That's pretty cold.

Most people familiar with stories about Antarctica know that there's a lot of ice there. How much ice? The Antarctic ice sheet contains 90 percent of all the world's ice and 70 percent of all the world's freshwater. 

I never gave much thought to how thick that ice was. At its thickest point the ice sheet is three miles thick. On average, this continent-sized ice sheet--5.5 million square miles of it--is more than a mile thick, and it sits atop of what is already a mountainous altitude. 

Why Is Antarctica So Cold?

We already mentioned the tilt of the Earth's axis. What this means is that in summer, the South Pole receives 24 hours of sunlight, but in the winter, it receives no sunlight at all. This lack of sunlight means that the ground doesn't warm up, and the air above stays cold. (How can it warm up anyways if it is under a mountain of ice?)

The high altitude of Antarctica surprised me. Antarctica is the highest continent on Earth, with an average elevation of 2,835 meters (9,301 feet). The higher the altitude, the colder the air becomes, which is why you can see snow-capped mountains year 'round in the Rockies.

Another feature also keeps it from warming up. The ice and snow there reflects the sunlight back into space, which prevents it from warming the ground. 

Finally, the winds in Antarctica are very strong and they can blow for days or even weeks at a time. These winds can carry away heat, which helps to keep the continent cold.

In spite of all this desolation, there are a few places in Antarctica where the temperature can get relatively warm. The warmest place in Antarctica is McMurdo Station, which has an average temperature of -17.2°C (1.2°F). That surprised me. I think I could actually handle that quite alright. McMurdo Station is located on the coast of Antarctica, where the ocean helps to moderate the temps.

Anyways, I was thinking about Antarctica this morning. Too bad they can't figure out a way to transport all that ice and cold to Texas, New Mexico and Arizona for part of the year. 

What's the most surprising thing to you about Antarctica?

Related Links

A number of years ago I wrote a poem called Hitchhiking Across Antarctica in which I imagined what extreme loneliness would feel like.

Throwback Thursday: Reflections on Water and Ice

34 below zero F. Coldest reading yet on our thermometer. The sun is a muted white, beaming from the southeast. Back down below, a prism of color rises from Rocky Run, a pulsing pillar that at times is quite pronounced and at other times so indistinct as to be invisible. It springs from the earth near two pines across the way which I have never noticed before, just this side of the gravel pit. It extends quite high at times, the endpiece of a rainbow. How strange this phenomenon on a cloudless morn.

How can it be so cold out there? Where does cold come from? Absence of heat... but the sun is no further, nor nearer, than another day 50 degrees warmer.
~ Journal note, 15 January 1994

While looking through one of my journals I came across the above observations. I was attempting to describe a phenomenon that I'd never seen before coming to Minnesota, the way fog and crystal-laden moisture refracts light in the context of intense cold. Here in the Northland you can sometimes tell how cold it is by the way it squeaks when walking on the frozen snow as you go out to fetch the paper in the morning.

Water is the strangest thing. The manner in which it changes based on temperature, and not just random temps but a specific temperature, at 0 degrees Celsius. And how it vanishes (becomes vapor) when it boils. Yet it is still H20 so that when it condenses it become moisture again.

The density of water is another mystery. You would think that when water freezes, becomes a solid, it would sink, wouldn't you? Yet when icebergs break off from Greenland they float. This seems very strange. Yet we just take it all for granted.

I was reading how water expands when it freezes. This, too, seems strange because the molecules are still H20, yet they re-form themselves somehow when they become crystals. My initial sense would be that frozen water would take less room, as if the fluid's molecules were arrange themselves tighter together when they became solid. But this is not the case. In point of fact, water expands by 9% when it freezes, hence the burst water pipes some of people have experienced in very cold weather in the Northland.

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Physics is the study of nature and natural phenomena in our world. I have fond memories of Mr. Dennison's physics class my junior year in high school. A former minor league pitcher who after 7 years finally came up for a pair of games with the Red Sox at the end of a season, he was also our Junior Varsity baseball coach. I learned a lot from Mr. Dennison about many things, but never quite got the answer to why it's so hard to hit a knuckleball.

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By the way, did you see the size of the moon last night? (Unfortunately, a sheet of clouds slid across the sky to hide the eclipse that occurred shortly after dark.) I find it intriguing that when the moon circles 'round the earth its influence causes the tides to advance and recede. Because of gravity the earth's bodies of water pull inward, or downward depending on your point of view. But when the moon passes overhead the gravitational pull of our lunar companion produces swelling seas. What's especially interesting is how the waters on the opposite side of the earth also bulge to produce a high tide there as well. (You can read how all this works here.)

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It's also interesting that water covers about two-thirds of the earth, and that when we mature our own bodies are about two-thirds water. (The ratio changes from infancy to maturity.)

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Here's another observation. Whereas water is essential for our nourishment to survive, water is also a destructive force, causing buildings to rot, dead trees to decay, and so on.

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For those who are interested in other mysteries and observations about water check out these links:

The Many Mysteries of Water

5 Weird Things About Water

Middle School Chemistry Lessons on Water and Ice

Observations on Melting and Freezing

In closing, a quote to float your boat: “Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.” ― Wallace Stevens

EdNote: The journal entry that started this post was our second winter living just outside Duluth. Since that time I have since seen 42 below on our thermometer. Welcome to the Northland. The original blog post was published in 2015.

The Climate Change Debate

This morning it is twenty below again and I find myself wishing for global warming. Or at least a little Minnesota warming since we've pretty much had enough of winter this year. I mean, well, you know what I mean.

What scares me is reading articles like the one in a recent issue of Popular Science where we learn that there are people coming up with ideas on how to modify the atmosphere in order to make it colder. Purportedly the U.S. and China are leading the charge on that one. No one knows for sure what impact those experiments will really have, including the possibility of another ice age.

So a book like The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won't Tell You About Global Warming by Roger Pielke Jr. offers some good medicine for what ails us.

Colleen Mondor's review at Amazon.com states:
Pielke’s area of expertise is the crossroads where environmental studies and politics meet, and clearly he is very frustrated by how the hard cold facts of science have become subservient to the whims of political fortune. In carefully crafted chapters that rely heavily on widely acknowledged truths, he examines everything from carbon dioxide emissions to the recent climategate controversy. Pielke excels in pointing out the minutiae the climate discussion finds itself repeatedly bogged down in, compared to the larger issues of global warming, regardless of the cause, which are irrefutable. From Kyoto to Copenhagen, Gore to George W. Bush to Obama, he addresses the changing political winds, the myths used to justify weak political will, and the irrevocable relationship between environmental policy and the economy. For navigating a treacherous field with grace and aplomb, Pielke deserves much praise. Whether readers will feel reassured or not after reading his measured words and patient call for a broad-based climate policy will depend on future political response. Copious endnotes and sourcing material included.

At the heart of the issue is the politicizing of everything, making it difficult for truth to be seen with any clarity. Last fall I sat with some people involved in a study regarding emissions in California. There are California legislators who want to restrict or eliminate hot rodding because many of these vintage cars do not have the latest emissions technology installed. The study showed that one boat shipping good from overseas produces more emissions in 24 hours of idling than all the hot rods in California produce in a year. Yet will we stop imports because the ships pollute?

Here's what another Amazon.com reviewer states about the book:
Pielke's style is soft spoken but he is not afraid to make strong judgements. He proposes an "iron law of climate policy" that basically says that no climate policies that cause substantial, immediate economic pain will ever be implemented. If you accept his iron law (and I do) then it is clear that all the CO2 control efforts that are supposed to be implemented via cap and trade or other unpleasant government mandates or taxes will never see the light of day. Yet Pielke believes that CO2 control is important and he proposes solutions that don't violate his iron law.

The book is filled with well-presented useful information. His discussion of climategate, the publication of numerous private emails exchanged between important climate scientists, is the best I've ever seen.

Just a few thoughts in response to a cold day in Northern Minnesota.

Arctic Blast

In 1999 the map of Canada changed for the first time in 50 years. A new territory was carved out of the Northwest Territories and returned to the Inuit people, formerly called Eskimos. Inuit means "The People" and the name of their new country is called Nunavet, which means "Our Land." The vast arctic region they inhabit is larger than the State of Texas, even though their population of 27,000 could comfortably occupy Chicago's Sears Tower (except for the lack of caribou.) With its sub-zero winter temperatures few of us are surprised to discover there is no population explosion in Nunavet.

In case you didn't know, Eskimos are racially distinct from the Native American Indians that inhabit the more hospitable climates of the North American Continent. In Eastern Siberia, Alaska, Labrador and Greenland they're still called Eskimos, which in Algonquin meant "Eaters of Raw Meat."

While growing up it seldom entered my mind to think of Eskimos in terms of their diet. Like most people, I always made the association of Eskimo with cold, inhospitable environments, and igloos. As it turns out, Eskimos live in all sorts of houses, including tents made of skins and underground sod homes, though most live in ordinary houses like ours. Certainly the Arctic environment places demands on these people to which most of us are unaccustomed, though it also helps reduce panhandling and street people.

One of my favorite short stories from high school days was Jack London's To Build A Fire. The story takes place in Alaska's Yukon region. It is a life and death struggle between a man and the elements, with everything hinging on his ability to build a fire. At the beginning of the story the man spits and he realizes, by the crackling sound of the spittle turning to ice in mid-air, that it is more than fifty below, colder than he realized.

Three decades after I first read this story I was clearing my driveway one December night in Duluth, Minnesota. There had been a fair dump of snow followed by a blistering cold Alberta Clipper. I knew it was cold, but discovered how severe the wind chill was when I spit and it became a marble before hitting the crust of snow and rolling away.

I knew right then it was cold. Fortunately that kind of weather is not the norm, even in Minnesota. Now for really cold conditions, think about what it's like to live in the arctic. The average December temperature at Gate of the Arctic National Park is twenty below during the day and forty below at night. Add wind chill temps and you've got weather!

This week, we had the pleasure of getting a spearhead of arctic air in Minnesota that dropped temps by more than fifty degrees in twenty-four hours in most places. My thermometer went from forty above to minus twenty-four overnight. That is a sixty-four degree drop, plus wind chill.

Funny how wind chill works. Usually it goes this way: the temp is zero with a wind chill that makes it feel like minus twenty, or it's minus twenty but feels like minus fifty. Why can't we have minus twenty temps that feel like twenty above? Guess that's not in the cards any time soon. In the meantime, do your best to stay warm. An extra sweater or two never hurt anyone.

That Nasty Cold

"I've come down with that nasty cold that has been going around. Burning sore throat, congestion and general misery, tired... Have not felt productive. That hot shower felt nice, though."

Journal note, January 18, 1998