ANTARCTICAParti There's a strange snow desert at the bottom of the world In the age that geologists call the Yurassic our planet had a lash tropical forest covering its southernmost regions. What a difference 130 million years can make! Now that part of the world is covered with a solid sheet of ice about 6,000 feet thick! Except for a few rocky outcroppings near the coast of this perpetually frozen land, we creatures that followed the dinosaurs, have seen very little of what lies under the ice. We do know that buried beneath this vast storehouse of frozen water is a whole continent, Antarctica. We're not sure exactly why Earth's polar regions have become so cold since the Yurasic period, but for the present we're not eager for any sudden changes. Nine tenths of all the ice and snow on Earth now lies atop Antarctica. If it were all to melt, the world's seas would rise 180 feet, flooding ports and coastal lands everywhere; there'd be enough water to fill another ocean the size of the North Atlantic. Don't worry, though. The Antarctic isn't warming up just now. Temperatures at the South Pole average —50°C — colder than the North Pole. And the Antarctic, believe it or not, is pretty dry. Only a few inches of new snow fall each year. At temperatures, such as these, the snow soon turns into hard, grainy particles, like fine sand. Antarctic winds whip the gritty snow into stinging, cutting storms. All in all, not a very comfortable environment! Curious humans have run great risks trying to discover more about our hidden continent. But even after nearly a hundred years of arduous exploration we've barely scratched Antarctica's surface.
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