Antarctica map

Cold Facts

  • The first chapel at McMurdo Station was built in 1956 by pious U.S. Navy Seabees who named it the Chapel of St. Dismas after the good thief because originally there were neither plans nor materials requisitioned to build a chapel. So, they "found" extra materials and built it on their own time. The current chapel, the Chapel of the Snows, is the third. It is the southernmost house of worship in the world.
  • At South Pole station, people drink melted ice and snow. The water is so pure that it is specially treated or it would leech out their bones. The water costs 10 times more to make there than in the United States. The average usage is 35 gallons per person per day compared to 100 in the U.S. For example, people are asked to take just two showers a week. The water consumed at the South Pole comes from approximately 500 feet below the surface. The ice at this level accumulated around 550 A.D. when Imperial Rome fell.
  • The Celsius and Fahrenheit scales meet at minus 40 degrees.
  • The Chilean sea bass is also called the Antarctic toothfish. Because of overfishing in the Ross Sea in Antarctica, the population of toothfish has drastically decreased. According to a New Zealand scientist, toothfish were in abundance right off the coast of McMurdo but are now disappearing rapidly. The toothfish, among other things, is an important source of food for the Orca (killer whale) and the seals.
  • Antarctica has seven million cubic miles of ice, 90 percent of the world's total. It averages 1.5 miles thick, and the deepest is three miles thick. The ice is so heavy that it compresses the land over much of the continent to below sea level. The weight actually deforms the South Pole, making the Earth slightly pear-shaped.
  • Presently, the Antarctic ice sheet would raise sea levels worldwide by more than 200 feet if it melted. The total surface area is about 14.2 million square kilometers in summer, much larger than the continental United States, approximately twice the size of Australia, and 50 times the size of the United Kingdom. The United States and Mexico combined approximate the size of Antarctica.

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