AMAZINGANTARTICA 1.Antarctica is the coldest, windiest, and driest continente on Earth. It is the fifth largest of the worldsseven continents. A layer of ice almost 5 kilometres (3 miles) thick covers the island in some places. In fact, 90% of the worlds ice is in Antarctica. 2.The weather in Antarctica is the coolest on Earth. The lowest temperatura ever recorded -89.2 degrees Celsius (-128.6 degrees Fahrenheit) was in 1983 at the Vostok Station, an old Russian research base. At the South Polen, the temperature varies from -35 degrees Celsius (-31 degrees Fahrenheit) in the midsummer to 70 Celsius (-94 degrees Fahrenheit) in ten midwinter. 3.Antarctica is not only the worlds coldest continent bit also the driest place on Earth. Sometimes called the worlds largest desert, it gets about the same amount of rain each year as the Sahara Desert. Antarctic winds are the strongest on the planet, reacjing up to 320 kilometers (199 miles) per hour. 4.Locales at the South Pole, Antarctica is the farthest south of any continent. The South Polen gets six months of nonstop daylight from September through March. Then it gets six months of nonstop darkness. And because its far South, Antarctica covers the most times zones all of them! 5.Explorers first visited Antarctica in 1821. Then in 1899, a Norwegian explorer set up a research station on Antarctica,and for the first time, people could live there. Now there are about 60 resech bases there, set up by many different countries. The population of Antarctica grows from about 1,000 in the winter to about 4,000 during the summer. It has the smallest population of any continent.