Antarctica, there are few places harder to get to in this world, and there aren’t any that are as hard to live in. The average temperature, here at the bottom of the earth is a balmy -58 degrees, and that is when the sun is out! It wasn’t always like this, Antarctica used to be a tropical place. It was vastly forested and teeming with life, but then the continents started to drift south, and by the time that the continent stopped drifting, the vastly forested area had been replaced with a new ground cover, ice. As for the former inhabitants, they had all died or moved on long ago, well, almost all of them
Legend has it that one tribe stayed behind. Perhaps they thought that the change in the weather was only temporary, or maybe they were just stubborn. But for whatever the reason, these tall souls refused to leave. For millions of years they have made their home in the darkest, driest, windiest, and coldest continent on earth. And they have done so alone.

Antarctica holds some 7 million cubic miles of ice, storing nearly ninety percent of the worlds ice and seventy percent of its fresh water. It’s More than two miles thick in some places. Its heavy enough to warp the shape of the earth. Lately, the frozen Continent has been heating up, giving scientists cause for concern. Global temperatures have risen about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the last century, but parts of Antarctica have risen about 4 degrees. While glaciers and sea ice are thinning in some parts of the world, in Antarctica it’s even more severe. Parts of the continent are surrounded by huge shelves of ice that extend from the land and float on the sea and parts of these have broken off and drifted off to sea, where they have melted. A few of these were as large as Rhode Island! The melting of these ice shelves can make a huge difference in the world’s coasts.