Antarctica, on average, is the coldest, driest, and windiest continent, and has the highest average elevation of all the continents.[2] Antarctica is considered a desert, with annual precipitation of only 200 mm (8 inches) along the coast and far less inland.[3] There are no permanent human residents but anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 people reside throughout the year at the research stations scattered across the continent. Only cold-adapted plants and animals survive there, including penguins, seals, nematodes, Tardigrades, mites, many types of algae and other microorganisms, and tundra vegetation.
Although myths and speculation about a Terra Australis ("Southern Land") date back to antiquity, the first confirmed sighting of the continent is commonly accepted to have occurred in 1820 by the Russian expedition of Mikhail Lazarev and Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen. The continent, however, remained largely neglected for the rest of the 19th century because of its hostile environment, lack of resources, and isolation. The first formal use of the name "Antarctica" as a continental name in the 1890s is attributed to the Scottish cartographer John George Bartholomew. The name Antarctica is the romanized version of the Greek compound word ανταρκτική (antarktiké), feminine of ανταρκτικός (antarktikos),[4] meaning "opposite to the north".[5]
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An expedition led by Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen from the ship Fram became the first to reach the geographic South Pole on 14 December 1911, using a route from the Bay of Whales and up the Axel Heiberg Glacier.[16] One month later, the ill-fated Scott Expedition reached the pole.
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The notion of Terra Australis was introduced by Aristotle. His ideas were later expanded by Ptolemy (1st century AD), who believed that the Indian Ocean was enclosed on the south by land, and that the lands of the Northern Hemisphere should be balanced by land in the south.[1] Ptolemy's maps, which became well-known in Europe during the Renaissance, did not actually depict such a continent, but they did show an Africa which had no southern oceanic boundary (and which therefore might extend all the way to the South Pole), and also raised the possibility that the Indian Ocean was entirely enclosed by land. Christian thinkers did not totally discount the idea that there might be land beyond the southern seas, but from St Augustine's time onwards they denied that they could be inhabited. The impossibility of crossing the ever more torrid space meant that descendants of Adam could not have travelled there, and in addition, since the Gospel was supposed to be made available to all of mankind, and could not have been brought there, no humans could dwell in those parts (although there were counter-myths going back to ancient time about the 'Antipodes', meaning people who lived opposite to us)
Más en la wiki sobre la Antártica y Terra Australis.
También interesante el Fram Muset.
