GENERAL KNOWLEDGE

Detailed explanation-1: -Often described as a continent of superlatives, Antarctica is not only the world’s southernmost continent. It is also the world’s highest, driest, windiest, coldest, and iciest continent. Antarctica is about 5.5 million square miles (14.2 million square km) in size, and thick ice covers about 98 percent of the land.

Detailed explanation-2: -Physical Geography. Antarctica is the southernmost continent in the world and it is centered asymmetrically around the geographic South Pole and surrounded by the Southern Ocean (Fig. 1). Its entire territory covers an area of 14 million km2 that lies south of 60°S of which only a 0.3% is deglaciated.

Detailed explanation-3: -While Antarctica does have high mountains, it is not because of its mountains that it has the distinction of being ‘the highest continent on Earth’: it is because of the thickness of its ice sheets.