Antarctica – the continent buried beneath a kilometres-thick ice sheet
Antarctica is Earth's southernmost and least populated continent, and almost all of it lies under an ice sheet averaging about 1.9 kilometres in thickness. That ice defines everything here: it makes this the coldest, driest and windiest of the continents, and the one with the highest average elevation. Its deep past looked very different. For hundreds of millions of years the land belonged to the supercontinent Gondwana, carrying forests and a mild climate, until Gondwana began breaking apart roughly 183 million years ago and the far south grew steadily colder. Today research stations are its only settlements. If you have worked or travelled in the far south, share your stories and photographs with us.