Melting ice sheets
Scientific certainties and uncertainties
The Antarctic is a remarkable continent - remote, hostile and uninhabited. Yet it is of key importance to our understanding of how the world works.
It is a place of extremes. Almost 60 times the size of the United Kingdom, Antarctica is the highest, coldest and windiest continent. Less than 1% of it is free of ice or snow. The ice cap, which shrouds the peaks and valleys of the continent, contains almost 70% of the world's freshwater and 90% of the world's ice.
During winter the ocean surface freezes, forming a cover of sea ice as large as the continent it surrounds.
Since the 1950s, the floating Wordie and Larsen ice shelves that fringed the Antarctic Peninsula have retreated or collapsed.
These changes are probably the result of recent climate warming, amplified over the Antarctic Peninsula. But thinning glaciers further south may be telling a quite different story.