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The highest wind speed ever recorded on earth was 231 miles per hour.

It was recorded at Mount Washington, New Hampshire. But that was a very unusual reading, and winds even half that high are rare everywhere in the United Stated, but not in one place in Antarctica.

In Commonwealth Bay, along the coast of Antarctica, winds sometimes reach speeds of 200 miles per hour. This is the windiest spot on earth!

Could you imagine how cold it would feel in winds blowing 200 miles per hour? In winds of just 50 miles per hour, a temperature of zero degrees would feel like minus 56 degrees!

The continent of Antarctica contains about 10 percent of all the land on earth.

Yet Antarctica is the most remote, hard-to-get-to place on our planet. Its possible to visit every continent except Antarctica without ever crossing more than about 100 miles of sea. But Antarctica is everywhere at least 600 miles from the nearest continent!

Antarctica is also the loneliest place on earth. In the Northern Hemisphere, large parts of Canada, Alaska, Russia, Greenland, and Scandinavia lie above the Arctic Circle.  read more »

A glacier is a large mass of ice and snow that forms where snow falls at a greater rate than it melts.

Glaciers usually move slowly down the slopes of mountains or through valleys. They break up into icebergs when they reach the sea.

It shouldn't be surprising that the largest glacier on earth is found in Antarctica, the "frozen continent". There are many large glaciers in Antarctica, some more than 100 miles long. The largest by far is the Lambert Glacier.  read more »

Whales weighing as much as 100 tons live in the waters near Antarctica, and some seals spend part of the year on that continent.

Penguins and some other birds also spend part of the year in Antarctica or the waters nearby. But the only creature that lives on the continent of Antarctica year-round is an insect.

These insects are members of a few species related to the fly, but they're wingless. Though they are the largest land creatures on the entire continent of Antarctica, these insects are less than one-tenth of an inch long!

The Arctic tern might just as well be called the "Antarctic" tern.

As this sea bird, related to the gull, spends about three months of each year in the Antarctic region and about three months in the Arctic. It spends the rest of the year traveling from one end of the globe to the other!

After spending the summer in Arctic lands, the Arctic tern leaves in the autumn and heads south. Flying day after day, stopping for food and rest from time to time, the bird makes its way on a three-month journey to the Antarctic.  read more »

Most birds are built for life in the air, but penguins are far better equipped for life in the water.

These flightless birds use their wings as paddles when they're swimming, enabling them to "fly" through the water. And they can "fly" indeed, some penguins travel more than 22 miles an hour when swimming underwater, making them the fastest swimming birds on earth.  read more »

Islands have been known to appear and disappear due to volcanic eruptions.

The Aurora Islands, which were supposed to lie in the South Atlantic within about 1,000 miles of the continent of Antarctica, appeared and disappeared a number of times over the course of several decades. But their disappearing act wasn't due to volcanoes, the Aurora Islands never existed!  read more »

When you think of a volcano, you think of bubbling lava, steam, smoke, and heat.

But there's a large volcano in the last place you would expect to find heat, Antarctica, the coldest continent!

Mount Erebus is the earth's most southerly volcano. It's located less than 900 miles from the South Pole. It's not really on the continent of Antarctica, but on an island just off the coast of the continent. The ice pack that covers Antarctica connects Mount Erebus's island with the Antarctic mainland.  read more »

An ocean current is a stream of water moving through a larger body of water. Just as a river is a stream of water moving through land, an ocean current is a "river" of water moving through the ocean.

One of the major ocean currents is the Gulf Stream, which flows out of the Gulf of Mexico and warms the east coast of the United States. But the greatest of all ocean currents is the West Wind Drift Current, a moving stream of water that circles the continent of Antarctica.  read more »

There are a number of places on earth where the land is below sea level.

In Death Valley, California, and around the Dead Sea in Israel, for instance. But none of these depressions, or low-lying places, can compare to a huge depression in Antarctica that is covered with thick ice.

Scientists have found that at a certain place in Antarctica, about 6,000 feet above sea level, the ice covering the land is about 14,000 feet thick.

That means that the land itself is some 8,000 feet below sea level! By comparison, the lowest place in America, Death Valley, is just 282 feet below sea level.