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Views
of Antarctica - Unusual Pictures of Antarctica
It's difficult to envisage a whole continent
and its place in the world. You can look at a map and see the shape of it and
where places are in relation to other places and you can look at aerial photographs,
but it requires quite a lot of imagination and not a small amount of experience
to get an idea of the larger picture.
Here are a few composite and artist-impression
pictures that have been borrowed from various sources that give a good impression
of Antarctica in three dimensions and also in relation to how it fits into the
globe.
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Use of picture courtesy of NASA
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Composite image of Antarctica
and southern hemisphere at night showing lights from major cities on
South America (top left), Africa (top right) and Australia / New Zealand
(bottom right). The earth could never be viewed in this way as in reality
one half of this view would be in daylight and the other in darkness
The outline of Antarctica is frequently
different in different images as some represent the continent during
the summer, some during the winter and some in between. At its greatest
extent the winter sea-ice just about doubles the size of Antarctica.
Even in the summer the shape of the coast-line
varies as very little of it consists of rock leading down to the sea.
Much of the edge of Antarctica is an ice-edge of constantly flowing
and ebbing glaciers, ice shelves and sea-ice that sometimes may break
out each year, sometimes not for a few years. A bit of a map-makers
night-mare in fact. No sooner is a map made, than it's out of date.
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Use of picture courtesy NASA/Goddard
Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
This is computer generated
image taken from hundreds of data points. I particularly like this as
it gives a feeling for the height of Antarctica. The average height
of the continent is 8,000ft (over 2,400m) as against the next highest
which is Asia at an average of 3,000ft (just over 900m).
The high dome of East
Antarctica is clearly seen as is the elevation of the South Pole and
the formidable barrier presented by the Trans-Antarctic Mountains which
usually just appear as a diffuse line running across maps.
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Use of Picture courtesy National Geographic
Society
The sheer weight of all the ice in Antarctica
pushes much of the underlying land beneath sea level. It is estimated
that the land is pushed down about 1,625ft (500m) by the ice. This map
shows the underlying land with the ice sheet peeled away. The average
depth of the ice sheet is more than 6,600ft (more than 2,000m).
Larger image
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Use of pictures courtesy NASA
These two pictures show the average
sea-ice accumulation around Antarctica at the minimum in February (left)
and the maximum in October (right). These were taken with a satellite
equipped with the ability to distinguish between ice at sea and ice
on the land (freshwater or sea-water ice).
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For more unusual views of Antarctica
(and the rest of the world too) take a look at the excellent
Earth viewer, this allows you
to choose your position above the earth according to longitude and latitude
and even the day and time of year to follow where the sun goes with
the seasons.
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