Información general para ver el relieve del continente de la Antártida. Éste es el quinto continente más grande del mundo con 14 millones de kilómetros cuadrados y está cubierto por una capa de hielo continental permanente. El hielo se distribuye en dos grandes capas de hielo, la Antártida Oriental y la Antártida Occidental , dónde hay una barrera de hielo que se extiende sobre el agua del mar. Los bloques de hielo tienen un espesor de hasta 5.000 m (el espesor medio es de unos 2.400 m), por lo que la Antártida, es con diferencia el continente más alto. Gran parte del continente es un desierto frío con muy bajas tasas de precipitación. Por lo tanto , a diferencia de Groenlandia, sólo una pequeña proporción de la pérdida de masa de la capa de hielo de la Antártida se produce por la fusión de la superficie. En cambio, la mayor parte la pérdida de hielo de la Antártida es de fusión basal.

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Geographical Information
“Antarctic is the fifth largest continent of the world at 14 million square kilometres and is covered by a permanent continental ice sheet. The ice is distributed in two major ice sheets, the East Antarctic and the West Antarctic, and in addition there are shelf ice, extending over the sea water. Antarctic inland ice ranges in thickness up to 5000 m, with an average thickness of about 2400 m, making Antarctica by far the highest of the continents. Straddling the South Pole, Antarctica is cold even during summer. Much of the continent is a cold desert with very low precipitation rates. Thus, in contrast to Greenland, only a tiny proportion of the mass loss from the Antarctic Ice Sheet occurs by melting from the surface – summertime melt from the margins of the ice sheet only occurs in the northern Antarctic Peninsula and the northernmost fringes of East Antarctica. Instead, most ice loss from Antarctica is from basal melting and iceberg calving from the vast floating ice shelves. The West Antarctica Ice Sheet drains mostly into the Ross Ice Shelf, at the head of the Ross Sea; but also into the Filchner/Ronne Ice Shelf (two connected ice shelves), at the head of the Weddell Sea; and into small ice shelves along the Amundsen Sea coast. The Ross and Filchner/Ronne ice shelves are each about the area of Spain.”

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