The continent of Antarctica, which surrounds the South Pole, has an area of more than 5 million square miles.
Only a few hundred miles of the continent are free from a permanent cover of ice. The ice cap that covers Antarctica is more than 6,000 feet thick in many places. At some points, it’s over 11,000 feet thick, more than two miles!
You can imagine how much water must be frozen in the Antarctic ice to form a mile-thick ice cap over an entire continent.
It’s been estimated that if the ice cap of Antarctica were to melt, it would raise the level of the oceans by 240 feet, and flood about one-quarter of the earth’s land!
