Antarctica is the continent that surrounds the South Pole. This cold, barren land covers about five million square miles, that’s about 11/2 times as big as the United States.
Yet except for only a few hundred square miles along the coast, the entire continent is continually covered with ice.
No, we can’t really call a continent a piece of ice. But the Ross Ice Shelf, a floating sheet of ice attached to Antarctica, might well be the biggest piece of ice on earth. This ice sheet is the size of France, and more than 1,200 feet thick in some places!
