Antarctica why is it a desert

Box , Napa, CA Skip to content. Home About Dive In! Subscribe Now! This helped so much whith my homework for Antarctica thx a lot. Yeagh me too it helped me mate a website about Antarctica for a project too. This so good it helped me with making a fact book and it is going in the library. Hi I think what you are doing is really cool and helpful to a lot of animals!

Question: how old is the snow? I understand the scientists drill ice cores into the snow. Is there land under the ice——like dirt and sand? I will thank you for the idea you are now my favorite person in this world. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published.

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Related Articles. A desert is generally categorized as a place that receives less than 10 inches of annual rainfall. Receiving only 6. It's counterintuitive to think of Antarctica as "dry" when much of the landscape is made up of water in the form of ice.

However, the perennially cold temperatures mean that this water is locked away in giant glaciers effectively rendering it useless, at least in terms of its ability to support life in the traditional way. Some parts of the inner regions get less than 2 inches of precipitation annually, making it one of the driest places on earth. Antarctica has very little precipitation. Only around 20 cm 7. Inland the figure is far lower. There are many definitions of what makes a region a desert.

Most simply state that a desert is a region with very little precipitation. Deserts can also be described as areas where more water is lost by evaporation than falls as precipitation. Deserts are often some of the hottest and most inhospitable places on Earth, as exemplified by the Sahara Desert in Africa, the Gobi desert in northern China and Mongolia, and Death Valley in California.

But they can also be cold, windswept landscapes where little to no snow ever falls — like in the Antarctic and Arctic. So in the end, being hot has little to do with it. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that deserts are characterized by little to no moisture and extremes in temperature. All told, deserts make up one-third of the surface of the Earth.

But most of that is found in the polar regions. In terms of sheer size, the Antarctic Desert is the largest desert on Earth, measuring a total of Antarctica is the coldest, windiest, and most isolated continent on Earth, and is considered a desert because its annual precipitation can be less than 51 mm in the interior. There are no permanent human residents, but anywhere from 1, to 5, researchers inhabit the research stations scattered across the continent — the largest being McMurdo Station, located on the tip of Ross Island.

Beyond a limited range of mammals, only certain cold-adapted species of mites, algaes, and tundra vegetation can survive there. Despite having very little precipitation, Antarctica still experiences massive windstorms. Much like sandstorms in the desert, the high winds pick up snow and turn into blizzards.

These storms can reach speeds of up to km an hour mph and are one of the reasons the continent is so cold.