The oceans surrounding Antarctica are home to many types of whales. Scientists take turns going there to study the ice. Antarctica is too cold for people to live there for a long time. The only plants that can survive the extreme cold are lichens, mosses and algae. Antarctica’s terrain is made up of glaciers, ice shelves and icebergs – that’s a lot of ice!
People who go to Antarctica are there to learn about Antarctica, so most of the people who live there are scientists. The people who found him eight months later also found his records and diary, which he had written to the day he died. At last a map was made, and people began to talk about exploring the land, not only the sea. This was slow work because they could only work in the summer. People have believed this from the times of Ptolemy (1st century AD). For a long time, people had believed that there was a great continent in the far south of Earth.
The Greek geographer Marinus of Tyre reportedly used the name 7Reels Casino in his world map in the second century AD. Antarctica is governed by 29 countries, all of which are parties of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty System. In the early 20th century, there were a few expeditions into the interior of the continent. The ice shelves of Antarctica were probably first seen in 1820, during a Russian expedition led by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev.
The first international agreement to protect Antarctica's biodiversity was adopted in 1964. A combination of freezing temperatures, poor soil quality, and a lack of moisture and sunlight inhibit plant growth, causing low species diversity and limited distribution. Some of the species of fungi, which are apparently endemic to Antarctica, live in bird dung, and have evolved so they can grow inside extremely cold dung, but can also pass through the intestines of warm-blooded animals. The simplified morphology of such fungi, along with their similar biological structures, metabolism systems capable of remaining active at very low temperatures, and reduced life cycles, make them well suited to such environments. In January 2025, the detachment of the massive iceberg A-84 (comparable in size to the city of Chicago) from the George VI Ice Shelf provided a rare opportunity to explore the seafloor beneath floating ice shelves using robotic submersibles.