As we are flying, lets learn something about Antarctica.
Antarctica is 14 million km2 large continent. It is about as two Australias or 40% bigger than Europe, China or USA, which are similar sized. It is the coldest, highest, driest and windiest out of all continents. It is called a “White continent” and it is the only one which never seen war. Let’s see why:
Coldest – median temperature is -57°C, warmest temperature recorded was 20°C (Feb 2020), coldest -89.2°C. It is of course different whether one is at coast of King George island (where my parents went on the break of millennium) or in 3000 meter on Antarctic plateau around South pole.
Highest – Average elevation of the continent is around 2500m with highest mountain Mt. Vinson of 4892m.
Driest – it is easy because in this cold all water freeze. It is estimated, that Antarctica haven’t seen rain for over 2.5 million years.
Windiest – it is especially thanks to co called katabatic winds, which are formed when they run down along the glaciers. They can be very strong. Strongest one recorded was 327 km/h.

Antarctica has formed about 170 mil years back, when this large landmass has torn from Pangea and moved south to cold places. Ice which is there till today was formed about 46-34 mil years back and today it holds 26.5 mil cubic km of ice. It is 90% of all fresh water in the World. Over the millions of years the ice stayed without any move, but in in last few years it is threatened by unprecedented climatic changes which melts those ancient glaciers.

How is it done? Process could be high level described like this. Emission of CO2 and other greenhouse effects are absorbed especially by water in oceans. It is causing its heating. Warm water is then move by currents to the Antarctic waters, where it gets mixed with cold water and warms it to about -1°C to 0°C. It is a temperature, which is for the glacier like a fire. Antarctic glaciers lie from big part on the bottom of the ocean, which could be even like 1600m under the water surface. Warm water gets under them and heats the glacier. It creates a chamber inside the glacier which eventually leads to break of the glacier and creation of iceberg. The iceberg then floats to the warmer waters where it melts quickly. 30 September 2019 for example, a 210 meter high iceberg of 1634 km2 holding 315 mil tons of fresh water has thorn from Antarctic glacier. Losing ice from Antarctica is like losing ice from fridge, when we don’t have any energy for its creation. Oceans will get warmer and sea life, which has been created for hundreds of million years, will die out. There are also problems with the sea level. Rising the sea level will flood cities and devour some island nations. The climate will change. Meteorology scientists predict, that rising of sea level by 50cm will lead that thousand-year storm will come every 100 years. And rising sea level by 1 meter will lead of such storm to come every 10 years.

Antarctica is here before first humans walked on the land, but we didn’t know about it much till the second half of 19 century. Greek philosophers predicted, that there must be a landmass on the south, which will balance the mass of continents which are present on the northern hemisphere. They called Ant-Arctic (opposite to Arctic). Despite the fact that no one has seen it that time, it is depicted on some maps from 16^th century as Terra Australis – huge land containing Australia and Antarctica. There were not many sailors who would sail to Southern waters in exploratory times of 17-18 century. Exception was James Cook, who changed the map, when he showed that south of Australia there is still lots of cold water behind which he assumed lies a big land but he never seen it. First one to see Antarctica was a Russian officer Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen 27^th January 1820. (First one who stood on Antarctica was American seal hunter John Davis 7^th February 1821.) Month-exact 200 years from the time human eye first saw Antarctica a there landed an airplane on Union Glacier with Martin and Zdenek Chvoj…