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This is only an introductory and by far not exaustive article on this continent, to give a general description of Antarctica.
I summarized it from a long article on the Italian edition of National Geographic, February 2002, about an U.S. research program, the USAMLR (U.S. Antarctic Marine Living Resources), to study the actual state of living species, with particular attention to the KRILL, the little crustaceans living in the seas surrounding this continent that are the base of the whole life in Antarctica.

This is the continent of the extreme cold, looking part of another planet of our solar system, farther than the Earth from the Sun.
It's totally covered by an enormous ice cap, in some points, reaching 4.7 Km of thickness and able to carve the continent up to 2500 m below the sea level; this cap covers nearly all the land and the sea around it for hundreds of Km, variable with seasons and slowly moving from the centre of the continent to the exterior.

We all know that the Sun is invisible in Antarctica during the winter, because it always remains under the horizon, leaving all this continent immersed in a partial darkness with the lowest temperatures of the world (the negative record is -89.6 C, recorded on July 21st, 1983) but also during the short and pale summer, when the Sun is always visible all the day, although low on the horizon, the termometer rarely goes above 0-10 C, even in the most external and northern region of this continent, the Antarctic Peninsula, at 900 Km only from South America.

Antarctica hasn't always been a frozen continent, because its ice cap has started to form only about 35 millions years ago.
Before, especially during the Paleozoic and Mesozoic Ages, Antarctica was still united to Australia and India to form the great continent of Gondwana and its climate was sub-polar, like Alaska today; it was covered by enormous forests and swamps, adapted to the 6 months of partial darkness (Antarctica was nearly in the same position) with the loss of their leaves, while glaciers covered only its mountains.

Then, Antarctica remained insulated at the extreme south of the planet, when Australia and India were separated by the movement of crustal plates.
It was surrounded by cold sea currents that prevented every mitigating effect by the hot tropical ones, so that its climate become colder and colder, untill collecting as ice the 80% of all the sweet water of the planet.

Today, Antarctica is at 2000 Km from New Zealand and Australia and 900 from South

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