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+5C in winter; so, the ice pack has started to melt and withdraw, especially, in the Antarctic Peninsula, the northern extremity of the continent.
Furthermore, an ice carrot sample has showed that the present concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (CO2, CH4, NOx) is the highest of the last 420,000 years. No comment!

So, Antarctica has been a great and precious scientific laboratory since 1959, when 45 Countries signed the Antarctic Treaty that declared this continent not politically belonging to any nation ("suspending" every territorial claim) and as a great natural reserve, dedicated to science and peace, without military bases.

This, despite Chili, Argentina and other 5 Countries have already presented formal territorial claims on part of the Antarctic teritory many years ago.
Also mining activity has been forbidden in 1991, at least, until 2048, after that geologists had found out gold, coal and oil and some pressure exists by some industrial interests to allow ores and oil exploitation.

So, Antarctica remains the only continent where wilderness reigns everywhere and, despite its very hostile environment, life is particularly abundant in the sea around it, among the richest of the world.
The base of its food chain, as already wrote above, is krill that is the main food for whales, penguins and other birds, fish, seals and these animals, in their turn, allow the life to their predators like the leopard seal, the killer-whale, and the biggest fish toward the smallest.
Unluckily, also fishing boats profit of krill, today, capturing about 100,000 tons of krill every year, that is not considered an amount able to endanger this population, if considered alone, but the problem is that krill concentrations are today decreasing in various coastal areas of Antarctica because of the global warming that disturbs krill's reproduction.

Just for this reason, it's very likely that the present fishing activity will have to be reduced or banned, for not creating further troubles to this delicate equilibrium.
In fact, in the decade 1992-2002, the U.S. researchers of the USAMLR scientific program, have discoverd a fast decline in the survival rate of penguins' chicks, in their first weeks of autonomous search for krill in the ocean, starting from the coastal sites where their great communities exist; this, because there's less and less krill near penguins' colonies and the young (and not expert) penguins must swim longer and waste more energy, until becoming easy preys

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