The coldest, windiest, and driest continent, overlying the South Pole. The lowest temperature ever measured on Earth was recorded at the Russian Antarctic station of Vostok at −89.2°C (−128.5°F) in July 1983. Katabatic (cold, gravitational) winds with velocities up to 50 km/h (30 mi/h) sweep down to the coast and occasionally turn into blizzards with 150 km/h (nearly 100 mi/h) wind velocities. Antarctica's interior is a cold desert with only a few centimeters of water-equivalent precipitation, while the coastal areas average 30 cm (12 in.).
Antarctica's area is about 14 million square kilometers (5.4 million square miles), which is larger than the contiguous 48 United States and Mexico together. It is the third smallest continent, after Australia and Europe. About 98% of it is buried under a thick ice sheet, which in places is 4 km (13,000 ft) thick, making it the highest continent, with an average elevation of over 2 km (6500 ft).
Although most of Antarctica is covered by ice, some mountains rise more than 3 km (almost 10,000 ft) above the ice sheet. The largest of these ranges is the Transantarctic Mountains separating east from west Antarctica, and the highest peak in Antarctica is Mount Vinson, 5140 m (16,850 ft), in the Ellsworth Mountains. Other mountain ranges, such as the Gamburtsev Mountains in East Antarctica, are completely buried, but isolated peaks called nunataks frequently thrust through the ice around the coast.
The Antarctic ice sheet is the largest remnant of previous ice age glaciations. It has probably been in place for the last 20 million years and perhaps up to 50 million years. It is the largest reservoir of fresh water on Earth, with a volume of about 25 million cubic kilometers (6 million cubic miles). Glaciers flow out from this ice sheet and feed into floating ice shelves along 30% of the Antarctic coastline. The two biggest ice shelves are the Ross and Filchner-Ronne. These shelves may calve off numerous large tabular icebergs, with thicknesses of several hundred meters, towering as high as 70–80 m (250 ft) above the sea surface.
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