Aug 21 2010
Antarctica Is Wealthy With Resources
Many researchers use Antarctica for their scientific studies because there are many things there that can’t be found anywhere else on Earth. One fantastic Antarctican characteristic tops almost the entire land mass and also goes into the surrounding water. It’s the great ice sheet. The greatest one of these shelves, the Ross Ice Shelf, turns out to be almost as big as Texas. The front of this ice shelf is moving forward at the rate of about 1800 feet annually. To get a closer look on antarctica cruise deals visit this site.
Interestingly enough, the continent houses only two percent of the water in the world, but 90 percent of the ice. Sea level is kept in place because of the stability of the great inland ice. If only a few feet of ice is allowed to melt, the sea level would rise and could prove disastrous to several, if not all, seacoasts and seaports.
The insanity of it is that if all the ice melted, sea level would rise an astounding 250 feet. Understanding the Antarctic ice’s health is necessary. The backward or forward movement of the ice doesn?t really matter to most. Not only is the ice valuable in relation to sea level, but it also is a geophysical recording for up to the last million years.
The ice and snow have recorded events like nuclear explosions, the use of leaded gasoline and even lead smelting. For the last 60 years, there have been measurements taken of the concentration of lead on the surface of the ice. Because we have burned leaded gasoline, the decomposed lead alkyls have created an increase in the lead concentration on the surface of the ice, and these levels have been increasing steadily over the last ten years. Here it is maybe, that we will begin to understand the critical nature of the pollution challenges. This site teaches you about antarctica cruise vacations.
Although no elements were contained in the polar snows, trace amounts of DDT have been discovered in seals, some fish, and penguins in Antarctica. Space particles have always been entering earth’s atmosphere. These can be examined in the ice sheet and even dated according to their depth. If it can be determined that there are patterns to the space debris within those layers, we can assist astronauts in their space exploration by predicting what types of issues they may encounter.
Lichens make up a majority of Antarctic vegetation. Land animals are found there, too. The most common are mites and springtails. A wingless fly is the biggest land animal there. Remarkably, none of the insects on Antarctica can’t fly. The southernmost mammals, the Weddell seal as well as the flightless penguin, live in the encircling seas. When investigators took a look at the Weddell seal, they were shocked to learn that it could dive as deep as 1500 feet as it looked for sustenance.
Antarctic coasts give Adelie penguins nesting grounds. These animals then head northward when winter comes. Their incredible abilities to navigate by the sun and their biological clock determining the seasons allow them to migrate with amazing accuracy. Six Adelies were let go 2,400 miles away from their home nests, and three of them returned home themselves in only ten months. Some were taken by researchers and released in the South Pole. As soon as they knew they were released, all it took was a second to get their bearings, and they were soon off in the exactly correct direction.
The largest of all living things resides in the oceans surrounding Antarctica, and the productivity of the area is shown in this. The highly endangered blue whale is the largest animal ever recorded, and consumes a diet of a ton of shrimp on a daily basis. Lots more fish species live near Antarctica than in the Arctic Ocean. A stunning proof of the efficiency of the Antarctic Convergence lies in the statistic that 90 percent of all bottom dwelling Antarctic fish can not be discovered anywhere else on earth.
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