Antarctica: The frozen time capsule

Antarctica is so cold mainly because it sits at a very high elevation and is surrounded by open ocean rather than warmer land, which keeps warm air masses away. Its thick ice sheet also reflects most incoming sunlight back into space, keeping the surface cold even during the sunlit summer months.

Yes, but not permanently. Antarctica has never had a native population, and no one holds citizenship there. Instead, several thousand scientists and support staff move through its research stations each year, with numbers dropping sharply once winter darkness sets in and travel becomes impossible.

No single country owns Antarctica. Several nations made territorial claims in the early twentieth century, but a 1959 international treaty set those claims aside and opened the continent to peaceful scientific research instead, so no government exercises full sovereignty over any part of it today.

Antarctica counts as a desert because its interior receives extremely little snowfall each year, far less than most sandy deserts get in rain. The freezing air simply cannot hold much moisture, so even though ice covers nearly the entire continent, almost none of it arrives as fresh precipitation.

Roughly seventy percent of the world's fresh water is frozen inside Antarctica's ice sheet. That ice also makes up about ninety percent of all the ice on Earth, built up gradually over hundreds of thousands of years as snow compressed into solid layers beneath its own weight.