Antarctica is like nowhere else on Earth. The only place like it is the North Pole, but there's not actually any land in the North Pole. Any place you can set your foot down is actually sea ice, several feet thick! Antarctica has sea ice too, but most of the continent is actually rock with ice two miles of ice on top of it. Because of this, Antarctica has the highest elevation of any continent, and if all that ice were to melt because of global warming, the sea level would rise over 200 feet!
Only 1% of the continent isn't covered by ice, which means nothing can really live there. It's a very inhospitable place, and humans can only live there with the help of very modern technology. It truly is like nowhere else on Earth!
Everything that helps people live in Antarctica has to be brought in. The main "city" in Antarctica is a research center called McMurdo Station, where 1,000 people live during the summer and only 300 live during winter. There are giant generators providing heat, and the airplane runways are made of packed ice. They even cut piers for ships to dock into the ice, which is several feet thick, and can carry a lot of weight!
