Why is Antarctica cold
Answers
Explanation:
Antarctica has its features mainly due to its location at the South Pole. The South Pole tends to get significantly less sunlight than other places, this is similar to the North pole too. Less sunlight means it gets cold. In addition the permanent ice cap reflects a large amount of sunlight.
Answer:
It is mainly due to the following reasons:
Being around South Pole, Sun-rays fall so slanting that it receives solar energy only for a limited period in a year.
The reflection coefficient of ice is so high that even for the solar energy that falls on the polar ice cap, 90% gets reflected back into the sky.
The average thickness of the whole continent is 2.3 km amsl, thus the temperature shall fall by about 25 degree compared to the sea level.
The entire water over the polar cap is in the form of solid ice, thus whatever energy falls over the ice, it gets utilized in melting the ice (latent heat is consumed in just transforming ice into water).
No indigenous population so least thermal production locally. Absolute transparency in the atmosphere makes surface to radiate heat so fast that it not only cools the surface, the surface based inversions so formed are dragged by the gravity from the interior towards the periphery with wind velocities going up to 300 km/ hr.