WORLD'S COOLEST PLACE

Antarctica is a special place, no matter how you look at it. It's the highest, driest, coldest, and windiest continent, for starters. One way that it's very special is its position, squatting right
on the south end of the Earth.To begin with, the seventh continent is in the middle of its own lithospheric plate, completely isolated from other continents.

Ever since that time, the ocean has surrounded it on all sides, turning around it in a great westward current. Antarctica has gotten colder and colder, cooling the rest of the planet
along with it. Over the years, it has accumulated a gigantic layer of ice to a height of 3,000 meters. That huge central mound stands up nearly halfway through the atmosphere, so like
a bald-headed man with no hat, it loses heat directly to outer space. The cold air that results flows right off the ice cap by gravity, picking up speed as it goes, until the resulting katabatic winds roar off the continent's edge onto the sea.


Antarctica is not really responsible for the ice ages we've been living through for the past
few million years, though. For that, you might blame Panama, which rose out of the water
about 3 million years ago and cut off the Atlantic from the Pacific Ocean. Now we have a complicated setup, involving Greenland with its ice cap and currents in the north Atlantic
Ocean, that seems to switch back and forth between a cold-climate state and a warmer
state, where we are today.