Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Those ice caps are really cool!
Earth's “ice caps” are actually continental glaciers, whose origins are described in Chapter 7. Cool?
They sure are. Ice caps account for about 2 percent of Earth's water. That may not seem like much,
but as a portion of all the water that exists on this planet, 2 percent turns out to be a lot of wet stuff —
or actually hard stuff, because it's water in a solid state.
You want data? Antarctica's ice cap is as deep as 15,760 feet. If you stood at that spot, you would
not literally be
on top of
Antarctica. Instead, you would be on top of a 3-mile-thick piece of ice that
is on Antarctica (see Figure 8-1). Indeed, the total volume of that ice cap is estimated to be about 30
million cubic kilometers. That's a lot of margaritas.
Figure 8-1:
A
portion of Antarc-
tica's ice cap.
Want more? Well, there's Greenland, which is one of the great misnomers in the history of real estate.
It really ought to be named Whiteland, because close to 99 percent of it is covered by ice cap. Actu-
ally, Greenland's ice cap is only about 10,000 feet deep at its thickest, so it's practically minor league
compared to Antarctica.
Getting out: Oceans, seas, gulfs, and bays
Most of earth's water is oceans, including seas, gulfs, and bays. The difference between these terms
is basically a matter of size and location.
Ocean
comes from the
Okeanos
of Greek mythology, which
was a river thought to encircle the Earth. And indeed,
the ocean
is a continuous body of water that
encircles the land, but it also consists of a handful of divisions that are also referred to as oceans —
Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean, Indian Ocean, and Arctic Ocean. So
ocean
is the big enchilada.
Seas, gulfs,
and
bays
are parts of the ocean that adjoin land bodies. Generally, seas are ranked second
(after oceans) with respect to size. They may be relatively enclosed by land, as is the Mediterranean
