The Most Hellish Place on Earth Contender #2: The East Antarctic Ice Sheet

Contender #1

It's the norm for people from places with difficult weather to brag about how awful it is to live in their home. (I still complain about Kansas, despite not having lived there in almost four years.) Over the next few posts, I'm going to be going over the actual serious contenders, though. At the end, I'll be having a vote to determine what people think the actual worst place is. Our second contender? The Antarctic Ice Sheet.

This is what the overwhelming majority of Antarctica looks like. [Image source]

Do you know what lives natively atop the 4.7 kilometres (2.9 mi) thick East Antarctic Ice Sheet? Nothing. Literally nothing. No plants. No animals. No bacteria. Absolutely nothing. The only life in Eastern, also known as Greater, Antarctica is either present on the thin coastlines where there is rock exposed, and there you find some moss, bacteria, and one or two species of insect. Penguins and seals as well, but they spend most of their time, and get all their food, from the ocean. There are no large, native land animals.

There are a few people atop the ice sheet at scientific research stations. They're few, far between and generally only there for the summer. Temperatures get as low as -85 °C in the winter. (-121 °F.) The sun stays up for weeks at a time in the summer, and it stays dark for weeks at a time in the winter. The alltime heat record for the continent (which occurred on the Antarctic Peninsula, which extends far north from the rest of the continent) is 17.5 °C (63.5 °F).

[Image source]

Navigation atop the ice sheet is extraordinarily difficult. The ice sheet is completely flat on top. There are no hills or visible relief of any sort. The closer you get to the south pole, the worse compasses work. (At the magnetic south pole, literally every single direction is north.) And, though the ice sheet looks perfectly flat, there are countless crevasses covered by only a single layer of snow, and there's no way to detect them except by probing ahead of you before every step you take. Step on one you didn't discover? You're dead or dying down an icy abyss.

As if all that wasn't bad enough, you have to deal with the wind. Antarctica is the windiest continent on the planet by a landslide. Wind atop the East Antarctic ice sheet never stops blowing. There's nothing to stop it or slow it down- it's the flattest place on Earth. It just keeps blowing. And blowing. And blowing. It can get extremely fierce, too- it's been clocked at 153 km/h. (95 mph) These boreal winds are katabatic- that is, they're flowing downhill. Though the ice sheet looks perfectly level while standing on it, it actually takes the form of a mindbogglingly huge dome. The wind is always blowing from the top of the dome downwards. Other weather never even shows up, because the katabatic winds just blow it away. There are weather stations in Antarctica where the average wind speed is over gale force. The AVERAGE windspeed.

More of the ice cap scenery. [Image source]

Oh, and to add insult to injury, the ice sheet counts as one of the driest deserts on the planet! There's very little precipitation- all of which arrives as snow- and it also has some of the driest air on the planet. There is so little humidity that cracked lips and chafed skin are the default- moisturizer is worth its weight in gold at Antarctic research stations.

And don't forget the blizzards! They can show up with little to no warning whatsoever, which is fun. Visibility in an Antarctic blizzard can drop below 100 feet very, very quickly. (25 foot visibility is very common, and zero visibility is far from unknown.) Temperature including windchill regularly drops to 100 °F (−73 °C). Oh, and that windchill comes from 102 km/h (63 mph) winds. Want to know how people train to navigate in these blizzards? By putting a bucket over their head and trying to find their way around. (I'm not joking even a little bit.)

While the top of the ice sheet might be brutally inhospitable, there is a network of liquid lakes and rivers beneath the surface! They're renowned for their bizarre behavior, too- many of them flow uphill, since they're driven more strongly by pressure than gravity. I wrote a blog post on the largest of the lakes, Lake Vostok, a while back.

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Bibliography:
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20151009-where-is-the-windiest-place-on-earth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Antarctica#Flora_and_fauna
http://www.antarcticglaciers.org/antarctica/east-antarctic-ice-sheet/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Antarctica
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctica_Weather_Danger_Classification
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_ice_sheet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildlife_of_Antarctica
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records#Antarctica
https://www.livescience.com/21677-antarctica-facts.html