Short answers, pulled from the story.
Antarctica is Earth's southernmost and least-populated continent, situated almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle and surrounded by the Southern Ocean. It is the fifth-largest continent with an area of 14,200,000 square kilometers, about 40 percent larger than Europe, and contains the geographic South Pole.
The lowest natural air temperature ever recorded on Earth was registered at the Russian Vostok Station in Antarctica on the 21st of July 1983. Antarctica is on average the coldest, driest, and windiest continent, with inland winter temperatures falling below -80 Celsius.
Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen led the first expedition to reach the geographic South Pole on the 14th of December 1911, traveling from the ship Fram up the Axel Heiberg Glacier. The doomed Terra Nova Expedition reached the pole one month later.
Antarctica's ice shelves were probably first seen in 1820, with Russian captain Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen recording an ice shelf on the 27th of January. The first confirmed landing on the continental mass occurred in 1895, when the Norwegian-Swedish whaling ship Antarctic reached Cape Adare.
Antarctica is governed under the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, originally signed by twelve countries including the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, Argentina, Chile, Australia, and the United States. The treaty prohibits military activity, mining, nuclear explosions, and nuclear waste disposal, setting the continent aside as a scientific preserve.
Native Antarctic animals include mites, nematodes, penguins, seals, and tardigrades, with Antarctic krill serving as the keystone species of the Southern Ocean. Only three species of flowering plants survive, all in the Antarctic Peninsula: Deschampsia antarctica, Colobanthus quitensis, and the non-native Poa annua.
About 70 percent of the world's freshwater reserves are frozen in Antarctica. If all of it melted, global sea levels would rise by almost 60 meters, and most of the continent is covered by the Antarctic ice sheet with an average thickness of 1.9 kilometers.