Antarctica is a desert
The interior of Antarctica receives so little precipitation that it is the largest desert on Earth.
Established2 min read
A desert, in the climatic sense, is a place that receives less than about 250 millimetres of precipitation a year. The high plateau of East Antarctica receives only a few centimetres, most of it as fine snow. By area it is the largest such region on the planet, ahead of the Sahara.
The ice sheet is kilometres thick not because it snows heavily but because what falls almost never melts or runs away. Cold is a lockbox. The coast is a different climate, wetter and stormier, and is not the desert in the sentence.
Caveats
- Coastal Antarctica, and the peninsula in particular, can be far wetter than the interior.
- The word here is the precipitation definition. There are no dunes of sand in the claim.
Sources
- 1British Antarctic Survey. The Antarctic Ice Sheet. BAS Ice Sheets briefing, 2023.