What are Some Antarctic Animals?
About 40 million years ago, the supercontinent that Antarctica was a part of, Gondwana, started breaking up. This allowed cold water to build and circulate around the southern continent, displacing the warm north-south currents that previously made the area warm. Over tens of millions of years, glaciers began to form on the continent, mostly covering it by 15 million years ago. It was only 6 million years go that the ice caps reached their present extent. Today, 98% of the continent is covered by ice. The contemporary Antarctic fauna are mostly sustained by the continent’s meager flora, which only grows during the summer, and usually for just a few weeks at most. The majority of the plants there are the same plants that first evolved to live on the land — non-vascular plants like mosses and liverworts. Numerous microorganisms make up the majority of all photosynthetic organisms on the continent. In all, Antarctica contains about 200 species of lichens, 50 non-vascular plants, and just
