Somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000 people, depending on the season

Antarctica doesn’t have a population in the way every other continent on this site does. Nobody is born here or grows old here, and nobody has ever called it home. What it has instead is a research workforce that swells and empties with the seasons: as many as 5,000 people in the Antarctic summer, dropping to around 1,000 once winter cuts most stations off from the outside world for months at a time¹.

McMurdo Station, the largest of the continent’s roughly 70 research bases, is a fair proxy for that swing on its own: it holds 1,000 to 1,400 people at the height of summer and as few as 150 to 200 through the dark winter months¹. Scientists, cooks, mechanics, and logistics staff make up most of that population, there to support Earth, atmospheric, and environmental research that would be difficult or impossible to run anywhere else on the planet.

That’s why this page skips the growth story every other population page on this site tells. There’s no fertility rate or migration balance to track, and no domestic economy for the Global Footprint Network to measure, so the usual Ecological Footprint section doesn’t apply here. What actually matters about Antarctica isn’t how many people live on it. It’s what’s frozen underneath them.

A continent that decides how high the oceans get

The Antarctic Ice Sheet holds about 30 million cubic kilometers of ice, by far the largest single mass of ice on Earth. If all of it melted, global sea levels would rise by roughly 58 meters, enough to redraw the coastline of every continent on this site². Together with Greenland’s much smaller ice sheet, it accounts for more than 99% of the world’s land ice and over two-thirds of its freshwater².

Nobody expects that ice to disappear on any timescale that matters to a person alive today. What does matter is the direction it’s moving. Satellite gravity measurements from NASA’s GRACE mission show Antarctica lost an average of 150 billion metric tons of ice a year between 2002 and 2023, and that pace nearly doubled over the second half of that period, from about 81 billion tons a year in the 2000s to about 157 billion tons a year in the 2010s³.

The most recent stretch of data complicates that story. From 2021 to 2023, Antarctica actually gained ice, at an average of about 119 billion tons a year. Researchers attribute that to an unusually large spike in snowfall rather than any reversal of the underlying warming trend, and even three good years in a row don’t come close to offsetting nearly two decades of losses that came before them³. It’s worth watching whether the gain holds up as more data comes in, but it would take a very long run of years like these before it meant anything for the 58-meter number above.