"So, as I said" repeats the storyteller, "what goes down must come up, and that is why there are so many diatoms. I can truly say that the Blue Whale is the biggest animal ever, because it is so cold that ocean water freezes next to the continent of Antarctica."

Why?

"I just told you!" says the storyteller. "The ocean freezes because its next to the frozen continent, stacked high with ice. The ice cap on Antarctica is more than two miles thick."

"Yes," said our grade-school scholar, "but Why is there so much ice? Don't just tell me that it is cold at the South Pole, I already know that."

To find a good, logical explanation for the ice, we have to know a few "laws of nature". There is a law in nature that says that warm air can hold more water than cold air. Warm air, especially when it is above the ocean, is wet air (as water vapor, not as solid snow or liquid rain). On the other hand, cold air, especially when it is over the land, or over ice, is dry air.

In Antarctica, very cold and very strong winds (katabatic winds) slide down off the ice cap into thewet and warmer air above the ocean. If you will forgive the use of a bad word, all hell breaks loose in places where cold, dry air bumps into warm, wet air. The place where they meet starts to heat up and the air spins clockwise in a great cyclonic storm. The warm air battles the cold air over who gets the water vapor. Neither can win, and both lose. The heat, released during the battle, rises upward in the spinning air. The water vapor turns to rain and snow, and some of it escapes as the spinning cyclone wanders away.

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