What’s under Antarctica?

I always figured there was a land mass under all of Antarctica that, give or take, was well above sea level. Turns out that isn’t the case at all. Take the ice cap off Antarctica and you end up with a land mass about half the size of what you would expect surrounded by a bunch of islands.

Drag the slider up and down and you can see just what parts of Antarctica are sitting on land and what parts are sitting on the sea floor.

This isn’t a prediction of what would happen if Antarctica melted. It’s just a map of what Antarctica would look like if you couldn’t see the ice.

Now I can see why scientists are so concerned about Western Antarctica. That’s the part they believe will go first and it could, according to some, go very quickly.

Lets talk code

From a code perspective I love this example Flex application because of it’s simplicity. It’s a great example of how powerful the Flex framework is because there is absolutely no Actionscript in the source code here. I didn’t have to write code to load the images, or to change the alpha of the top image when the slider changes. Nothing like that. All made possible through the magic of data binding.

[cc lang="actionscript3"]
package com.polyGeek.patterns {
	import flash.display.Sprite;
	public class WavyCircle extends Sprite {
		public function WavyCircle( s:Sprite, radius:int, amplitude:int, period:int, rotation:Number ) {
			super();
			var step:Number = 0.01;
			var len:Number = 2 * Math.PI + step;
			for( var i:Number = -0.01; i < len; i+= step ) {
				var r:Number = radius + amplitude * ( Math.sin( period * i ) * Math.cos( period * i ) );
				if( i >= 0 ) {
					s.graphics.lineTo( Math.sin( i + rotation ) * r, Math.cos( i + rotation ) * r );
				} else {
					s.graphics.moveTo( Math.sin( i + rotation ) * r, Math.cos( i + rotation ) * r );
				}
			}
		}
	}
}[/cc]