South Pole
In midsummer, as the sun reaches its maximum elevation of about 23.5 degrees, high temperatures at the South Pole in January average at . As the six-month "day" wears on and the sun gets lower, temperatures drop as well: they reach around sunset (late March) and sunrise (late September). In midwinter, the average temperature remains steady at around . The highest temperature ever recorded at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station was on Christmas Day, 2011, and the lowest was on June 23, 1982 (for comparison, the lowest temperature directly recorded anywhere on earth was at Vostok Station on July 21, 1983, though was measured indirectly by satellite in East Antarctica between Dome A and Dome F in August 2010). Mean annual temperature at the South Pole is -49.3 °C (-56.7 °F).
Plateau
Another very large plateau is the icy Antarctic Plateau, which is sometimes referred to as the Polar Plateau, home to the geographic South Pole and the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, which covers most of East Antarctica where there are no known mountains but rather high of superficial ice and which spreads very slowly toward the surrounding coastline through enormous glaciers. This polar ice cap is so massive that the echolocation sound measurements of ice thickness have shown that large parts of the Antarctic "dry land" surface have been pressed below sea level. Thus, if that same ice cap were suddenly removed, the large areas of the frozen white continent would be flooded by the surrounding Antarctic Ocean or Southern Ocean. On the other hand, were the ice cap melts away too gradually, the surface of the land beneath it would gradually rebound away through isostasy from the center of the Earth and that same land would ultimately rise above sea level.