Ross Ice Shelf

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Ross Ice Shelf in 1997.

The Ross Ice Shelf (81°30′S 175°00′W) is the largest ice shelf of Antarctica (an area of roughly 487 000 km², and about 800 km across: about the size of Spain). It is several hundred meters thick. The nearly vertical ice front to the open sea is more than 600 km long, and between 15 and 50 meters high above the water surface. 90 percent of the floating ice, however, is below the water surface.

Most of Ross Ice Shelf is located within the Ross Dependency claimed by New Zealand.

The ice shelf was named after Captain James Clark Ross who discovered it on January 28, 1841. It was originally named the Ice Barrier as it prevented sailing further south. Ross mapped the ice front eastward to 160°W.

The Ross Ice Shelf acquired a grimmer reputation in 1912, when it became the final resting place of Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his party.

[edit] History

On the 5th of January 1841 a British Admiralty team in the Erebus and the Terror, three masted ships with specially strengthened wooden hulls, was going through the pack ice of the Pacific nears Antarctica in an attempt to determine the position of the South Magnetic Pole. Four days later, they found their way into open water and were hoping that they will have a clear passage to their destination; but on 11 January, the men were faced with an enormous mass of ice.

Sir James Clark Ross, who was the expedition's leader, remarked 'Well, there's no more chance of sailing through that than through the cliffs of Dover,'. Ross, who in 1831 had located the North Magnetic Pole, spent the next two years vainly searching for a sea passage to the South Pole; later, his name was given to the ice shelf and the sea surrounding it.