Ross Ice Shelf
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Ross Ice Shelf () 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.
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[edit] Overview
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 near 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 would have a clear passage to their destination; but on January 11, 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.
The Ross Ice Shelf is about the size of France, and reaches into Antarctica from the south. The ice mass is about 500 miles (800 km) wide and 600 miles (970km) long. In some places, namely its southern areas, the ice shelf can be almost 2,450 ft (750 m) thick. The Ross Ice Shelf pushes out into the sea at the rate of between 5ft (1.5 m) and 10 ft (3 m) a day. There are other glaciers that gradually add bulk to it. At the same time, the freezing of seawater below the ice mass increases the thickness of the ice from 15 in (38 cm) to 20 in (51 cm). Sometimes, fissures and cracks may cause the shelf to break off; the largest known is about 12,000 square miles (31,000 km²), that is slightly larger than the size of Belgium.
[edit] Ross Ice Shelf in popular culture
For centuries the shelf's southern areas remain undiscovered and unexplored, although the ancient Greeks came to a conclusion that there must be a large southern landmass to balance the northern landmass of Eurasia. This belief was portrayed in all early European maps; the famous Dutch map maker Mercator (1512-1595) showed a gigantic island around the South Pole which he named Terra Australis Incognita, despite the fact that, in 1578, Sir Francis Drake who was forced to the south by violent storms, saw no signs of the mythical continent.
The first section of stage 3 of the Capcom videogame Strider 2 (arcade/PlayStation) takes place on the Ross Ice Shelf.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- http://www.vims.edu/bio/microbial/NBPishelf.html - some pictures of the Ross.
- http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=5&ObjectID=10412954 Massive ice shelf 'may collapse without warning'de:Ross-Schelfeis
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