Ross Ice Shelf

The Ross Ice Shelf is the largest ice shelf of Antarctica (an area of roughly 487,000 square kilometres (188,000 sq mi) and about 800 kilometres (500 mi) across: about the size of France). It is several hundred metres thick. The nearly vertical ice front to the open sea is more than 600 kilometres (370 mi) long, and between 15 and 50 metres (50 and 160 ft) high above the water surface. Ninety percent of the floating ice, however, is below the water surface.

Most of Ross Ice Shelf is in the Ross Dependency claimed by New Zealand. It floats in, and covers, a large southern portion of the Ross Sea and the entire Roosevelt Island located in the west of the Ross Sea.

The ice shelf is named after Captain Sir James Clark Ross, who discovered it on 28 January 1841. It was originally called The Barrier, with various adjectives including Great Ice Barrier, as it prevented sailing further south. Ross mapped the ice front eastward to 160°W. In 1947, the US Board on Geographic Names applied the name Ross Shelf Ice to this feature and published it in the original US Antarctic Gazetteer. In January 1953 the name was changed to Ross Ice Shelf; that name was published in 1956.

On January 5, 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 11 January, the men were faced with an enormous mass of ice.

Sir James Clark Ross, who was the expedition's commander, 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. Two volcanoes in the region were named by Ross for his vessels.

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