Prominent Features
Beaufort Island
This small island at the northern entrance to McMurdo Sound is a protected area due to its site as a penguin rookery.
Black Island (Ross Archipelago)
This island is located west of nearby White Island and is about 25 miles (40 km) from McMurdo Station. An unmanned telecommunications base is located here.
Cape Royds
Protected area with the most southerly Adelie penguin colony (Antarctica New Zealand). The site features an expedition hut built by Ernest Shackleton and his crew of the Nimrod in 1907 on western shore of Ross Island.
Discovery Point
Also referred to as Hut Point, which overlooks Winter Quarters Bay. Location of the expedition hut built by the British Antarctic Expedition(1901–04) led by Robert Falcon Scott.
Glacier Ice Tongues
Erebus Ice Tongue projects 11–12 km from the coastline, reaching up to 10 meters in height. Ice flowing rapidly from the glacier at the base of Mt. Erebus forms the ice structure. MacKay Glacier Tongue is located across the sound to the northwest at Granite Harbor.
McMurdo Dry Valleys
This row of valleys on the western shore are so named because of their extremely low humidity and their lack of snow or ice cover.
McMurdo Ice Shelf
This floating ice shelf forms the southern boundary of McMurdo Sound and is itself part of the larger Ross Ice Shelf.
Mount Discovery
This isolated volcanic cone on the western shore of McMurdo Sound reaches 2,681 meters (8,796 ft) in height.
Mount Erebus
Mount Erebus is the southernmost active volcano on Earth. (Antarctic Connection). The mountain reaches 3,794 meters (12,448 ft) in height and is located on Ross Island.
Ross Island
Ross Island features four principal volcanoes: Mounts Erebus, Terror, Bird, and Terra Nova. The United States and New Zealand scientific bases are located on the southern end of the island.
Royal Society Range
This volcanic range is part of the Transantarctic Mountains, one of the world’s longest mountain chains (Antarctic Connection). The Royal Society Range is located on McMurdo Sound’s southwestern shore.
White Island (Ross Archipelago)
The McMurdo Ice Shelf encircles White Island, which is visible from Scott Base. A perennial tidal crack in the ice permits weddell seals to live at the island year round. (Texas A&M University at Galveston LABB)
Read more about this topic: McMurdo Sound
Famous quotes containing the words prominent and/or features:
“The worst enemy of good government is not our ignorant foreign voter, but our educated domestic railroad president, our prominent business man, our leading lawyer.”
—John Jay Chapman (1862–1933)
“The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)