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.
The ice shelf was named after Captain Sir James Clark Ross, who discovered it on 28 January 1841. It was originally named the Victoria barrier by Ross after Queen Victoria and later the Great Ice Barrier, as it prevented sailing further south. Ross mapped the ice front eastward to 160°W.
Read more about Ross Ice Shelf: Exploration, Composition and Movement
Famous quotes containing the words ross, ice and/or shelf:
“The New Yorker will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady from Dubuque.”
—Harold W. Ross (1892–1951)
“Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)