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)
“When the ice is covered with snow, I do not suspect the wealth under my feet; that there is as good as a mine under me wherever I go. How many pickerel are poised on easy fin fathoms below the loaded wain! The revolution of the seasons must be a curious phenomenon to them. At length the sun and wind brush aside their curtain, and they see the heavens again.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The boy seemed to have fallen
From shelf to shelf of someone’s rage.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)