The Alph River is a small

river A river is a natural flowing watercourse, usually freshwater, flowing towards an ocean, sea, lake or another river. In some cases, a river flows into the ground and becomes dry at the end of its course without reaching another body of w ...

Antarctica Antarctica () is Earth's southernmost and least-populated continent. Situated almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle and surrounded by the Southern Ocean, it contains the geographic South Pole. Antarctica is the fifth-largest cont ...

, running into Walcott Bay,

Victoria Land Victoria Land is a region in eastern Antarctica which fronts the western side of the Ross Sea and the Ross Ice Shelf, extending southward from about 70°30'S to 78°00'S, and westward from the Ross Sea to the edge of the Antarctic Plateau. I ...

. It is in an ice-free region at the west of the

Koettlitz Glacier Koettlitz Glacier is a large Antarctic glacier lying west of Mount Morning and Mount Discovery in the Royal Society Range, flowing from the vicinity of Mount Cocks northeastward between Brown Peninsula and the mainland into the ice shelf of Mc ...

, Scott Coast. The Alph emerges from Trough Lake and flows through Walcott Lake, Howchin Lake, and Alph Lake. It ends in a subglacial flow beneath Koettlitz Glacier to

McMurdo Sound McMurdo Sound is a sound in Antarctica. It is the southernmost navigable body of water in the world, and is about from the South Pole. Captain James Clark Ross discovered the sound in February 1841, and named it after Lt. Archibald McMurdo ...

.S.J. De Mora, R.F. Whitehead and M. Gregory. Aqueous geochemistry of major constituents in the Alph River and tributaries in Walcott Bay, Victoria Land, Antarctica. Antarctic Science, (1991), 3, pp 73–86 The river was named by

Thomas Griffith Taylor Thomas Griffith "Grif" Taylor (1 December 1880 – 5 November 1963) was an English-born geographer, anthropologist and world explorer. He was a survivor of Captain Robert Scott's Terra Nova Expedition to Antarctica (1910–1913). Taylor was a se ...

, member of the

Terra Nova Expedition The ''Terra Nova'' Expedition, officially the British Antarctic Expedition, was an expedition to Antarctica which took place between 1910 and 1913. Led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott, the expedition had various scientific and geographical objec ...

of 1911–1913, who explored the portion north of Pyramid Trough. He took the name from the opening passage of

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Samuel Taylor Coleridge (; 21 October 177225 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake ...

's poem ''

Kubla Khan ''Kubla Khan'' () is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, completed in 1797 and published in 1816. It is sometimes given the subtitles "A Vision in a Dream" and "A Fragment." According to Coleridge's preface to ''Kubla Khan'', the poem ...

'', as the stream continues north a considerable distance under moraine and ultimately subglacially beneath Koettlitz Glacier to the

Ross Sea The Ross Sea is a deep bay of the Southern Ocean in Antarctica, between Victoria Land and Marie Byrd Land and within the Ross Embayment, and is the southernmost sea on Earth. It derives its name from the British explorer James Clark Ross who ...

. The nearby Xanadu Hills are named from the same poem.

References

* Rivers of Victoria Land Scott Coast {{ScottCoast-geo-stub

See also

References