The Axel Heiberg Glacier in

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 ...

is a valley

glacier A glacier (; ) is a persistent body of dense ice that is constantly moving under its own weight. A glacier forms where the accumulation of snow exceeds its ablation over many years, often centuries. It acquires distinguishing features, such as ...

, long, descending from the high elevations of the

Antarctic Plateau The Antarctic Plateau, Polar Plateau or King Haakon VII Plateau is a large area of East Antarctica which extends over a diameter of about , and includes the region of the geographic South Pole and the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station. This ...

into the

Ross Ice Shelf The Ross Ice Shelf is the largest ice shelf of Antarctica (, an area of roughly and about across: about the size of France). It is several hundred metres thick. The nearly vertical ice front to the open sea is more than long, and between hi ...

(nearly at

sea level Mean sea level (MSL, often shortened to sea level) is an average surface level of one or more among Earth's coastal bodies of water from which heights such as elevation may be measured. The global MSL is a type of vertical datuma standardised g ...

) between the Herbert Range and Mount Don Pedro Christophersen in the Queen Maud Mountains. This huge glacier was discovered in November 1911 by the Norwegian polar explorer

Roald Amundsen Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen (, ; ; 16 July 1872 – ) was a Norwegian explorer of polar regions. He was a key figure of the period known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Born in Borge, Østfold, Norway, Amundsen bega ...

, and named by him for Axel Heiberg, a Norwegian businessman and patron of science who contributed to numerous Norwegian polar expeditions. Amundsen used this glacier as his route up onto the polar plateau during his successful expedition to the

South Pole The South Pole, also known as the Geographic South Pole, Terrestrial South Pole or 90th Parallel South, is one of the two points where Earth's axis of rotation intersects its surface. It is the southernmost point on Earth and lies antipod ...

. Unlike the big “outlet” glaciers such as the Beardmore, Shackleton and Liv, the Axel Heiberg is in effect an alpine glacier, cut off from the Plateau by a

dolerite Diabase (), also called dolerite () or microgabbro, is a mafic, holocrystalline, subvolcanic rock equivalent to volcanic basalt or plutonic gabbro. Diabase dikes and sills are typically shallow intrusive bodies and often exhibit fine-grained ...

rim and fed entirely from the uncharacteristically heavy snow falling within its own catchment. It falls over 2,700 m (9,000 ft) in 32 km (20 mi), most of it over 11 km (7 mi).

References

Glaciers of Amundsen Coast Queen Maud Mountains {{RossDependency-glacier-stub

See also

References