Taylor Valley is the southernmost of the three large

McMurdo Dry Valleys The McMurdo Dry Valleys are a row of largely snow-free valleys in Antarctica, located within Victoria Land west of McMurdo Sound. The Dry Valleys experience extremely low humidity and surrounding mountains prevent the flow of ice from nearby ...

in the

Transantarctic Mountains The Transantarctic Mountains (abbreviated TAM) comprise a mountain range of uplifted (primarily sedimentary) rock in Antarctica which extend, with some interruptions, across the continent from Cape Adare in northern Victoria Land to Coats Land. ...

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 ...

, Antarctica, located west of

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 ...

at approximately . The valley extends from

Taylor Glacier __NOTOC__ The Taylor Glacier is an Antarctic glacier about long, flowing from the plateau of Victoria Land into the western end of Taylor Valley, north of the Kukri Hills, south of the Asgard Range. The middle part of the glacier is bounded ...

in the west to McMurdo Sound at Explorers Cove at the northwest head of New Harbour in the east and is about long. It was once occupied by the receding Taylor Glacier, from which it derives its name. Taylor Valley contains Lake Bonney in the west (inward), and Lake Fryxell in the east (coastward), and Lake Hoare,

Lake Chad Lake Chad (french: Lac Tchad) is a historically large, shallow, endorheic lake in Central Africa, which has varied in size over the centuries. According to the ''Global Resource Information Database'' of the United Nations Environment Programme ...

, Lake Popplewell, Mummy Pond and Parera Pond close together between the two. Further east of Lake Bonney is

Pearse Valley Pearse Valley () is an ice-free valley long, lying immediately west of Catspaw Glacier, at the south side of the Asgard Range in Victoria Land. Named by Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names (US-ACAN) for John S. Pearse, biologist at McMurdo Stat ...

. Taylor Valley is separated from Wright Valley in the north by

Asgard Range The Asgard Range is a mountain range in Victoria Land, Antarctica. It divides Wright Valley from Taylor Glacier and Taylor Valley, and was named by the Victoria University of Wellington Antarctic Expedition (1958–59) after Asgard, the home o ...

, and from Ferrar Glacier in the south by Kukri Hills. At its southernmost end, Taylor Valley becomes Quinn Gully, a mainly ice-free

gully A gully is a landform created by running water, mass movement, or commonly a combination of both eroding sharply into soil or other relatively erodible material, typically on a hillside or in river floodplains or terraces. Gullies resemble lar ...

, which descends between

MacDonald Hills The MacDonald Hills () are a compact group of exposed rock hills in the Asgard Range, east of Commonwealth Glacier on the north side of lower Taylor Valley, Victoria Land, Antarctica. They are separated from Hjorth Hill by Quinn Gully. The hill ...

and

Hjorth Hill Hjorth Hill () is a rounded, ice-free mountain, high, standing just north of New Harbour and south of Hogback Hill, in Victoria Land, Antarctica. The hill is separated from the MacDonald Hills by Quinn Gully. It was charted by the British An ...

to Explorers Cove in New Harbour. It was named by the

Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names The Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names (ACAN or US-ACAN) is an advisory committee of the United States Board on Geographic Names responsible for recommending commemorative names for features in Antarctica. History The committee was established ...

(1997) after Thomas Quinn, supervisor of

Continental Air Operations Continental may refer to: Places * Continent, the major landmasses of Earth * Continental, Arizona, a small community in Pima County, Arizona, US * Continental, Ohio, a small town in Putnam County, US Arts and entertainment * ''Continental'' ( ...

Antarctic Support Associates The Antarctic ( or , American English also or ; commonly ) is a polar region around Earth's South Pole, opposite the Arctic region around the North Pole. The Antarctic comprises the continent of Antarctica, the Kerguelen Plateau and other ...

Scar Peak Scar Peak () is a peak ( high) surmounting the northern wall of Taylor Valley immediately east of the Lacroix Glacier in Victoria Land. It was named by the New Zealand Geographic Board in 1998 after the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research ...

overlooks the valley's northern wall, east of the

Lacroix Glacier Lacroix Glacier () is a glacier between Suess Glacier and Matterhorn Glacier, which flows southeast into Taylor Valley in Victoria Land, Antarctica. It was mapped by the British Antarctic Expedition, 1910–13, under Robert Falcon Scott, and name ...

. Taylor Valley was discovered by the

British National Antarctic Expedition The ''Discovery'' Expedition of 1901–1904, known officially as the British National Antarctic Expedition, was the first official British exploration of the Antarctic regions since the voyage of James Clark Ross sixty years earlier (1839–184 ...

(1901–04), it was more fully explored by the BrAE (1907–09) and the BrAE (1910–13), and named after Australian geologist Thomas Griffith Taylor. In the oblique aerial photo at right, the tan bands are sandstone layers from the

Beacon Supergroup The Beacon Supergroup is a geological formation exposed in Antarctica and deposited from the Devonian to the Triassic (). The unit was originally described as either a formation or sandstone, and upgraded to group and supergroup as time passed. It ...

, a series of sedimentary rock layers formed at the bottom of a shallow sea between 250 million and 400 million years ago. Throughout that period, Earth's southern continents were locked into the supercontinent

Gondwana Gondwana () was a large landmass, often referred to as a supercontinent, that formed during the late Neoproterozoic (about 550 million years ago) and began to break up during the Jurassic period (about 180 million years ago). The final sta ...

. The dark band of rock that divides the sandstone is

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-grain ...

(sometimes called diabase), a volcanic rock that forms underground. The distinctive dolerite intrusion—or

sill Sill may refer to: * Sill (dock), a weir at the low water mark retaining water within a dock * Sill (geology), a subhorizontal sheet intrusion of molten or solidified magma * Sill (geostatistics) * Sill (river), a river in Austria * Sill plate, ...

—is a remnant of a massive volcanic plumbing system that produced major eruptions about 180 million years ago. The eruptions likely helped tear Gondwana apart.Taylor Valley, Antarctica
at

NASA Earth Observatory NASA Earth Observatory is an online publishing outlet for NASA which was created in 1999. It is the principal source of satellite imagery and other scientific information pertaining to the climate and the environment which are being provided by NA ...

. Article includes

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because those rights have expired ...

text from this US government website.

References

External links

USGS Geographic Names Database - Taylor Valley
McMurdo Dry Valleys Valleys of Victoria Land Transantarctic Mountains {{McMurdoDryValleys-geo-stub

See also

References

External links