The Bay of Whales was a natural ice

harbour A harbor (American English), harbour (British English; see spelling differences), or haven is a sheltered body of water where ships, boats, and barges can be docked. The term ''harbor'' is often used interchangeably with ''port'', which is ...

, or

iceport An iceport is a more-or-less permanent indentation in the front of an ice shelf, that can serve as a natural ice harbour. Though useful, they are not always reliable, as calving of surrounding ice shelves can render an iceport temporarily unstab ...

, indenting the front of 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 h ...

just north of

Roosevelt Island Roosevelt Island is an island in New York City's East River, within the borough of Manhattan. It lies between Manhattan Island to the west, and the borough of Queens, on Long Island, to the east. Running from the equivalent of East 46th to ...

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 ...

. It is the southernmost point of open ocean not only of 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 ...

, but worldwide. The Ross Sea extends much further south – as far as the Gould Coast, some from 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 ...

– but most of that area is covered by the Ross Ice Shelf rather than open sea.

Discovery and naming

Ernest Shackleton Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton (15 February 1874 – 5 January 1922) was an Anglo-Irish Antarctic explorer who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic. He was one of the principal figures of the period known as the Heroic Age o ...

named the feature on January 24, 1908, during the Nimrod Expedition, because of the large number of

whale Whales are a widely distributed and diverse group of fully aquatic placental marine mammals. As an informal and colloquial grouping, they correspond to large members of the infraorder Cetacea, i.e. all cetaceans apart from dolphins and ...

s seen near this location.

History

During his quest for the South Pole, Norwegian 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 beg ...

established a temporary base, which he named Framheim, at the Bay of Whales. The base was used between January 1911February 1912, and was named after Amundsen's ship '' Fram''. The Bay of Whales has also served as a logistical support base for several other important Antarctic expeditions, including: * 1928–1930: Richard Evelyn Byrd – first expedition * 1933–1935: Richard Evelyn Byrd – second expedition * 1939–1941: Richard Evelyn Byrd – third expedition The configuration of the Bay of Whales is continuously changing. A survey by the second Byrd expedition in 1934 determined that the feature lay at the junction of two separate ice systems, the movements of which are influenced by the presence of Roosevelt Island. Commander Glen Jacobsen, USN, who visited aboard the USS ''Atka'' in January 1955, found that calving of the

ice shelf An ice shelf is a large floating platform of ice that forms where a glacier or ice sheet flows down to a coastline and onto the ocean surface. Ice shelves are only found in Antarctica, Greenland, Northern Canada, and the Russian Arctic. The ...

rendered the iceport temporarily unusable. The Bay of Whales was entirely eliminated in 1987 when the Iceberg B-9 broke off from the Ross Ice Shelf. The Whale Bay Furrows, a series of undersea valleys on the central Ross

continental shelf A continental shelf is a portion of a continent that is submerged under an area of relatively shallow water, known as a shelf sea. Much of these shelves were exposed by drops in sea level during glacial periods. The shelf surrounding an island ...

, were named in association with the Bay of Whales.

References

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Whales, Bay of Ports and harbours of the Ross Dependency Bays of the Ross Dependency

Discovery and naming

History

See also

References