The Bay of Whales was a natural ice

harbour A harbor (American English), or harbour (Commonwealth English; see American and British English spelling differences#-our, -or, spelling differences), is a sheltered body of water where ships, boats, and barges can be Mooring, moored. The t ...

, or iceport, 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 high ...

just north of

Roosevelt Island Roosevelt Island is an island in New York City's East River, within the Borough (New York City), borough of Manhattan. It lies between Manhattan Island to the west, and the borough of Queens, on Long Island, to the east. It is about long, wit ...

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

, at the southernmost point of the world's

ocean The ocean is the body of salt water that covers approximately 70.8% of Earth. The ocean is conventionally divided into large bodies of water, which are also referred to as ''oceans'' (the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian Ocean, Indian, Southern Ocean ...

. While the Ross Sea stretches considerably further south – encompassing the Gould Coast, located around from the

South Pole The South Pole, also known as the Geographic South Pole or Terrestrial South Pole, is the point in the Southern Hemisphere where the Earth's rotation, Earth's axis of rotation meets its surface. It is called the True South Pole to distinguish ...

– the majority of this expanse 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 of Antarcti ...

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 animal, aquatic placental mammal, placental marine mammals. As an informal and Colloquialism, colloquial grouping, they correspond to large members of the infraorder Cetacea ...

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 Norwegians, 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, Am ...

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 was a logistical support base for Richard E. Byrd's first (1928–1930), second (1933–1935) and third expedition (1939–1941) The configuration of the Bay of Whales continuously changed. 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 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, 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