The Shackleton Inlet is a reentrant, about 16 km (10 mi) wide, between Cape Wilson and

Cape Lyttelton Cape Lyttelton () is a cape forming the southern entrance point of Shackleton Inlet, along the western edge of the Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica. Location Cape Lyttelton lies between Cape Goldie and Shackleton Inlet, along the western edge of th ...

. It is occupied by the terminus of the

Nimrod Glacier The Nimrod Glacier is a major glacier about 135 km (85 mi) long, flowing from the polar plateau in a northerly direction through the Transantarctic Mountains between the Geologists and Miller Ranges, then northeasterly between the Chur ...

descending at a low gradient from the bordering highlands to 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 ...

. Discovered by Capt.

Robert Falcon Scott Captain Robert Falcon Scott, , (6 June 1868 – c. 29 March 1912) was a British Royal Navy officer and explorer who led two expeditions to the Antarctic regions: the ''Discovery'' expedition of 1901–1904 and the ill-fated ''Terra Nov ...

, in December 1902, while on his attempted trip 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 ...

. He was accompanied on this trip by Dr. Edward A. Wilson and Lt. (later Sir)

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 A ...

, for whom this

inlet An inlet is a (usually long and narrow) indentation of a shoreline, such as a small arm, bay, sound, fjord, lagoon or marsh, that leads to an enclosed larger body of water such as a lake, estuary, gulf or marginal sea. Overview In ma ...

was named.

External links

* Inlets of Antarctica Bodies of water of the Ross Dependency Shackleton Coast {{ShackletonCoast-geo-stub