Bay of the whales
Coordinates: 78 ° 30 ′ S , 164 ° 20 ′ W
The Bay of Whales was a bay on the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf north of Roosevelt Island in Antarctica . It was the southernmost point of the open sea, not only of the Ross Sea , but worldwide. All marine areas further south are covered by the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf and the Ross Ice Shelf.
When the 154 km long and 35 km wide iceberg B-9 broke off in 1987, the bay also disappeared.
The predecessors of this bay were Borchgrevink Bay and the so-called Barrier Inlet to the east of it , which were discovered during the Southern Cross Expedition (1898-1900) and the Discovery Expedition (1901-1904). When searching for the Barrier Inlet by Ernest Shackleton during the Nimrod expedition was determined at position fixes on 24 January 1908 that both the fjord-like inlet also known as Borchgrevink Bay by breaking large masses of ice from the Ross Ice Shelf had disappeared. Shackleton named the resulting bay after the large number of whales that were sighted there. The nature of the bay is constantly changing. Research conducted by an expedition led by Richard Byrd in 1934 revealed that the site lies on the junction of two different ice systems, the movements of which are influenced by the glaciated Roosevelt Island, which is partially under the ice shelf.
The natural harbor served as the starting point for Roald Amundsen's successful expedition to the South Pole in 1911. In contrast to Shackleton, who had ruled out a landing three years earlier because of breaking ice, Amundsen chose the bay for his Framheim base camp , as he erroneously postulated that the ice was stable Seabed. The first American Antarctic expeditions initially followed Amundsen's choice of the Bay of Whales, such as Richard Byrd's departure camp from 1928 to 1930, as the destination of Lincoln Ellsworth's transantarctic flight in 1935 and as the west base of the United States Antarctic Program from 1939 to 1941.
Picture gallery
Aerial view of the bay with Little America IV station (southern summer 1946–47)
Icebreaker in the former Bay of Whales (January 1999)
former whale bay (before 2007)
See also
literature
- Beau Riffenburgh: "Nimrod": Ernest Shackleton and the extraordinary history of the South Pole expedition 1907–1909. Translated from English by Sebastian Vogel. Berlin Verlag, 2006, ISBN 3-8270-0530-2 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Britannica: Bay of Whales
- ^ Harry JR Keys, SS Jacobs, Don Barnett: The calving and drift of iceberg B-9 in the Ross Sea, Antarctica. In: Antarctic Science. Volume 2, No. 3, September 1990, pp. 243-257. doi: 10.1017 / S0954102090000335 (full text)
- ↑ Bay of Whales ( English ) In: Geographic Names Information System . United States Geological Survey . Retrieved October 26, 2013.
- ^ R. Huntford: Scott and Amundsen. Hodder and Stoughton, London et al. 1979, ISBN 0-340-19565-7 , p. 242.