Thurston Island
| Thurston Island | |
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| Waters | Bellingshausen lake |
| Geographical location | 72 ° 6 ′ S , 99 ° 0 ′ W |
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| length | 215 km |
| width | 90 km |
| surface | 15,700 km² |
| Highest elevation | Mount Howell 750 m |
| Residents | uninhabited |
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The Thurston Island ( English Thurston Island ) is an ice-covered, rugged and glaciated island in the Southern Ocean off the Eights coast in the west Antarctic Ellsworthland .
The uninhabited island stretches for 215 kilometers from east to west. It is traversed in this direction by the Walker Mountains and is up to 90 kilometers wide. The area is 15,700 square kilometers and the maximum height is 750 meters. The island lies on the western edge of the Bellingshausen Sea . The Amundsen Sea begins to the west of the island . It is the third largest island in Antarctica after Alexander I Island and Berkner Island . To the north of Thurston Island is the Warr Glacier .
Thurston Island was discovered on February 27, 1940 from an airplane owned by Richard E. Byrd on an Antarctic expedition and named by him after W. Harris Thurston , a New York textile manufacturer and promoter of Antarctic expeditions.
At first Thurston was thought to be a peninsula , which was not corrected until 1960 during another expedition. It turned out that Thurston Island is completely separated from the mainland by the western part of the Abbot Ice Shelf , the Peacock Sound , more precisely from the Eights coast in Ellsworthland , a region in West Antarctica .
Web links
- Thurston Iceland in the Geographic Names Information System of the United States Geological Survey (English)
- Thurston Island on geographic.org (English)