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WONDERS OF NATURE
Ross Ice Shelf. Nature miracle
As you know, the great navigator Cook never managed to reach the shores of Antarctica. Only almost half a century after its voyage, the ships of the Russian expedition of Bellingshausen and Lazarev managed to approach the coast of the southern continent in two places. And twenty years later, in 1840, the famous polar explorer, discoverer of the North Magnetic Pole, James Clark Ross, went to Antarctica to try to discover this time its southern counterpart. And although he did not manage to visit the South Magnetic Pole, the brave captain made many important geographical discoveries, and now his name rightfully adorns the map of Antarctica, and more than once.
Ross was the first to travel this far south, reaching through dangerous floating ice to almost eighty degrees south latitude. He discovered the largest and most active active volcano in Antarctica - Erebus, put on the map the sea and the island, later named after him, and then tried to go even further south. But his path was blocked by a gigantic ice wall that was as high as a twenty-story building, plunging vertically into the sea. "Fighting this barrier is like trying to swim through the cliffs of Dover," Ross wrote in his diary. It was the edge of the largest ice shelf in Antarctica, which also now bears the name of the brave English navigator. The ice barrier that stood in his way, the captain named the Victoria Barrier, in honor of his queen. (Now, however, history has done justice, and on the maps it is listed as the Ross Ice Barrier.) The Ross Glacier almost completely fills the entire southern part of the Ross Sea. From east to west, it stretches for eight hundred kilometers, and crashes into the depths of Antarctica for almost a thousand. In area, it is equal to the island of Madagascar and exceeds the territory of Sweden, Spain or France. The thickness of the triangular ice plate gradually decreases from south to north. Off the coast of Antarctica, it is more than a kilometer, and near the ocean, where its outer edge breaks off the Ross Ice Barrier, the ice is about two hundred meters thick. Ice shelves are formed where continental ice flows descend from the coast of Antarctica into the bays of the ocean. At the same time, they continue to move along the bottom of the continental shelf - the shelf - to a depth of about three hundred meters. Then the ice tongue emerges, merging with neighboring glacial ledges into a single mass, and this entire mass of ice continues to move until it fills the entire bay. Having gone beyond its limits, the glacier loses the protection of the shores, and the waves rocking the huge ice field begin to break off its edges. This is how table icebergs are formed - the floating ice islands of Antarctica. Such icebergs are much larger than the ice mountains that break away from the glaciers of Svalbard or Greenland. Sometimes their magnitude is simply amazing. For example, in the winter of 2000, New Zealand sailors noticed an ice mass the size of the island of Jamaica south of their shores! And the largest table iceberg had an area of more than thirty thousand square kilometers, that is, it was larger than Sicily. Such ice islands usually rise thirty to forty meters above the water, and go two hundred meters or more deep. The Ross Ice Shelf is fed by glaciers flowing down the slopes of the Queen Maud Land mountains and the Transantarctic Ridge. These mighty mountain systems, rising four kilometers above sea level, give rise to several glacial streams that merge into a single ice field on the coast of the Ross Sea. It is slowly but steadily moving towards the open sea at a speed of up to a kilometer per year. As you move, the ice melts from below, and cold bottom currents form, directed northward towards the ocean. The outer edge of the glacier, the same Ross Barrier, really remotely resembles the chalk cliffs of Dover, so close to the heart of English sailors. It is here that, under the influence of storms, the two-hundred-meter thickness of the glacier cracks and ice islands-icebergs break off. The number of them in the Antarctic, compared with the Arctic waters, is enormous. Sometimes up to a thousand floating ice blocks can be seen from the deck of a ship at the same time. However, the formation of cracks and the separation of pieces of the ice field are typical only for the marginal zone of the glacier. In general, there are no cracks on the ice shelves, and it is much easier to move along them than along the continental ice of Antarctica. It is no coincidence that most of the expeditions to the South Pole started from the Ross Sea. This area also attracted researchers by the fact that a whole bunch of sights are concentrated here that deserve the attention of scientists, in particular, the active volcano Erebus, the reflections of fire over which turned it into a kind of beacon for everyone who swims in the Ross Sea. And nearby, on Victoria Land, the South Magnetic Pole was located until recently. Now its location has shifted to the north, and the pole point is in the ocean, near the coast of Antarctica. The discovery and study of the magnetic pole on the southern mainland is associated with the name of the famous Australian polar explorer Mawson, a member of the English Antarctic expedition of Shackleton. He was there while Shackleton and three companions were trying to storm the South Pole. The Englishman's attempt was unsuccessful, and the pole was conquered by people only four years later, when the Norwegian Amundsen and the Scot Skotg reached it. Mawson, in the absence of the expedition leader, did not waste time and managed, together with two other researchers, to visit a point that had been attracting scientists since the time of Ross for half a century. The same Mawson with two satellites was the first to conquer the formidable volcano Erebus, towering four kilometers above the eternal ice of Antarctica. It happened in 1908. Scientists climbed to the top of the fire-breathing mountain in three days and examined all three of its craters. The largest of them was three hundred meters deep and eight hundred meters in diameter. At the bottom of it, lava, fire and smoke escaped from several holes, and there was a liquid lava lake. Combined with severe frost and wind, this made being at the top "not the most comfortable thing to do", according to Mawson. It should be noted that the lava lake of Erebus, which exists today, is the rarest phenomenon in the world of volcanoes. In addition to the Antarctic giant, long-lived lakes of liquid lava are noted only in the crater of the Kilauea volcano in the Hawaiian Islands and in the Nyi Ragongo crater in Africa. However, the fiery lake among the eternal snows and ices makes, no doubt, a stronger impression. There is enough work in the Ross Sea not only for geologists and magnetologists. Biologists also consider this area one of the most interesting in Antarctica. Despite the harsh climate, the edge of the ice shelf is teeming with life. Cold currents carrying oxygen-rich water promote the development of marine microorganisms and algae, which in turn attract numerous schools of tiny shrimps and a variety of fish. Baleen whales swim in the Ross Sea for shrimp. And fish are a desirable food for seals and seabirds. By the way, it was Ross who once discovered here a new, fourth species of Antarctic seals. It is called the Ross seal. However, birds far outnumber whales and pinnipeds. Tens of thousands of gulls, petrels, barn swallows and skuas nest on the rocks near the edges of the ice barrier. The latter often fly into the interior of the continent. American winterers observed them even at the South Pole. But the most numerous inhabitants of Antarctica are, of course, penguins. The population of their colonies reaches several hundred thousand birds. There are several types of penguins, as well as seals: small penguins Hell ate, larger ones - royal ones and the largest ones - emperor ones. Particularly interesting are the emperor penguins living in only two places in Antarctica. These large birds sometimes weigh up to eighty kilograms and have tremendous strength. There was a case when five sailors could not keep one such "emperor". The female penguin lays the only egg directly on the ice, after which the father of the family takes care of it. He lays the egg on his paws and covers it with a fat fold hanging down from the bottom of his body. After that, the male does not move for three months and does not eat, hatching offspring, and the female restores her strength during this time, fishing in coastal waters. Then the parents switch roles. Penguins have adapted perfectly to life in the harsh conditions of the Ross Sea region, where they have only one dangerous enemy - the leopard seal. But these predatory seals are relatively few in Antarctic waters, and penguin colonies thrive despite Antarctica's harsh climate. The curiosity and friendly disposition of these unusual birds greatly brighten up the life of polar explorers on the icy continent. The curiosity of penguins knows no bounds. It is enough, for example, to turn on a tape recorder, as a dozen feathered "music lovers" gather around a person to listen to music. At one time, the Ross Ice Barrier did not allow sailing ships to pass to the south, and even now its wall is "too tough" even for modern icebreakers. However, on the other hand, it was from here, from the Bay of Whales (the only place on the barrier where its height drops to seven meters), that Amudsen began his victorious march to the Pole. Expeditions of the famous polar explorers Shackleton, Mawson, Charcot, Drygalsky and others visited here in their time. And now the American polar station McMurdo is working here. And if we talk about the most studied area of Antarctica, the southernmost continent, then, without a doubt, this is the Ross Sea area - a huge body of water stretching almost to the pole, covered with a white shell of the largest glacier on Earth - the Ross Ice Shelf. Author: B.Wagner
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