Case file · Declassified record
Ross finds the Great Ice Barrier
On 28 January 1841 James Clark Ross, with HMS Erebus and Terror, met a sheer wall of ice stretching east for hundreds of kilometres and standing 15 to 50 m above the sea; it is now the Ross Ice Shelf.
1841 CE · -77.80, -178.00 · status: official
The account
Sailors called it simply 'the Barrier', because it stopped any ship going further south. Ross also named the volcanoes Erebus and Terror after his ships. The real ice cliff, about the size of France in area, became the template for the 'ice wall' of later flat-earth belief.
Connections in the atlas
- The singing Ross Ice Shelf
- Mount Erebus breathes gold
- Flight 901 and the whiteout on Mount Erebus
- The flat-earth 'ice wall' around the world