Where there are no strong currents, the ice becomes partly grounded on the sea bottom and attaches itself to rocks and islands. The Ice Wall is a natural formation, a thick mass of floating ice that is attached to land, formed from and fed by tongues of glaciers extending outward from deep within the uncharted tundra into sheltered waters. The Ice Wall surrounds 95% of the Antarctic coast Some hold that the tundra of ice and snow stretches forever eternally. All we at present know is, that snow and hail, howling winds, and indescribable storms and hurricanes prevail and that in every direction 'human ingress is barred by unsealed escarpments of perpetual ice,' extending farther than eye or telescope can penetrate, and becoming lost in gloom and darkness. How far the ice extends how it terminates and what exists beyond it, are questions to which no present human experience can reply. Between pit stops at the Cape of Good Hope and his polar expeditions, he spent the next several years of his life circumnavigating the southern coast vainly in search of a south sea passage to the other side.īeyond the 150 foot Ice Wall is anyone's guess. Sir James Clark Ross and his expeditionary fleet sailed around the Ice Wall for a number of months in circumnavigation. It would be impossible to conceive a more solid-looking mass of ice not the smallest appearance of any rent or fissure could we discover throughout its whole extent, and the intensely bright sky beyond it but too plainly indicated the great distance to which it reached southward.

an obstruction of such character as to leave no doubt in my mind as to our future proceedings, for we might as well sail through the cliffs of Dover as to penetrate such a mass. Upon confronting the massive vertical front of ice he famously remarked.

The Ice Wall was discovered by Sir James Clark Ross, a British Naval Officer and polar explorer who was among the first to venture to Antarctica in an attempt to determine the position of the South Magnetic Pole. The Ice Wall as observed from a nearby aeroplane

Flat earth map ice wall