The Ross Ice Shelf

Mention the wall of ice in the far south and someone will laugh. It sounds like something out of Game of Thrones, a giant Wall at the edge of the world, and many people shut the idea down without a second look. But there is nothing fictional about it. The ice wall has a name, a discoverer, a measured height and length, a place on every map of the region, and nearly two hundred years of written records.

“It’s not in the Bible”

A common reply is that the ice wall is not biblical. That is true, and it misses the point. The Bible does not name the Ross Ice Shelf, but it does not name Mount Everest, the Pacific Ocean or the Amazon River either, and no one doubts that they exist. “Is it in the Bible?” and “Is it real?” are two different questions. This one is a question of geography, and geography is settled by records. Here they are.

What Ross saw in 1841

The British naval officer James Clark Ross sailed into the far southern sea with two ships, the Erebus and the Terror. On 28 January 1841 he came to something no one had described before. In his published account, he wrote:

a perpendicular cliff of ice, between one hundred and fifty and two hundred feet above the level of the sea, perfectly flat and level at the top, and without any fissures or promontories on its even seaward face.

He followed it for days, looking for a way through, and found none. His verdict, on the next page, has become famous: “we might with equal chance of success try to sail through the Cliffs of Dover, as penetrate such a mass.” A wall of ice, as high as a fifteen-story building, rising straight out of the sea and running past the horizon. That is not a fantasy writer’s invention. It is a ship captain’s log.

“The Barrier”

For the next century the explorers who went there gave it a plain name: the Barrier, or the Great Ice Barrier. Robert Falcon Scott titled a chapter of his 1905 account “Along the Great Barrier.” Ernest Shackleton, in the preface to his 1909 book, wrote of “the breaking away of a section of the Great Ice Barrier.” Roald Amundsen, who set out from its surface in 1911, called it “the great Antarctic Barrier which has since been named the Ross Barrier.”

The modern name came later. The United States Board on Geographic Names adopted “Ross Shelf Ice” in 1947 and changed it to “Ross Ice Shelf” in 1953. So when people today speak of an “ice wall,” they are not making up a term. They are using, in plainer words, the name the explorers themselves used for it.

The shelf today

The Ross Ice Shelf is the largest ice shelf on record. The U.S. Geological Survey gives its area as about 487,000 square kilometers, “roughly the size of France.” The ice is hundreds of meters thick, and its seaward edge rises as much as 50 meters, over 160 feet, above the water. Scientists drill into it, fly radar over it, and measure it year after year. It is one of the most studied features in the far south.

Operation Highjump

After the Second World War the United States Navy mounted the largest expedition ever sent to the southern ice. Its official name was the Antarctic Development Project, better known as Operation Highjump. It was authorized on 26 August 1946 and sailed in December, with “just over 4700 men, with 33 aircraft, on 13 ships.” Rear Admiral Richard H. Cruzen commanded the task force, and Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd, the famous polar explorer, served as officer in charge of the project.

The force worked in three main groups. The Eastern and Western groups surveyed the coast by ship and aircraft. The Central Group went to the Ross Ice Shelf itself. It reached the Bay of Whales on 15 January 1947 and built a base on the shelf, called Little America IV, from which aircraft flew survey missions until the group left on 23 February 1947. The largest naval expedition the region had ever seen set up camp on top of the ice wall.

What Byrd did and did not say

Operation Highjump has gathered many stories, and some of the quotes attributed to Admiral Byrd do not hold up. We want readers to be able to defend what they share, so here is the record.

On 5 March 1947 the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio published an interview with Byrd by an American wire reporter. Byrd warned that the United States could be attacked by planes flying over one or both poles, and said that the time had ended when the nation could take refuge in its isolation. That much is documented. In context he was speaking of the new long-range aircraft of the coming Cold War.

Two popular quotes are not documented. The line about “flying objects” that could fly from pole to pole at incredible speeds comes from a 1975 book that mistranslated the interview. And the famous quotes about “the land beyond the pole” do not appear in any record from 1947 or 1956; they first surface in publications of 1959. We do not use either one, and we encourage readers not to. The ice shelf does not need them.

The Antarctic Treaty

Twelve years after Highjump, on 1 December 1959, twelve nations signed the Antarctic Treaty in Washington. It took effect in 1961. Its first article closes the region to military activity:

Antarctica shall be used for peaceful purposes only. There shall be prohibited, inter alia, any measures of a military nature, such as the establishment of military bases and fortifications, the carrying out of military maneuvers, as well as the testing of any type of weapons.

Article VI defines where the treaty applies: “to the area south of 60º South Latitude, including all ice shelves.” The ice shelves are named in the treaty itself. Whatever one thinks of the rest of the far south, the Ross Ice Shelf is a legal and governed place, written into international law by the world’s leading powers.

The bound of the sea

Scripture never speaks of an ice wall, and we will not claim that it does. But it does speak, again and again, of a limit God set for the sea:

Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb? … And brake up for it my decreed place, and set bars and doors, And said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed?

“Thou hast set a bound that they may not pass over” (Psalm 104:9). “He hath compassed the waters with bounds” (Job 26:10). God “gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment” (Proverbs 8:29). And it is God Who makes the ice: “Out of whose womb came the ice? … the face of the deep is frozen” (Job 38:29–30).

These verses do not name the Barrier. But a wall of ice standing at the edge of the southern sea, “hitherto and no further,” is entirely at home in the world they describe.

What this shows

Let us be clear about what this short study proves. It proves that the ice wall is real: discovered in 1841, described as a cliff no ship could pass, called “the Barrier” by every explorer who went there, measured by modern science, occupied by the largest naval expedition of its era, and written into a treaty by name. Nobody needs to apologize for talking about it.

The larger question, how far the ice extends and what it means for the shape of the world, is the subject of a longer study. We set out that case, from Scripture, observation and history, in The Shape of the Earth. Whatever conclusion a reader reaches there, the starting point should not be ridicule. The wall is on the map.

Further reading