The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Amery Ice Shelf

an ice shelf in eastern Antarctica, between the Lars Christensen and Ingrid Christensen coasts. The Amery Ice Shelf measures more than 200 km in length and ranges in thickness from 400 m to 800 m. It extends 250 km into the continent and merges in the south with the Lambert Glacier, its main source. The shelf has an area of approximately 40,000 sq km. In 1964 a huge iceberg covering an area of approximately 11,000 sq km broke off from the shelf.

The shelf was discovered in 1931 by an expedition sponsored by Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand and was named for W. B. Amery, a representative of the British government in Australia. Amery Base, a temporary Australian station, was used to conduct research on the shelf in 1968. Soviet antarctic expeditions carried out detailed geological and geographical research from 1971 to 1974 at the temporary Sodruzhestvo Station.

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References in periodicals archive

Prydz Bay on the east coast of Antarctica is a deep embayment where the giant drainage system of Lambert Glacier ends at the Amery Ice Shelf (Fig.

Notes on the Ascidian component of a Marine Benthos survey in Australian Antarctic Territory

Two secondary negative MSLP anomaly centers located over coastal Ross Sea (between 165[degrees]E and 160[degrees]W) and the Amery Ice Shelf (~65[degrees]E) produced stronger onshore wind flows and resulted in greater than 30% higher P-E in the interior of the Antarctic continent (Fig.

6. ANTARCTICA

The ships were off MacKenzie Bay, southwest of Perth, in an area of Antarctica near the Amery Ice Shelf.

Whale wars; BATTLE ON HIGH SEAS TO SAVE ENDANGERED MAMMALS; PICTURE POWER

In fact, the largest glacier on Earth is the Lambert Glacier (96 km wide, 400 km long, and about 2500 m thick) in East Antarctica, flowing down from the Antarctic Ice Sheet to the Amery Ice Shelf. And the Humboldt Gletsjer does not even represent the longest ice-front in the Northern Hemisphere: that distinction belongs to the east and southeast front of the Austfonna on Nordaustlan-det, Svalbard, some 185 km long, while there are numerous stretches of ice-cliffs longer than the Humboldt Gletsjer around the periphery of Antarctica.

Race to the Polar Sea: the Heroic Adventures of Elisha Kent Kane

In December 2003, researchers drilled a hole through the Amery ice shelf in Antarctica.

Life under ice

In December 2003, researchers drilled a hole through the 480-meter-thick Amery ice shelf in Antarctica to get a look at the ocean bottom.

An unexpected, thriving ecosystem

Early analyses show that in just three years the Amery Ice Shelf has advanced five kilometres, while the Shirase Glacier, located in the Indian Ocean sector of the continent, has retreated twelve kilometres, and an enormous tabular iceberg (10,915 km2) calved from the Ross Ice Shelf.

RADARSAT-1 PROVIDES VALUABLE ANTARCTIC IMAGERY

Andrew McMinn of the University of Tasmania and his colleagues looked for changes by pulling up cores of sediments from Antarctic fjords near the Amery Ice Shelf. Using the decay of radioactive lead to date the sediment layers, they tracked the waxing and waning of algae species over the last 600 years.

Antarctic algae weather UV rays