Volta
ExplorationJanuary 1841

Ross’s Antarctic Expedition

With the Erebus and Terror the Briton James Clark Ross sailed into a deep sea of Antarctica (the Ross Sea) and found a smoking volcano, Mount Erebus, and a vast wall of ice barring the sea (the Ross Ice Shelf).

The Erebus and Terror in the Ross Sea — by John Edward Davis, second master of the Terror (c. 1841)
The Erebus and Terror in the Ross Sea — by John Edward Davis, second master of the Terror (c. 1841)

John Edward Davis · Public domain · Source

Setting out from Britain in 1839 to seek the South Magnetic Pole, Ross pushed through a thick belt of pack ice in January 1841 into open sea to the south. He saw the mountains of Victoria Land and on 27 January found an active volcano, smoking, which he named Mount Erebus after his ship. To its east a cliff of ice more than 50 m high ran for hundreds of kilometres, and the ships could go no further — the wall now called the Ross Ice Shelf.

The next year he reached 78°10′ S, a record unbroken for nearly sixty years. Both ships vanished with Franklin’s expedition seeking the Northwest Passage in 1845; their wrecks were found in Canadian Arctic waters in 2014 and 2016.

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The map in 1839

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States at the time
Great Britain
Places
Mount Erebus

People

  • James Clark Ross1800 – 1862

    key figure · British naval officer and explorer who reached the North Magnetic Pole in 1831 and in 1841 discovered the Ross Sea, the Ross Ice Shelf and Mount Erebus

Before and after

Earlier
1832 British Reform Act and Chartism
Later
1840 Opium War and Treaty of Nanjing

Themes that include this event

  • Antarctic Exploration1773 – 2014

    From Cook crossing the Antarctic Circle in 1773 to the first sightings of the continent, Ross’s wall of ice, the race to the pole between Amundsen and Scott, Shackleton’s Endurance, the Antarctic Treaty and the ozone hole — two centuries of reaching for the frozen continent