What is the name of the largest ice shelf in Antarctica?

What is the name of the largest ice shelf in Antarctica? The answer is the Ross Ice Shelf. It floats in the southern Ross Sea and covers roughly 500,000 square kilometres, making it about the size of France. The shelf is fed by glaciers and ice streams flowing outward from the Antarctic ice sheet.

An ice shelf is not the same as an ice sheet or an iceberg. It is a thick platform of land-derived ice that extends from the coast and floats on seawater, although it remains attached to grounded ice at a grounding line. Ice shelves help slow the flow of inland glaciers, acting as a buttress before ice calves into the ocean.

British explorer Sir James Clark Ross discovered the feature in January 1841. Early explorers called it “The Barrier” because its towering ice front blocked ships seeking a route farther south. The Ross Ice Shelf has also produced spectacular icebergs, including B-15, which calved in 2000 and became the largest recorded iceberg at the time.

The Filchner–Ronne Ice Shelf is another giant Antarctic shelf, but it is generally ranked second by area.