Minna Bluff

- 78.575167.07222222222Koordinaten: 78 ° 34 '30 " S, 167 ° 4' 20" E

Minna Bluff is the name of a rocky cape at the eastern end of a volcanic peninsula, which pushes forward into the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. It forms a long, narrow arm which terminates in a hook-shaped processes ( Minna Hook) and is subject to research on the history of the Antarctic cryosphere, which are funded by the National Science Foundation.

The cape comes up again and again in the history of the discovery of the Antarctic. For the first time it was sighted in June 1902 during Robert Falcon Scott's Discovery Expedition, which took place from 1901 to 1904. Later, the Cape was used as a crucial landmark and location for important accounts. Originally called simply " the Bluff ", it was later named by Scott after the wife of the former President of the Royal Geographical Society, Sir Clements Markham.

Each expedition that Scott was succeeded by his pioneering travel on this route ( including Ernest Shackleton in 1908, Scott himself in 1911 and Shackleton's Ross Sea Party 1914-16 ) took advantage of Minna Bluff to store supplies and to find their way on the road. Thanks to the state of the ice in its immediate neighborhood, the polar route is about 30 kilometers east furnished, depots along the route within sight of the Cape.

According to research by George Simpson, the meteorologists at the Terra Nova expedition, Minna Bluff has an effect on the polar weather. The mass of the cape deflects the passing along the eastern edge of the Ross Ice Shelf winds from the east. About 80 miles further north to reach this winds the Ross Island, where they are shared. A stream is blowing in the McMurdo Sound, the other aimed east toward Cape Crozier. This division of the wind direction, together with other factors triggered the " windless bay " on the south coast of Ross Island, an unusually cold area, predominant in the fog and was described on several land travel between McMurdo Sound and Cape Crozier.