This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
James Clark Ross had already made his name in the Arctic, locating the north magnetic pole in 1831, before he turned south. Commanding an expedition that sailed south for the Antarctic in October 1839 in the ships Erebus and Terror, he pushed further south than any prior explorer, discovering the sea, the great ice shelf at its southern limit, and the volcanic island near that shelf edge that all now carry some form of his name or his ships. The Ross Ice Shelf he found remains the largest ice shelf on the continent, roughly the size of Spain, and the sea itself, opening south of New Zealand between Victoria Land and Marie Byrd Land, is the southernmost sea on Earth, its own southern edge sitting barely 320 kilometers from the pole.