Stancomb-Wills Glacier

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Stancomb-Wills Glacier
Penguin in Antarctica jumping out of the water.jpg
Emperor penguins breed in the IBA
Antarctica relief location map.jpg
Blue pog.svg
Location of Stancomb-Wills Glacier in Antarctica
Typecirque
Location Coats Land
Coordinates 75°18′S19°00′W / 75.300°S 19.000°W / -75.300; -19.000
Thicknessunknown
Terminus Weddell Sea
Statusunknown

The Stancomb-Wills Glacier is a large glacier that debouches into the eastern Weddell Sea southward of Lyddan Island. The glacier was discovered in the course of the U.S. Navy LC-130 plane flight over the coast on November 5, 1967, and was plotted by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) from photographs obtained at that time. The name was applied by the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names (US-ACAN) in 1969.

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The Stancomb-Wills Glacier Tongue ( 75°0′S22°0′W / 75.000°S 22.000°W / -75.000; -22.000 ) is the extensive seaward projection of the Stancomb-Wills Glacier into the eastern Weddell Sea. The cliffed front of this feature was discovered in January 1915 by a British expedition led by Ernest Shackleton. He named it "Stancomb-Wills Promontory," after Dame Janet Stancomb-Wills, one of the principal donors of the expedition. [1] [2] In 1969, US-ACAN amended the name to "Stancomb-Wills Glacier Tongue". This followed the U.S. Navy flight on which the glacier was discovered and the relationship with the glacier tongue was first observed.

The Stancomb-Wills Glacier Important Bird Area ( 74°06′15″S23°05′31″W / 74.10417°S 23.09194°W / -74.10417; -23.09194 ) is a 352 ha site which has been designated an Important Bird Area (IBA) by BirdLife International because it supports a breeding colony of about 5,500 emperor penguins, as estimated from 2009 satellite imagery, on fast ice on the north-eastern coast of the glacier tongue, some 60 km west of Lyddan Island. [3]

See also

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Dame Janet Stancomb Graham Stancomb-Wills was the first woman mayor of Ramsgate in Kent, an office which she held from 1923–24, and she was also the first person to receive, in 1922, the Freedom of the Town. She was elected President of the Royal West of England Academy (RWA) in 1911, decades before any other British Academy even admitted women as full members, and also became President of the School of Architecture at Bristol in 1921. In 1927, she was appointed Justice of the Peace for Kent. She died on 22 August 1932 at East Court (Historic England listing), Ramsgate, Kent, aged 78.

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References

  1. Western Front Association website, Dame Janet Stancomb-Wills: the Clifftop Amazon, article by Laura Probert
  2. Winterstoke Gardens & East Cliff Projects website, Who was Dame Janet?, article dated 31-01-2021
  3. "Stancomb-Wills Glacier". BirdLife Data Zone. BirdLife International. 2015. Retrieved 29 November 2020.