By Dr Kate Winter, Elena Field, Dr Adrian Fox, from the Antarctic Placenames Committee
What’s in a name?
Does Washington DC gain a certain something extra by being named after the first president of the United States of America?
Would it matter if the new British Antarctic Research Survey ship had been named Boaty McBoatface – in line with a public poll, instead of the RRS Sir David Attenborough?
It might have meant future generations not finding out who Sir David Attenborough was? That would be quite a loss to history. So names are important.
The RRS Sir David Attenborough sails to Antarctica multiple times a year, but it won’t always visit sites that have names.
Just a little more than 200 years ago, with no indigenous population, there were no maps, no footsteps and certainly no place names on a continent about one-and-a-half times the size of the mainland USA. But soon after the discovery of Antarctica in 1820, explorers from around the world were racing to win national prestige by naming swathes of the white continent and its offshore islands in honour of monarchs, national heroes and expedition members and sponsors.
The results of their efforts in the northern Antarctic Peninsula region, the first bit to be explored, endure to the present day. King George Island was named for Britain’s George III, while Adelaide Island came to bear the name of his successor William IV’s Queen Consort. Louis-Philippe Plateau was named after the French King of the same name and Admiralty Bay was named to honour the British Navy. Further south, Alexander Island’s connection to Alexander I of Russia and the Adélie Coast’s to the wife of French explorer Dumont D’Urville.
Other names on the continent come from the sealers who exploited the accessible northern regions. Names like Neptune’s Bellows and Neck or Nothing Passage vividly capture the hardships of working in hostile uncharted waters in small wooden ships.
Early naming for navigation
Of course, naming an area serves important navigational purposes. A series of national expeditions, including Australian, British, Belgian, French, German, Japanese, Norwegian and Swedish endeavours soon began to explore the coast of the continent in more detail, slowly piecing together its complex geography. Capes, bays and offshore islands, and mountains and glaciers visible from the sea resulted in the preservation and celebration of national heroes from around the globe.
Supplemented by names from the late 19th century and early 20th century inshore whaling industry, they reveal a detailed history of Antarctic exploration. While many features are simply descriptive names, like Snow Hill Island, or Low Island, others are more evocatively named; The Cloudmaker, Sewing Machine Needles and Cape Well-met.
Some names reflect expedition ships: Belgica Glacier (Belgian), Pourqoi Pas? Island (French) Aurora Peak (Australian), Mount Discovery (British); or the thoughts and feelings of the expedition party: Desolation Island, Cape Disappointment, Longing Peninsula; or the more positively named Mount Hope and Paradise Harbour.
Rapid growth in naming
There was an exponential growth in place naming once overland travel began in the 1930s. Topographic surveys of the interior gathered pace during the Cold War with systematic national programmes of exploration and mapping. These were supported with widespread use of aerial photography from the late 1940s, and later satellite imagery.
New mountains, glaciers and coastlines were seen for the first time and mapped. With no government or international body to dictate naming conventions, repeat names (such as ‘Long’, which appears more than 10 times, ‘Larsen’, more than 15 times or ‘McDonald’ which is used 18 times with four variant spellings), or multiple names for the same feature led to confusion in maps and scientific publications.
International collaboration on Antarctic placenames
Antarctic toponymy had to be brought to order. The UK Antarctic Place-names Committee (APC) was formed in 1945, followed by other similar National Naming Committees. In 1992, the international Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) decided to compile a list of all Antarctic place names, creating the SCAR Composite Gazetteer of Antarctica. The project also generated guidelines for creating new place names, as well as the use of existing names. To date, about 38,000 names for about 19,000 discrete features have been officially recorded in the SCAR Composite Gazetteer. Each feature has a unique identifier code to connect possible multiple names to the feature. Usually, background information about the discovery of the feature and why the place name was chosen is included so the detailed history of exploration and science on the continent will not be forgotten.
The SCAR Gazetteer of placenames is a wonderful example of international cooperation, with different nations respecting placenames and compiling them into their national gazeteers. The SCAR Gazetteer works under the umbrella of the Antarctic Treaty.
These place names provide interesting stories and context, but are also important for contemporary exploration. The work is ongoing.
You can explore the internationally agreed and compiled placenames named in Antarctica by the UK Antarctic Placenames Committee in the map below, and find out more on the UK Antarctic Placenames Committee website.
Names for science
As a glaciologist working in Antarctica, I need place names to map and monitor ice flows. Co-ordinates are too specific for the scale of Antarctic ice flows, which stretch for miles and miles. With limited surface features on the vast white continent to refer to, we often use repeat satellite measurements to generate coloured maps of ice flow. These maps reveal slow flowing ice in the centre of the continent and faster flowing ice streams near the coast.
With improvements in satellite technology, more and more ice streams in Antarctica are being monitored and named. In 2019, the UK APC honoured the important role satellites play in Antarctic science by naming ice streams along the coast of Palmer Land in the Antarctic Peninsula after the satellites and sensors that identified them (e.g. Landsat, Cryosat, and Sentinel ice streams). These names help researchers across the globe to differentiate ice flow units, making sure we all refer to the same feature as we work together to monitor changes in Antarctica.
Placenames in a rapidly changing environment
Place-naming in Antarctica is as important now as it has ever been. The continent is constantly changing and our scientific understanding of Antarctica and the role it plays in Earth’s global system is increasing every year, linked to large collaborative science projects answering key questions in previously little-visited regions.
New features form as the coastline changes, creating the need for new place names. Attenborough Strait (named after Sir David Attenborough) was formed by the break-up of part of the Wilkins Ice Shelf, and a series of inlets exposed by the collapse of the northern part of the Larsen Ice Shelf are named after the glaciologists who studied it.
As new discoveries are made in Antarctica, more names must be added to the Gazetteer to unambiguously define significant features for scientific, logistical and navigational purposes.
All over the world society at large is reconsidering the attribution of names and how we honour history. The Antarctic continent is no exception.
To find out more about Antarctic place names, visit https://data.aad.gov.au/aadc/gaz/scar/ or https://apc.antarctica.ac.uk/.
Authors
Author: Dr Kate Winter (Northumbria University, Newcastle): an ad-hoc member of the Antarctic Place-names Committee. With generous support from Elena Field: Antarctic Place-names Committee Secretary, and former secretary Dr Adrian Fox (both British Antarctic Survey) who provided the figures, and helped to refine the text.