ice-shelf

A form of ice shelf — A thick, floating platform of ice that forms where a glacier or ice sheet flows down to a coastline and onto the ocean surface. Ice shelves are found in Antarctica, Greenland, and Canada only.

Meanings

nounice-shelf (plural ice-shelves)

plural ice-shelves

  1. alternativeAlternative form of ice shelf.

    But he found no Alaloi, and he urged his dogs carefully across the crevasses of the Fairleigh ice-shelf, back out onto the sea.

    2000, Orson Scott Card, Future On Ice, →ISBN
    2 more examples

    All planes reached the old base on the eventing of the next day —January 27th—after a swift non-stop flight; and on the 28th we made McMurdo Sound in two laps, the one pause being very brief, and occasioned by a faulty rudder in the furious wind over the ice-shelf after we had cleared the great plateau.

    1931, H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

    Thunderous roars warned us that the whole ice-shelf had entered a hyperactive phase, causing hitherto safe snow-bridges to collapse all around us into their crevasses.

    2009, Ranulph Fiennes, Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know, →ISBN
Cite this entry
APA

ice-shelf. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/ice-shelf

MLA

“ice-shelf.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/ice-shelf. Accessed November 3, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “ice-shelf,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/ice-shelf.

Source: ice-shelf on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.