Commonwealth Bay is an open bay

Headlands and bays

Headlands and bays are two related features of the coastal environment.- Geology and geography :Headlands and bays are often found on the same coastline. A bay is surrounded by land on three sides, whereas a headland is surrounded by water on three sides. Headlands are characterized by high,...

 about 48 km (30 mi) wide at the entrance between Point Alden

Point Alden

Point Alden in Antarctica is an ice-covered point with rock exposures along the seaward side. The point marks the western side of the entrance to Commonwealth Bay and the division between Adélie Coast and George V Coast in Antarctica. The point was discovered on January 30, 1840 by the USEE under...

 and Cape Gray

Cape Gray

Cape Gray is a rocky cape which forms the east side of the entrance to Commonwealth Bay, part of the George V Coast of Antarctica. The cape is actually a small rocky island which is joined to the icecap of the mainland by an ice ramp...

 in Antarctica. It was discovered in 1912 by the Australasian Antarctic Expedition

Australasian Antarctic Expedition

The Australasian Antarctic Expedition was an Australasian scientific team that explored part of Antarctica between 1911 and 1914. It was led by the Australian geologist Douglas Mawson, who was knighted for his achievements in leading the expedition. In 1910 he began to plan an expedition to chart...

 under Douglas Mawson

Douglas Mawson

Sir Douglas Mawson, OBE, FRS, FAA was an Australian geologist, Antarctic explorer and Academic. Along with Roald Amundsen, Robert Falcon Scott, and Ernest Shackleton, Mawson was a key expedition leader during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.-Early work:He was appointed geologist to an...

, who established the main base of the expedition at Cape Denison

Cape Denison

Cape Denison is a rocky point at the head of Commonwealth Bay in Antarctica. It was discovered in 1912 by the Australasian Antarctic Expedition under Douglas Mawson, who named it for Sir Hugh Denison of Sydney, a patron of the expedition...

 at the head of the bay. Named by Australasian Antarctic Expedition after the Commonwealth

Commonwealth

Commonwealth is a traditional English term for a political community founded for the common good. Historically, it has sometimes been synonymous with "republic."More recently it has been used for fraternal associations of some sovereign nations...

 of Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

.

Katabatic winds

It is listed in both the Guinness Book of World Records and the Eighth Edition of the National Geographic Atlas

Atlas

An atlas is a collection of maps; it is typically a map of Earth or a region of Earth, but there are atlases of the other planets in the Solar System. Atlases have traditionally been bound into book form, but today many atlases are in multimedia formats...

as the windiest place on Earth with winds regularly exceeding 240 kilometres (149.1 mi) per hour and medium annual wind speed 80 kilometres (49.7 mi) per hour.

Storms are caused by katabatic wind

Katabatic wind

A katabatic wind, from the Greek word katabatikos meaning "going downhill", is the technical name for a drainage wind, a wind that carries high density air from a higher elevation down a slope under the force of gravity. Such winds are sometimes also called fall winds...

 - concentrated flow of cold air flowing along the steep surface of ice shield towards the sea and accelerated by increasing gradient of the surface of ice and cliff monolith at Cape Denison. In summer there might be experienced periods of relative calm but during winter storms are especially strong and long lasting. It is characteristic that storms might start unexpectedly and last for long time, again ending unexpectedly. Abrupt start and end of storm might be accompanied by powerful whirlpools and expressive short-lived and fast moving cloud at the coast line.

In spite of the extreme weather, coast of Commonwealth Bay is important breeding area for Antarctic petrel

Antarctic Petrel

The Antarctic Petrel is a boldly marked dark brown and white petrel, found in Antarctica, most commonly in the Ross and Weddell seas. They eat Antarctic krill, fish, and small squid...

s, emperor penguin

Emperor Penguin

The Emperor Penguin is the tallest and heaviest of all living penguin species and is endemic to Antarctica. The male and female are similar in plumage and size, reaching in height and weighing anywhere from . The dorsal side and head are black and sharply delineated from the white belly,...

s, and Adelie penguin

Adelie Penguin

The Adélie Penguin, Pygoscelis adeliae, is a species of penguin common along the entire Antarctic coast. They are among the most southerly distributed of all seabirds, as are the Emperor Penguin, the South Polar Skua, the Wilson's Storm Petrel, the Snow Petrel, and the Antarctic Petrel...

s.

External links

• Life On Commonwealth Bay by Reuters
  Reuters
  Reuters is a news agency headquartered in New York City. Until 2008 the Reuters news agency formed part of a British independent company, Reuters Group plc, which was also a provider of financial market data...
  
   journalist Pauline Askin
• Commonwealth Bay photographs on Flickr
  Flickr
  Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to...