Schokalsky Bay is a bay

Bay

A bay is an area of water mostly surrounded by land. Bays generally have calmer waters than the surrounding sea, due to the surrounding land blocking some waves and often reducing winds. Bays also exist as an inlet in a lake or pond. A large bay may be called a gulf, a sea, a sound, or a bight...

, 9 nautical miles (17 km) wide at its entrance and indenting 6 nautical miles (11 km) between Mount Calais

Mount Calais

Mount Calais is a massive mountain, high, at the northwest side of Schokalsky Bay in the northeast part of Alexander Island. It was first roughly surveyed in 1909 by the French Antarctic Expedition under Jean-Baptiste Charcot, who named it for the French city of Calais. The mountain was...

 and Cape Brown

Cape Brown

Cape Brown is a prominent ice-covered cape north-northeast of the summit of Mount Nicholas, marking the eastern side of the entrance to Schokalsky Bay on the northeast coast of Alexander Island. It was first seen from a distance by the French Antarctic Expedition under Jean-Baptiste Charcot in...

 along the east coast of Alexander Island

Alexander Island

Alexander Island or Alexander I Island or Alexander I Land or Alexander Land is the largest island of Antarctica, with an area of lying in the Bellingshausen Sea west of the base of the Antarctic Peninsula, from which it is separated by Marguerite Bay and George VI Sound. Alexander Island lies off...

. Hampton Glacier discharges tremendous amounts of ice into the head of Schokalsky Bay at a steep gradient causing the ice there to be extremely broken and irregular, and discourages use of this bay and glacier

Glacier

A glacier is a large persistent body of ice that forms where the accumulation of snow exceeds its ablation over many years, often centuries. At least 0.1 km² in area and 50 m thick, but often much larger, a glacier slowly deforms and flows due to stresses induced by its weight...

 as an inland sledging route onto northeast Alexander Island. First sighted from a distance in 1909 and roughly charted by the French Antarctic Expedition

French Antarctic Expedition

French Antarctic Expedition refers to several French expeditions in Antarctica.-First expedition:Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen-Trémarec was a French explorer....

 under Charcot who, thinking it to be a strait, gave the name "Detroit Schokalsky" after Yuliy M. Shokal'skiy, Russian geographer, meteorologist and oceanographer. Charcot followed the spelling Schokalsky used by the man himself when writing in Roman script. The coast in this vicinity was photographed from the air and this bay roughly charted in 1937 by the British Graham Land Expedition

British Graham Land Expedition

A British expedition to Graham Land led by John Lachlan Cope took place between 1920 and 1922. The British Graham Land Expedition was a geophysical and exploration expedition to Graham Land in Antarctica between 1934 to 1937. Under the leadership of John Riddoch Rymill, the expedition spent two...

 (BGLE), but Charcot's "Detroit Schokalsky" was not identified. Surveys by Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey (FIDS) in 1948 identified this bay as the feature originally named by Charcot.