The West Ice Shelf is a prominent ice shelf

Ice shelf

An ice shelf is 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 only found in Antarctica, Greenland and Canada. The boundary between the floating ice shelf and the grounded ice that feeds it is called...

 extending about 288 km in an E-W direction along the Leopold and Astrid Coast

Leopold and Astrid Coast

Leopold and Astrid Coast is that portion of the coast of Antarctica lying between the western extremity of the West Ice Shelf, at 81° 24' E, and Cape Penck, at 87° 43' E. It is located in the eastern half of Princess Elizabeth Land. It was discovered and explored in an airplane flight from the...

 in East Antarctica

East Antarctica

East Antarctica, also called Greater Antarctica, constitutes the majority of the Antarctic continent, lying on the Indian Ocean side of the Transantarctic Mountains...

 between Barrier Bay

Barrier Bay

Barrier Bay is an open bay in the Antarctic coastal angle formed by the coast and the western end of the West Ice Shelf. Charted by Norwegian cartographers from aerial photographs taken by the Lars Christensen Expedition, 1936–1937, and named by them Barrierevika . Barrier is an obsolete term...

 and Posadowsky Bay

Posadowsky Bay

Posadowsky Bay is an open embayment in the vicinity of Gaussberg, just east of the West Ice Shelf. Discovered in February 1902 by German Antarctic Expedition under Erich von Drygalski, who named it for Count Arthur von Posadowsky-Wehner, Imperial Home Secretary, who secured a government grant to...

. Discovered and named by the First German Antarctica Expedition

First German Antarctica Expedition

The Gauss Expedition , was the first German expedition to Antarctica, led by Arctic veteran and geology professor Erich von Drygalski in the ship Gauss, which was named after the mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss.-Voyage:...

, 1901-03, under Dr. Erich von Drygalski

Erich von Drygalski

Erich Dagobert von Drygalski was a German geographer, geophysicist and polar scientist, born in Königsberg, Province of Prussia....

. The toponym describes the direction in which the German expedition first viewed the ice shelf. Their limited westward view became a prolonged one; on February 21, 1902, the ship became stuck in the ice. It remained there imprisoned by the pack ice until February 8, 1903.