Guess the Antarctic ice shelf from its outline.
grounded open ocean another shelf
Copy result
Name an Antarctic ice shelf from its outline, with the scale withheld. A wrong guess reports the geodesic distance to the answer and an arrow pointing the way a polar stereographic map does — not the way the great circle sets off, which near the pole can be the opposite direction.
Easy offers six names, allows two guesses, and shades the outline to say which of its edges face open water and which are grounded against rock or ice sitting on it — the difference between a calving front and a grounding line, which BedMachine’s mask knows for every edge of every shelf. Hard draws practice shelves from all 164 named shelves instead of the everyday 52. Today’s shelf is the same one at every level — easy shortens the list of names it could be, it does not change the puzzle — so a shared result says which level it was played at.
The shapes are not drawn by hand. They are traced from the floating-ice mask of BedMachine Antarctica and named by intersection with the MEaSUREs boundaries, by a pipeline in the repository.
The game is named for the Wordie Ice Shelf, which disintegrated from the 1960s and was gone by 2004. It is in the answer list.