Bouvet Island

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Bouvet Island ( BOO-vay; Norwegian: Bouvetøya [bʉˈvèːœʏɑ]) is an uninhabited subantarctic volcanic island and dependency of Norway. A protected nature reserve situated in the South Atlantic Ocean at the southern end of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, it is the world's most remote island. Located north of 60°S latitude, Bouvet Island is not part of the southern region covered by the Antarctic Treaty System. The island lies 1,700 km (1,100 mi; 920 nmi) north of the Princess Astrid Coast of Queen Maud Land, Antarctica, 1,870 km (1,160 mi; 1,010 nmi) east of the South Sandwich Islands, 1,845 km (1,146 mi; 996 nmi) south of Gough Island, and 2,520 km (1,570 mi; 1,360 nmi) south-southwest of the coast of South Africa. It has an area of 49 km2 (19 sq mi), 93 percent of which is covered by a glacier. The centre of the island is the ice-filled crater of an inactive volcano. Some skerries and one smaller island, Larsøya, lie along its coast. Nyrøysa, created by a rockslide in the late 1950s, is the only easy place to land and is the location of a weather station. The island was first spotted on 1 January 1739 by the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier, during a French exploration mission in the South Atlantic with the ships Aigle and Marie. They did not make landfall. He mislabeled the coordinates for the island, and it was not sighted again until 1808, when the British whaler James Lindsay encountered it and named it Lindsay Island. The first claim to have landed on the island was made by the American sailor Benjamin Morrell, although this claim is disputed. In 1825, the island was claimed for the British Crown by George Norris, who named it Liverpool Island. He also reported having sighted another island nearby, which he named Thompson Island, but this was later shown to be a phantom island. In 1927, the first Norvegia expedition landed on the island, and claimed it for Norway. At that point, the island was given its current name of Bouvet Island ("Bouvetøya" in Norwegian). In 1930, following resolution of a dispute with the United Kingdom over claiming rights, it was declared a Norwegian dependency. In 1971, it was designated a nature reserve.

The island was discovered on 1 January 1739 by Jean-Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier, commander of the French ships Aigle and Marie. Bouvet, who was searching for a presumed large southern continent, spotted the island through the fog and named the cape he saw Cap de la Circoncision. He was not able to land and did not circumnavigate his discovery, thus not clarifying if it was an island or part of a continent. His plotting of its position was inaccurate, leading several expeditions to fail to find the island. James Cook's second voyage set off from Cape Verde on 22 November 1772 and attempted to find the island, but also failed. The next expedition to spot the island was in 1808 by James Lindsay, captain of the Samuel Enderby & Sons' (SE&S) snow whaler Swan. Swan and another Enderby whaler, Otter, were in company when they reached the island and recorded its position, though they were unable to land. Lindsay could confirm that the "cape" was indeed an island. The next expedition to arrive at the island was American Benjamin Morrell and his seal hunting ship Wasp. Morrell, by his own account, found the island without difficulty (with "improbable ease", in the words of historian William Mills) before landing and hunting 196 seals. In his subsequent lengthy description, Morrell does not mention the island's most obvious physical feature: Its permanent ice cover. This has caused some commentators to doubt whether he actually visited the island. On 10 December 1825, SE&S's George Norris, master of the sealer Sprightly, landed on the island, named it Liverpool Island and claimed it for the British Crown and George IV on 16 December. The next expedition to spot the island was Joseph Fuller and his ship Francis Allyn in 1893, but he was not able to land on the island. German Carl Chun's Valdivia Expedition arrived at the island in 1898. They were not able to land, but dredged the seabed for geological samples. They were also the first to accurately fix the island's position. At least three sealing vessels visited the island between 1822 and 1895. A voyage of exploration in 1927–1928 also took seal pelts. Norris also spotted a second island in 1825, which he named Thompson Island, which he placed 72 km (45 mi; 39 nmi) north-northeast of Liverpool Island. Thompson Island was also reported in 1893 by Fuller, but in 1898 Chun did not report seeing such an island, nor has anyone since. However, Thompson Island continued to appear on maps as late as 1943. A 1967 paper suggested that the island might have disappeared in an undetected volcanic eruption, but in 1997 it was discovered that the ocean is more than 2,400 m (7,900 ft) deep in the area.

Adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Photography via Wikimedia Commons.