Thule Island

Thule Island
South Sandwich Islands (South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands)
Location
Location:	27°18’0"S, 59°27’0"W
Area:	5.5 square miles
Highest point:	3,525 feet
Data
Population:	Uninhabited

Thule Island, also called Morrell Island, is one of the southernmost of the South Sandwich Islands, part of the grouping known as Southern Thule. It is named, on account of its remote location, after the mythical land of Thule, said by ancient geographers to lie at the extreme end of the earth. The alternative name Morrell Island is after Benjamin Morrell, an American explorer and whaling captain.

Geography

Thule Island is approximately triangular in shape and 5.5 square miles in area with a 2-mile long, panhandle-like peninsula extending to the southeast. Steep slopes ascend to a summit caldera with the peak of Mount Larsen at 2,329 feet above sea level. Mount Larsen is named after the whaler and explorer Carl Anton Larsen.

Off the south-eastern tip lies the small islet of Twitcher Rock, the southernmost land on Earth except for Antarctica and offshore islands considered part of Antarctica.

Thule Island lies close to Cook Island and Bellingshausen Island. It is thought that Thule and Cook may have been a larger single island in the past, and there is evidence for a submerged crater between the two. Steam from the summit crater lake and ash on the flank was reported in 1962. Volcanic heat keeps the crater on Thule Island free from ice. The peak elevation is 3,525 feet above sea level.

Argentine occupation

Argentina, in order to assert a claim over the South Sandwich Islands, established the summer station Teniente Esquivel at Ferguson Bay on the south-eastern coast on 25 January 1955. The station had to be evacuated in January 1956 because of volcanic eruption. In 1976, the Argentines established a military base on Thule Island at Port Faraday, which they called Corbeta Uruguay, in the lee southern coast of the island. Britain discovered the Argentine intrusion in 1976 but chose to pursue a diplomatic solution to the issue until the Falklands War in 1982. The base was occupied by British Forces after the war and was eventually destroyed in 1982.

References

• "Thule Islands" at Global Volcanism Program
• LeMasurier, W. E.; Thomson, J. W. (eds.) (1990). Volcanoes of the Antarctic Plate and Southern Oceans. American Geophysical Union. p. 512 pp. ISBN 0-87590-172-7. 
• volcano.und.edu
• Thule Island at OceanDots.com