Paulet Island
| Paulet Island | |
 Paulet Island | |
|---|---|
| Location | |
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| |
| Location: | 63°34’48"S, 55°47’17"W |
| Highest point: | 1,158 feet |
| Data | |
Paulet Island is a small, circular island about a mile in diameter, lying three miles south-east of Dundee Island in the Joinville Island Group; a group of islands lying off the north-eastern end of the Trinity Peninsula of Graham Land in the British Antarctic Territory.
Because of its large penguin colony, Paulet is a popular destination for sightseeing tours.
The island is composed of lava flows capped by a cinder cone with a small summit crater. Geothermal heat keeps parts of the island ice-free, and the youthful morphology of the volcano suggests that it was last active within the last 1,000 years.
Discovery and exploration
Paulet Island was discovered by a British expedition (1839–1843) under James Clark Ross and named by him for Captain the Right Hon Lord George Paulet of the Royal Navy.
In 1903 during the Swedish Antarctic Expedition led by Otto Nordenskjöld his ship Antarctic was crushed and sunk in the pack ice of the Erebus and Terror Gulf in February 1903 off the coast of Paulet Island. The crew reached Paulet Island and built a stone hut which they occupied from 28 February until 31 October 1903: the hut, together with the grave of an expedition member, and the cairn built on the highest point of the island to draw the attention of rescuers, have been designated a Historic Site or Monument (HSM 41), following a proposal by Argentina and the United Kingdom to the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting.[1]
In 1912 the shipwrecked crew of the Endurance planned was to travel to Paulet Island and use stores there that were left by the Swedish Expedition but the ice pack on which they were stranded eventually drifted too far east.[2]
The island was visited and surveyed by the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey from Hope Bay in January 1947 and further surveyed from a distance by the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey in December 1953. It was photographed from the air by the Falkland Islands and Dependencies Aerial Survey Expedition of 1956-57. A landing was made on the island by the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey from Shackleton on 18-19 January 1961, when a trigonometric station was occupied.
Important Bird Area
The island has been identified as an Important Bird Area (IBA) by BirdLife International because it supports a very large breeding colony of about 100,000 pairs of Adélie penguins.
Other birds known to nest on the island include imperial shags, snow petrels and kelp gulls.[3]
Outside links
- Picture of Paulet Island on 'Antarctic Cruises'
- Picture of Paulet Island from Greg Lasley
- Antarctic Voyage - Paulet Island (air-and-space.com)
References
- ↑ List of Historic Sites and Monuments approved by the ATCM (2012) - Antarctic Treaty Secretariat, 2012
- ↑ Armstrong, Jennifer: 'Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World' (Knopf, 1998)
- ↑ Paulet Island IBA: BirdLife International
Books
- Antarctica. Sydney: Reader's Digest, 1985, pp. 152–159.
- Child, Jack. Antarctica and South American Geopolitics: Frozen Lebensraum. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1988, pp. 69, 72.
- Lonely Planet, Antarctica: a Lonely Planet Travel Survival Kit, Oakland, CA: Lonely Planet Publications, 1996, 302.
- Stewart, Andrew, Antarctica: An Encyclopedia. London: McFarland and Co., 1990 (2 volumes), p 752.
- U.S. National Science Foundation, Geographic Names of the Antarctic, Fred G. Alberts, ed. Washington: NSF, 1980.
- 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.