Today in History - 4 January - There be Volcanoes!
Captain William McDonald aboard the
Samarang discovered the McDonald Islands (conveniently named) on 4 January 1854.
This was six weeks after an American sealer, Captain John Heard, aboard
Oriental, sighted the island bearing his name while enroute from Boston to Melbourne.
I wonder where Akhenaten Island is.
Anyway . . .
Heard Island and McDonald Islands (HIMI) are bare, rocky, uninhabited, islands located in the Southern Ocean at 53°00′ S 73°00′ E, about two-thirds of the way from Madagascar to Antarctica and about 4100 km from Perth, Western Australia. They've been territories of Australia since 1947, and contain the only two active volcanoes in Australian territory, one of which, Mawson Peak, is the highest Australian mountain (at 2745 m it's 527 m higher than Mount Kosciuszko). The islands cover an area of 372 km².
Heard Island (I suspect they actually saw it first)
Heard Island (368 km²) is bleak and mountainous, covered in glaciers and dominated by Mawson Peak which forms part of the Big Ben massif.
The other active volcano on Australian territory is on McDonald Island.
It was dormant for 75,000 years, but erupted in 1992 and has erupted again several times since, its most recent eruption being on 10 August 2005.
The McDonald Islands, located 44 km to the west of Heard Island, are small and rocky.
McDonald Island and Meyer Rock
The blue line shows the size of the island when it was discovered. Australia is getting bigger!
The group consists of McDonald Island (230 m high), Flat Island (55 m high) and Meyer Rock (170 m). They total approximately 2.5 km² in area and, as with Heard Island, are surface exposures of the Kerguelen Plateau.
There is a small group of islets and rocks about 10 km north of Heard Island, consisting of Shag Islet, Sail Rock, Morgan Island and Black Rock. They total approximately 1.1 km² in area.
Heard Island and the McDonald Islands have no ports or harbours and there is no economic activity, although they have been assigned the country code HM and Internet top-level domain .hm.
From 1947 until the 1950s there were camps of visiting scientists on Heard Island (at Atlas Cove) and in 1971 on McDonald Island (at Williams Bay).
The islands are a territory of Australia administered from Hobart by the Australian Antarctic Division of the Australian Department of the Environment and Heritage.
They are populated by large numbers of seal and bird species. The islands are contained within a 65,000 square kilometre marine reserve and are primarily visited for research.
Heard Island did not have visitors until the mid-1850s. It is probable that no human had ever seen the island until this time. Peter Kemp, a British sealer (seal hunter), was the first person thought to have seen the island on November 27, 1833, from the brig
Magnet during a voyage from Kerguelen to the Antarctic and was believed to have entered the island on his 1833 chart.
Fun fact: The antipode to the central Mawson Peak of Heard Island is located less than 70 kilometres (43 mi) West by South of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Canada. (Wikipedia)
Images and information from the
Australian Antarctic Division