A lifeboat at the end of the world Bouvetøya, Bouvet island (49 sq km, or 12 sq miles), is the most remote island in the world….
A lifeboat at the end of the world
Bouvetøya, Bouvet island (49 sq km, or 12 sq miles), is the most remote island in the world. Along with its tiny satellite Larsøya, it is the only land in a radius of some 1600 kilometres (1000 miles)—the nearest land is Gough Island, the nearest continental shore Antarctica. The island is so remote, you could draw a circle around it so big, its area would nearly equal that of Europe before you encountered land. First sighted in 1739 by the French explorer Jean-Baptiste Bouvet de Lozier, for whom it is named, it was spotted and claimed for the British crown in 1825, but its precise location couldn’t be pinpointed on maps until 1898, and the first undisputed landing happened in 1927, when explorers from the Norwegian survey vessel Norvegia briefly set foot on the island, planted a flag and claimed it in the name of the Norwegian king. Since 1930, it has been a Norwegian dependency.
Not only is the island extremely remote, it is also extremely inhospitable. Most of it is covered by a glacier which sits atop a still-active volcano. It is almost permanently covered in thick sea mist, and ravaged by storms 300 days a year. The island is ruled by seals—70,000 of them live on the island today. In 1955, the South African government expressed interest in setting up a weather station on the island, but a circumnavigation of the island revealed no suitably flat place to set it up. In 1958, an American icebreaker passed by and spotted a new development: a landslide, probably due to the rumblings of the dormant volcano, had extended the island by a small, flat area the Norwegians dubbed Nyrøysa—the New Rubble. In 1964, the South Africans finally got around to exploring this new part of the island, and they found something strange: in a lagoon on Nyrøysa, a seaworthy life raft floated, and on some rocks a hundred yards away they also found a single pair of oars and a copper flotation tank that had been flattened out. There were no other signs of human activity on the island, and no subsequent expedition, including one in 1966 that studied the lagoon thoroughly, made any mention of the human artifacts.
So where did they come from? No ship sails even close to nearby unless they have special reason to do so; we know of no shipwreck that could be connected to it, nor any expeditions to the island in the period between the formation of Nyrøysa and 1964. Even if there were, neither shipwreck, flotsam nor expedition seems to explain all the facts, few as they are. Read more about this mystery at A Blast from the Past, an excellent blog about bizarre and interesting tidbits of history, thoroughly researched and captivating reading.
Spoiler: his best theory considers some obscure traces pointing to a possible Soviet landing in 1959 to study birds, although even this lead doesn’t explain why they would leave a perfectly good life boat, a single pair of oars, and a flotation tank that for some inexplicable reason had been hammered flat behind. Perhaps the answer sits in some classified or simply obscure Soviet archive—during the Cold War, the Soviets certainly had reasons to be paranoid, and a secret expedition, even if the purpose was innocent ornithology, isn’t something you’d put past them.
Since 1971, the island has been a nature reserve. In 1977, an automated weather station was established at Nyrøysa, and it was manned for a two-month period between 1978-79. A larger research station was established in 1996, but was eventually destroyed and blown to sea, likely by an earthquake in 2006. In 2014, a new, more robust and technologically advanced research station was set up on the island. It is designed to host up to 6 people for periods of two to four months.
From the top, images: (1) glacier on the West coast of Bouvet Island; (2) NASA view of the island from space; (3) map showing its location in the South Atlantic; (4) photograph of the new Norvegia field station on Bouvet island from the Norwegian Polar Institute. It was pre-fabricated in Tromsø, Norway and shipped in via Cape Town, South Africa.
