The Earth Story

Isolated, glaciated and mysterious Bouvet Island

Known as the most isolated island in the world, the uninhabited (only penguins, seals and birds can be spotted) Bouvet Island or Bouvetoya’s closest neighbor is the most isolated inhabited island in the world, Tristan da Cunha. Ten kilometer wide Bouvet Island offers quite a hostile environment with 95 percent of the island covered in glaciers, only the high cliffs revealing underlying land and a violent sea encircling it. Thus, the island is also almost inaccessible; you have to fly in by helicopter.

The island has a special location on a so-called Bouvet triple junction of oceanic ridges, the Mid-Atlantic, southwest Indian and American-Antarctic ridges (other triple junctions of oceanic ridges are located at the Azores and near Baja California). This explains that the island is a 750 m high basaltic, rhyolitic shield volcano that could have erupted around 50 BC but more likely had its last eruption more than 2000 years ago. Obviously, not many volcanologists or geologists visit the island. In 1956 a landslide deposit was actually mistaken for a lava flow.

Most interestingly, the island is surrounded by mystery. A bright green flash now known as the Vela Incident was seen by U.S. satellites in 1979. It is now believed to have been a nuclear test. A boat stacked with supplies but lacking passengers was found in 1964. There is still no sign of the people aboard. Supposedly Bouvet also has a phantom neighbor, Thompson Island. The island was first reported in 1825 and last observed in 1893. It seems probable that the island might have disappeared during either a volcanic eruption, was a submarine volcano or never existed at all..

--BO

Image: Olav Orheim, Norsk Polarinstitutt.

http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/bouvet-island http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/volcano.cfm?vnum=1806-02- http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/volcano.cfm?vnum=1806-03- http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=35526 Mitchel et al. 2000. The Bouvet Triple Junction. Journal of Geophysical research.

The Most Isolated Island in the World – Bouvet Island  Go to Iceland, turn south on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and follow it all the way to the triple junction where the ridge intersects the Antarctic Plate, and there you will find… an island. At 2260 kilometers from the nearest inhabited island (Tristan de Cunha with a population of 271, if this counts), smack dab between Africa, South America and Antarctica, Bouvet island is not a very big island, less than fifty square kilometers in size with nearly all of it covered by a glacier, but is considered as the most isolated land mass on earth. Nevertheless, it turns out to be – an island of mystery! Discovered in 1739 by the French (hence the name), claimed by the British in 1825, and annexed by Norway in 1928, there has never been a war or disagreement about the sovereignty of the island – apparently no one loves it enough to argue over it, and it is, today, a nature reserve (apparently seals and penguins do like the place). The Norwegians take responsibility for it, with the island’s administration managed by their Polar Department of the Ministry of Justice and the Oslo Police. Since the island is uninhabited, the police have little to do there one supposes. Perhaps in hopes that someday someone would like to take up residence, an internet domain has been set up under its name (.bv), but as yet no takers. The average high temperature on Bouvet Island is just above 1C, and average low temperature is -2.3C – we know this because there is an automated weather station on this desolate locale. Nor is the island forgotten by the seismographs of the USGS who keep track of all earthquakes in the world, even those in Norwegian territories in the South Atlantic, and spotted a 5R earthquake near there (well, “near” as distances go for the most isolated spot in the world, about 348km west of the island) in 2009. Since geologists never forget about any island, no matter how great or how small, there are geologic papers on Bouvet Island that describe its volcanic composition (sitting on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, not surprisingly these include Mid-Atlantic Ridge Basalts – “MORB”.) The island is as close to the site of a plate tectonic triple-junction as can be: it’s just on the edge of the African Plate next to the South American plate border (the Mid-Atlantic Ridge marking this), intersecting with the Antarctic plate. The island’s volcano has been hypothesized to be a “hot spot” where material is coming directly from the mantle. This tectonic environment is “way cool” for a geologist, and perhaps were there not so many glaciers occluding the island, some poor lost PhD student would have a great time in the frigid field. Some mysteries surround the island: an abandoned boat stocked with supplies (but no passengers) was found there in 1964; in 1979, a US satellite saw an extremely bright light flash from the uninhabited area near the island that is speculated to have been a nuclear bomb test by the Israelis and South Africa (come on, conspiracy theorists! You can do better than this!); AND there’s a disappearing island nearby!  Unlike Sandy Island in the Pacific that probably never existed in the first place (as recently reported by The Earth Story), Thomson Island was “discovered” to the northeast of Bouvet Island and seemed to exist in 1825 and 1893 (including very convincing sketches), but hasn’t been sighted since at least 1927. Possibly Thomson Island, also theoretically on the Mid-Atlantic ridge, could have been destroyed in an eruption or some caldera collapse, but in the 1960’s sonar failed to locate any sort of submerged shoal – since the original coordinates of the island’s position were done with the cutting-edge technology of 1825, possibly the sonar was looking in the wrong place.  Since the Norwegians haven’t yet sent out the Oslo Police to figure out who may have stolen the island, all theories are still open.  Annie R. Photo credit: We delightfully note that Google Panoramio has even made it to the most desolate island on earth and this photo is by: Franco Cain on Google Panoramio http://wikitravel.org/en/Bouvet_Island https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/bv.html http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/bouvet-island http://www.antarctic.ac.uk/documents/bas_bulletins/bulletin13_06.pdf http://on.fb.me/1Ceod9v http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00451868?LI=true