Bouvet Island

• 1. Introduction

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  Bouvet Island is an uninhabited volcanic island in the South Atlantic, and it holds the title of the most remote island in the world. The nearest inhabited place, Tristan da Cunha, lies about 2,260 km away. Ships went looking for this island for decades and found only open water. Others sailed up to it and could not set foot ashore. This documentary asks how a place that mariners kept losing ended up under a national flag. It asks what a British survey team found abandoned beside a lagoon there. And it asks what an American satellite saw flash over the sea nearby in 1979.

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• 2. Lost at Sea

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  On the 1st of January 1739, the French commander Jean-Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier saw land through fog while leading the ships Aigle and Marie. He was hunting for a presumed great southern continent. He named the cape Cap de la Circoncision. Heavy seas kept him from landing, and he never sailed around it, so he could not say whether it was an island or the edge of a continent. Worse, he plotted its position badly. Several later expeditions failed to find it, among them James Cook's second voyage, which left Cape Verde on the 22nd of November 1772.

  In 1808, the whaling captain James Lindsay of the ship Swan finally sighted it again. Another whaler, Otter, was sailing alongside, and both ships recorded the position without landing. Lindsay at least proved that the supposed cape was an island. Then came the American sealer Benjamin Morrell aboard the Wasp. By his own account, he located the island easily and killed 196 seals there. The historian William Mills described his success as coming with "improbable ease". Morrell wrote at length about the place, yet never mentioned its permanent ice cover. That omission leads some commentators to doubt that he went there at all.

  On the 10th of December 1825, George Norris, master of the sealer Sprightly, did land. Six days later he claimed the island for the British Crown and George IV, calling it Liverpool Island. Joseph Fuller's ship Francis Allyn sighted it in 1893 but could not land. In 1898, the German Valdivia Expedition under Carl Chun dredged the seabed nearby and became the first to fix the island's position accurately. At least three sealing vessels called between 1822 and 1895.

  Norris also reported a second island in 1825, which he called Thompson Island, about 72 km north-northeast of the first. Fuller reported it again in 1893. Chun saw nothing there in 1898, and nobody has seen it since. Even so, maps kept showing it as late as 1943. A 1967 paper proposed that it had vanished in an undetected volcanic eruption. Then in 1997 came a measurement showing the sea there is more than 2400 m deep. Thompson Island had never existed. Norris's muddle between his two islands would soon weaken Britain's hand when Norway came calling.

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• 3. Claimed for Norway

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  In 1927, the First Norvegia Expedition, led by Harald Horntvedt and paid for by the shipowner Lars Christensen, became the first party to stay on the island for any length of time. The men carried out surveys and observations ashore and took oceanographic measurements offshore. At a spot they called Ny Sandefjord they put up a small hut. On the 1st of December 1927 they raised the Norwegian flag. The island received its present name, Bouvetøya in Norwegian, and a royal decree confirmed the annexation on the 23rd of January 1928.

  Britain objected at first, pointing to Norris and his landing a century earlier. That argument had holes. Norris had reported two islands, and no one could say which of them he had stood on. His position was also well off the true location. The island is small and has no natural harbour. Together these doubts led Britain to accept the Norwegian claim after diplomatic talks, and in November 1929 it gave up its own.

  The Second Norvegia Expedition arrived in 1928 hoping to set up a staffed meteorological radio station. It found no suitable site. The flagpole and hut from the year before had already been washed away. The Third Norvegia Expedition, under Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen, came the following year and built a new hut at Cape Circoncision and another on Larsøya. It also photographed the island from the air, the first Antarctic expedition to use aircraft. On the 27th of February 1930, the Norwegian Parliament passed a Dependency Act making the island a dependency, together with Peter I Island and Queen Maud Land. Seal protection followed. The eared seal was protected in 1929, and in 1935 every seal around the island was covered, a striking turn for a place first visited by seal hunters.

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• 4. Ice and Fire

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  The island measures 9.5 by 7 km and covers 49 km2, and glaciers blanket 93 percent of it. Underneath is a shield volcano just off the Southwest Indian Ridge. Near the centre lies Wilhelmplatået, a plateau 3.5 km across ringed by peaks. The tallest is Olavtoppen at 780 m, followed by Lykketoppen at 766 m and Mosbytoppane at 670 m. Below the plateau sits the main caldera. The last eruption happened around 2000 BCE and sent a lava flow down to Cape Meteor. The volcano is presumed to be declining, though the ground 30 cm below the surface still measures 25 C.

  The coastline runs for only 29.6 km, and almost none of it welcomes visitors. Seas are usually high, the cliffs are steep, and pack ice surrounds the island in winter. The one easy place to land is Nyrøysa, a terrace roughly 2 km by 0.5 km on the northwest coast, formed by a rock slide in the late 1950s. Elsewhere, Svartstranda stretches 1.8 km as a strip of black sand, and Larsøya is the only sizable island offshore. Coastal stretches carry names such as Morgenstiernekysten, Victoria Terrasse and Vogtkysten. About 275 km to the west lies the Bouvet triple junction, where the South American, African and Antarctic plates meet.

  Empty ocean surrounds the place. Queen Maud Land in Antarctica is the closest land, about 1,700 km south. Gough Island lies about 1,860 km north, the South Sandwich Islands about 1,900 km west, and the Prince Edward Islands about 2,570 km east. The island sits south of the Antarctic Convergence, giving it a marine Antarctic climate of heavy cloud and fog. February averages 2 C, and winds are mostly weak and from the west. In March 1980, intense sunshine pushed the temperature to 14 C. On sunlit rock faces, spot readings as high as 20 C have been recorded.

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• 5. Life at the Edge

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  At Nyrøysa, researchers have recorded five species of moss, six ascomycete fungi and twenty kinds of algae. Elsewhere the ice and steep slopes allow little growth. Mosses, liverworts, fungi and lichens make up the island's non-animal life, with snow algae in the ice. Frequent avalanches strip most snow-free slopes, so only crustose lichens and algal films survive there. Six of the island's ascomycetes are endemic, and three of those are lichenized.

  BirdLife International has named the island an Important Bird Area because so many seabirds breed there. An estimate for 1978-79 put the breeding penguins at 117,000, mostly macaroni penguins with some chinstrap and Adélie penguins. By 1989-90 the estimate had fallen to 62,000. Nyrøysa holds the most important colony. Southern fulmars are the most common other bird, at around 100,000 individuals. Cape petrels, Antarctic prions, snow petrels and Antarctic terns also breed here, while wandering albatrosses and king penguins appear without nesting.

  The only vertebrates besides birds are seals. Southern elephant seals and Antarctic fur seals both breed here. In 1998-99, Nyrøysa counted 88 elephant seal pups and 13,000 fur seal pups. Humpback whales, fin whales and orcas pass through the surrounding water, along with hourglass dolphins. On the 17th of December 1971, the whole island and its territorial waters became a nature reserve.

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• 6. Unsolved Traces

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  In 1964, the British naval ship HMS Protector carried two Westland Whirlwind helicopters to the island. One of them set a small survey team down at Nyrøysa, led by Lieutenant Commander Alan Crawford. Shortly after landing, the team spotted an abandoned lifeboat in a small lagoon. They had very little time. A quick search turned up no other sign of people, and for many years nobody knew where the boat had come from.

  A scientific landing in 1978 brought the lifeboat out from Nyrøysa. Again, nothing else pointed to human activity. The boat was believed to belong to a Soviet scientific reconnaissance vessel, though the island itself gave up no confirmation.

  On the 22nd of September 1979, the American Vela Hotel satellite 6911 recorded an unexplained double flash on or above the sea between Bouvet Island and the Prince Edward Islands. Some read it as a meteor. Others blamed a glitch in the instruments. Most independent assessments conclude it was an undeclared joint nuclear test by South Africa and Israel. The question has never been settled. Norwegian scientists were already visiting through the 1970s, and they would try, again and again, to keep a station standing there.

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• 7. Station and Visitors

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  In 1977, Norwegian expeditions put up a temporary five-man station and an automated weather station. It was staffed for two months in 1978 and 1979. In March 1985, the weather cleared enough for an expedition to photograph the entire island from the air. The result was the first accurate map of the whole island, produced 247 years after its discovery.

  The Norwegian Polar Institute built a 36 m2 research station from shipping containers at Nyrøysa in 1996. On the 23rd of February 2006, a magnitude 6.2 earthquake struck with its epicentre about 100 km away. The shaking weakened the foundation, and a winter storm then blew the station into the sea.

  In December 2012, a replacement left Tromsø by ship, travelling by way of Cape Town. Crews assembled it at Nyrøysa, the only spot wide enough for a helicopter to land on the north-western part of the island. Three modules sit on a steel platform anchored in a concrete base. The station can house six people for two to four months at a time. Wind power supplies the energy, and an automated meteorological station sends data by satellite all year.

  The expedition ship Hanse Explorer visited on the 20th and the 21st of February 2012 for "Expédition pour le Futur", hoping to climb the island's highest point. Amateur radio operators know Bouvet by the prefix 3Y0. The 3Y0J expedition of January and February 2023 was scaled back and cut short as the weather worsened. A further expedition, 3Y0K, began in March 2026.

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• 8. Law and Resources

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  Norway holds three dependencies, and Bouvet is the one that is not disputed. Peter I Island and Queen Maud Land fall under the Antarctic Treaty System. Bouvet lies north of 60°S and so sits outside it. As a dependency, the island is not part of the Kingdom of Norway but remains under Norwegian sovereignty. That means it could be ceded without breaching the first article of the Norwegian constitution. The Polar Affairs Department of the Ministry of Justice and the Police, in Oslo, administers it.

  A Dependency Act dated the 24th of March 1933 applies Norwegian criminal, private and procedural law to the island. It makes all land state property and bans the storage and detonation of nuclear products. The island carries the ISO code BV. It received the country code top-level domain .bv on the 21st of August 1997, run by Norid but unused.

  The exclusive economic zone around the island covers 441163 km2. The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, with 27 member states including Norway, monitors compliance. Vessels suspected of illegal fishing can be blacklisted and face enforcement through member states and Interpol. Surveys in 2000 found dense krill near the island. In 2004, Aker BioMarine won a krill concession, and later quotas from 2008 brought the total catch to 620000 t. Critics question whether this is sustainable, since whales depend on krill. In 2009, Norway asked the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf to extend its shelf limit beyond 200 nmi.

  In the mid-1980s, Bouvet, Jan Mayen and Svalbard were weighed as homes for a new Norwegian ship register, but Bergen got it in 1987. In 2007, the island joined Norway's tentative World Heritage list within a Mid-Atlantic Ridge nomination. Popular culture has found it too. Alien vs. Predator is set mainly there. And at Edinburgh Zoo, a king penguin named Major General Sir Nils Olav III holds the title Baron of the Bouvet Islands.

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