Bouvet Island

From Wikinfo

Search for "Bouvet_Island" on Wikipedia  • Wikimedia Commons • Wiktionary • Wikiquote • Wikibooks • Mediawiki Wikia • Wikitravel • Google Advanced Search • Yahoo Advanced Search • WorldCat Advanced Search • Amazon • Recent NY Times • Older NY Times.

For criticism see Criticism of Bouvet_Island

Bouvetøya Bouvet Island
File:Bouvet-pos.png
Government		Dependent territory
-	Monarch of Norway	Harald V
-	Administration	Polar Affairs Department
Norwegian dependency
-	Claimed	1 December, 1927
-	Annexed	23 January, 1928
-	Dependency	27 February, 1930
-	Nature reserve	17 December, 1971
Area
-	Total	49 km²  19 sq mi
Population
-	census	0
Internet TLD		.bv¹
1	Currently not in use.

Bouvet Island (Norwegian: Bouvetøya) is an uninhabited Antarctic volcanic island in the South Atlantic Ocean, south-southwest of the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa). It is a dependent territory (Norwegian: biland) of Norway and is not subject to the Antarctic Treaty. It is the most remote island in the world.

Contents 1 Geography 2 History 3 Bouvet Island in fiction 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

Geography

Bouvet Island is located at 54°26′S 3°24′E / -54.433, 3.4. It is 49 km² in area, 93% of which is covered by glaciers which block the south and east coasts.^[1]

Bouvet Island is the most remote island in the world. The nearest land is Queen Maud Land, Antarctica, over 1,600 km (1,000 miles) away to the south, which in itself has no fixed population, but is inhabited with a Nordic all-year round research station.

Bouvet Island has no ports or harbours, only offshore anchorages, and is therefore difficult to approach. Wave action has created a very steep coast. The easiest way to access the island is with a helicopter from a ship. The glaciers form a thick ice layer falling in high cliffs into the sea or onto the black beaches of volcanic sand. The 29.6 km (18.4 miles) of coastline are often surrounded by an ice pack. The highest point on the island is called Olavtoppen, whose peak is 780 m (2,559 ft) above sea level. A lava shelf on the island's west coast, which appeared between 1955 and 1958, provides a nesting site for birds.

Because of the harsh climate and ice-bound terrain, vegetation is limited to lichens and mosses. Seals, seabirds and penguins are the only fauna.

Despite being uninhabited, Bouvet Island has the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) .bv, though it is not used.^[2] A handful of amateur radio expeditions have gone to this remote location (call signs used here begin with 3Y). There is no telephone country code or area code, and no telephone connection (except by satellite, but there is nothing installed). There is no postal code and no postal distribution. Ships approaching Bouvet Island fall within the UTC Z time zone. There is a Norwegian law ^[3] saying that the time zone of Norway is UTC+1, except for part of the year (daylight saving time). This suggests that the legal time zone for Bouvet Island also should be UTC+1. However, since this law does not apply for the Norwegian Antarctic territories (Bouvet Island, Peter I Island, Queen Maud Land), UTC Z is the proper time zone for Bouvet Island.

History

Bouvet Island was discovered on January 1, 1739, by Jean-Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier, who commanded the French ships Aigle and Marie. However, the island's position was not accurately fixed having been placed eight degrees to the east, and Bouvet did not circumnavigate his discovery, so it remained unclear whether it was an island or part of a continent.^[4]

In 1772, Captain James Cook left South Africa on a mission to find the island. However, when arriving at 54°S 11°E / -54, 11 where Bouvet had said he sighted the island, nothing was to be seen. Captain Cook assumed that Bouvet had taken an iceberg for an island, and he abandoned the search. ^[5]

The island was not sighted again until 1808, when it was spotted by James Lindsay, the captain of the Enderby Company whaler Snow Swan. Though he didn't land, he was the first to correctly fix the island's position. Since this deviated greatly from the (incorrect) position previously recorded for Bouvet, it was initially assumed to be a different island and was named Lindsay Island. Only later was it established that Bouvet and Lindsay must be the same.

Captain Benjamin Morrell of the sealer Wasp claimed to have landed on Bouvet in December 1822 to hunt for seals, but his account is disputed.^[6]

On December 10, 1825, Captain Norris, master of the Enderby Company whalers Sprightly and Lively, landed on the island, named it Liverpool Island, and claimed it for the British Crown. Again, it was not known with certainty at the time that this was the same island found previously. He also reported sighting a second island nearby, which he named Thompson Island. No trace of this island now remains.

In 1898, the German Valdivia expedition of Carl Chun visited the island but did not land.

The first extended stay on the island was in 1927, when the Norwegian "Norvegia" crew stayed for about a month; this is the basis for the claim by "Norvegia" expedition leader Lars Christensen on behalf of Norway, who have named the island Bouvet Island (Bouvetøya in Norwegian).^[7] The island was claimed for Norway on December 1 1927, and by a Royal Norwegian Decree of January 23 1928, Bouvetøya became a Norwegian Territory. The United Kingdom waived its claim in favor of Norway the following year. In 1930 a Norwegian act was passed that made the island a dependent area subject to the sovereignty of the Kingdom (but not a part of the Kingdom).

In 1964, an abandoned lifeboat was discovered on the island, along with various supplies; however, the lifeboat's passengers were never found.^[8]

In 1971, Bouvet Island and the adjacent territorial waters were designated a nature reserve. In the 1950s and 1960s, there was some interest from South Africa to establish a weather station, but conditions were deemed to be too hostile. The island remains uninhabited, although an automated weather station was set up there in 1977 by the Norwegians.

On September 22, 1979, a satellite recorded a flash of light (which was later interpreted as having been caused by a nuclear bomb explosion or natural event such as a meteor) in a stretch of the southern Indian Ocean between Bouvet Island and Prince Edward Islands. This flash, since dubbed the Vela Incident, is still not completely resolved.^[9]

On October 19, 2007, the Norwegian Polar Institute announced that satellite photos no longer show the research station built on the island in 1994. Later investigations indicate that a landslide or ice avalanche swept the building off its foundations. A replacement station is being planned (2009). An unmanned weather station on the island is reportedly still intact.^[10]

Bouvet Island in fiction

• Bouvet is the setting of the 2004 movie Alien vs. Predator, in which it is referred to using its Norwegian name "Bouvetøya" even though in the unrated edition of the film, a satellite focuses in on the island which is geographically situated in the approximate location of Peter I Island.
• The island figures prominently in the book A Grue of Ice (also published as "The Disappearing Island") by Geoffrey Jenkins. It also features in "Warhead" by Andy Remic.

See also

• Sub-antarctic islands
• List of islands of Norway
• .bv (Internet top-domain code for Bouvet Island)
• ISO 3166-2:BV, an ISO country code standard

References

• LeMasurier, W. E.; Thomson, J. W. (eds.) (1990). Volcanoes of the Antarctic Plate and Southern Oceans. American Geophysical Union, 512 pp. ISBN 0-87590-172-7. 

External links

• Wikimedia Atlas of Bouvet Island
• Bouvet Island as seen from a Satellite
• Information on Bouvet Island
• Bouvet Island entry at The World Factbook
• Bouvet Island - Bouvetøya
• Bouvet Island at Infoplease
• 2000 Bouvet Island amateur radio expedition (3YØC)
• 1990 Bouvet Island amateur radio expedition (3Y5X)

Coordinates: 54°26′S 3°24′E / -54.433, 3.4 Template:Overseas territories of Norway

v • d • e Peri-Antarctic countries and overseas territories Argentina · Australia (Heard Island and McDonald Islands • Macquarie Island) · Chile · Falkland Islands · French Southern and Antarctic Lands (Kerguelen Islands) · New Zealand (New Zealand Sub-Antarctic Islands) · Norway (Bouvet Island) · South Africa (Prince Edward Islands) · South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands "Peri-Antarctic" (meaning "close to the Antarctic") does not include territorial claims on Antarctica itself.

Template:Outlying territories of European countries

This page uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at Bouvet Island. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. The text of this Wikinfo article is available under the GNU Free Documentation License and the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license. English | Română | edit