Things to Do in Antarctica (2026)

Antarctica · AQ

Brown Bluff

Imagine standing on a beach of dark volcanic ash and rounded cobbles, hemmed in by towering cliffs of rust-red rock that look like they belong on Mars rather than Earth. This is Brown Bluff, a dramatic basalt tuya on the Tabarin Peninsula of Antarctica. It is one of the few places on the continent that offers a rare continental landing, allowing you to step onto solid land rather than sea ice or ship-strewn water. The site is defined by its stark, geological beauty and its deafening, joyful noise: the calls of approximately 20,000 breeding pairs of Adélie penguins and hundreds of Gentoos echoing off the steep slopes. For the expedition traveler, Brown Bluff is not just a stopover; it is a visceral introduction to the raw power of Antarctic nature, combining ancient volcanic history with one of the world’s most intense wildlife spectacles.

Channel

Antarctica · AQ

Schollaert Channel

The Schollaert Channel is a broad, deep waterway slicing through the Palmer Archipelago off the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, hemmed in by two of the region's great islands: glaciated Brabant Island to the northeast and the larger Anvers Island to the southwest. Far from a dead end, it is a working sea corridor that links Dallmann Bay up to the northwest with the famous Gerlache Strait down to the southeast, so expedition vessels threading between the peninsula's islands frequently glide straight through its icy heart. What makes the channel special is the sheer concentration of Antarctic drama packed into a single crossing. Steep, ice-clad peaks rise on both shores, tabular bergs and smaller growlers drift with the swell, and the deep, clear water runs between them like a fjord in motion. For a traveler whose itinerary includes it, the Schollaert Channel is rarely a place you land on but a place you sail through in wonder—a window-side show of glaciers, sea ice and open ocean stacked one against the other.

Island

Antarctica · AQ

Cockburn Island

Cockburn Island is a small, ice-free sentinel at the stormy north-east gateway to the Antarctic Peninsula's inner waterways. An oval of dark rock only about 2.7 kilometres long, it rises abruptly from the sea to a 450-metre pyramidal peak and a windswept plateau, sitting at the entrance to Admiralty Sound just off the tip of the peninsula. Uninhabited and administered under the Antarctic Treaty System, it is the kind of place most travellers will only ever reach on a deep-expedition voyage that dares the ice-choked Erebus and Terror Gulf. What makes Cockburn Island compelling is its density of firsts: the one place in West Antarctica where Captain James Clark Ross himself set foot ashore, the site of the very first botanical collections made on the southern continent, and a geologically unique archive of Cretaceous, Eocene and Pliocene rock found nowhere else on the frozen landmass. Today it shelters tens of thousands of breeding Adélie penguins and a colony of Antarctic shags, turning a 'barren rock' recorded in 1843 into one of the peninsula's great wildlife concentrations.

Nature preserve

Antarctica · AQ

iceberg 5_MEMORIA NATURAL_jvio

Iceberg 5, catalogued on maps as "MEMORIA NATURAL" (Natural Memory), is a drifting body of sea ice logged as a nature point in the waters off Chile's González Videla Antarctic Base, on the Danco Coast at Paradise Bay. It sits in the Gerlache Strait system—the Antarctic Peninsula's most scenic and iceberg-crammed cruising waters—so the way to encounter it is not a fixed shore visit but the slow, awe-filled navigation expedition ships and Zodiacs make through a maze of calved bergs. What gives the spot its pull is its setting rather than any permanent structure: an iceberg is a transient feature that grinds, tilts and melts as currents carry it, and the very fact that one here is mapped as a "nature preserve" reflects how striking the floating scenery around Paradise Bay has become to the cruise passengers who photograph it. Around the same water lies the Chilean base and its famous gentoo penguin colony, a rare albino lineage, and the historic ruin of Waterboat Point, so a visit that brings you past this iceberg typically delivers wildlife and polar exploration history in the same sailing.

Island

Antarctica · AQ

Spert Island

Spert Island is a dramatic, uninhabited outcrop off the western tip of Trinity Island in Antarctica's Palmer Archipelago, known among expedition cruise travellers for its Jurassic volcanic rock towers, narrow glacially-carved straits, and spectacular sea arches and tunnels. Classified as a Marine Only site, it is experienced entirely from a zodiac, threading between stranded icebergs and beneath cliff faces that shed rocks into the cold swell below. The island was first charted by Otto Nordenskjöld's Swedish Antarctic Expedition of 1901–04 and formally named in 1960 after Sir Thomas Spert, the Tud-era Controller of the King's Ships who founded the Mariners of England — the organisation that later became Trinity House. Today it draws chinstrap penguins, leopard seals, humpback whales, and an array of seabirds to its surrounding waters.

Finding your next place…

A little more
of Antarctica.

Brown Bluff

Schollaert Channel

Cockburn Island

iceberg 5_MEMORIA NATURAL_jvio

Spert Island

Finding your next place…

A little more
of Antarctica.

Brown Bluff

Schollaert Channel

Cockburn Island

iceberg 5_MEMORIA NATURAL_jvio

Spert Island