Things to Do in French Southern Territories

French Southern Territories · TF

Lac de la Deception

Lac de la Déception is a small, nameless-to-tourists lake sitting on the Central Plateau of the main island (Grande Terre) of the Kerguelen archipelago, a French territory in the subantarctic southern Indian Ocean. Recorded at roughly 200 metres above sea level near 49°25′S 69°39′E, it is one of dozens of tarns and ponds that France catalogued across this remote volcanic land. There is no resort, trailhead or viewing platform here. The lake's real appeal is its location at one of the most isolated places on Earth—within a national nature reserve and a UNESCO World Heritage property that almost no traveller ever reaches except scientists and resupply crews.

Lake

French Southern Territories · TF

Lac Marville

Somewhere beyond the Roaring Forties, past the last shipping lanes and well into waters that belong more to the Antarctic than to India, a vast still lagoon glimmers against a backdrop of black basalt and tundra grass. Lac Marville is the largest lake in the Kerguelen archipelago, a body of water so remote that most of the people who would marvel at it are stationed there for science rather than sightseeing. At roughly 27 square kilometres, it dwarfs every other lake in this volcanic scatter of islands and ranks among the largest in all of France, though you will find no road, no car park, and no tourist brochure leading to its shores. What makes Lac Marville extraordinary is precisely what makes it unreachable for most travelers: it sits at the very edge of the inhabited world, on Grande-Terre's eastern peninsula where a glacial moraine sealed off a sea inlet thousands of years ago, trapping brackish freshwater that now supports a quiet ecology of introduced trout, native algae, and surrounding peat bogs. The Kerguelen Islands earned UNESCO World Heritage status in 2019 for the extraordinary concentrations of seabirds and marine mammals on their shores, and the Courbet Peninsula that hosts Lac Marville is home to the second-largest elephant seal colony on Earth.

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Glacier

French Southern Territories · TF

Glacier Arago

Glacier Arago is an eight-kilometre valley glacier descending from the Rallier du Baty ice cap on Grande Terre, the main island of the remote Kerguelen archipelago in the French Southern and Antarctic Lands. Named for the great French astronomer and physicist François Arago, it sits in the Vallée de Larmor between the peaks of Mont Henri Rallier du Baty and Le Bicorne, its terminus now lapping into a milky proglacial lake that did not exist within living memory. What makes this glacier remarkable to scientists and the few who glimpse it from expedition vessels is its dramatic, well-documented retreat. Satellite measurements reveal that Arago lost roughly three kilometres of length between 1964 and 2001 alone, while its ice thinned by an estimated eighty metres over the same period. In a sub-Antarctic world battered by the winds of the Roaring Forties, Arago has become one of the clearest visual records of how rapidly even the most isolated landscapes are responding to a warming climate.

Finding your next place…

A little more
of French Southern Territories.

Lac de la Deception

Lac Marville

Glacier Arago

Finding your next place…

A little more
of French Southern Territories.

Lac de la Deception

Lac Marville

Glacier Arago