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.