Heard Island and McDonald Islands: Difference between revisions

Heard Island and McDonald Islands (abbreviated as HIMI^[1] ) (formally named the Territory of Heard Island and McDonald Islands^[2] ) are a volcanic group of barren islands located in the Southern Ocean, about two-thirds of the way from Madagascar to Antarctica, approximately 4099 km west of Perth.^[3] Discovered in the mid-19th century, they have been territories of Australia since 1947, and contain the only two active volcanoes in Australian territory, one of which, Mawson Peak, is the highest Australian mountain.

The group's overall size is 372 square kilometres (144 sq mi) in area, and it has 101.9 km of coastline. The islands are uninhabited.

Heard Island, by far the largest of the group, is a 368-square-kilometre (142 sq mi) bleak and mountainous island located at 53°06′00′′S 73°31′00′′E / 53.10000°S 73.51667°E / -53.10000; 73.51667 . Its mountains are covered in glaciers (the island is 80% covered with ice^[5] ) and dominated by Mawson Peak, a 2,745-metre (9,006 ft) high complex volcano which forms part of the Big Ben massif.

Mawson Peak is the highest Australian mountain (higher than Mount Kosciuszko), and one of only 2 active volcanoes in Australian territory, the other being McDonald Island. A long thin spit named "Elephant Spit" extends from the east of the island.

There is a small group of islets and rocks about 10 kilometres (6 mi) north of Heard Island, consisting of Shag Islet, Sail Rock, Morgan Island and Black Rock. They total approximately 1.1 square kilometres (0.4 sq mi) in area.

The McDonald Islands are located 44 kilometres (27 mi) to the west of Heard Island at 53°02′20′′S 72°36′04′′E / 53.03889°S 72.60111°E / -53.03889; 72.60111 . The islands are small and rocky and consist of McDonald Island (230 metres (750 ft) high), Flat Island (55 metres (180 ft) high) and Meyer Rock (170 metres (560 ft) high). They total approximately 2.5 square kilometres (1.0 sq mi) in area and, as with Heard Island, are surface exposures of the Kerguelen Plateau.

The volcano on McDonald Island, after being dormant for 75,000 years, erupted in 1992 and has erupted again several times since, its most recent eruption being on 10 August 2005.^[6]

Heard Island and the McDonald Islands have no ports or harbours; ships must anchor offshore. The coastline is 101.9 kilometres (63.3 mi), and a 12 nautical mile territorial sea and 200 nautical mile exclusive fishing zone are claimed.^[7]

The islands have an antarctic climate. Their only natural resource is fish.^[8]

The antipode to the central Mawson Peak of Heard Island is located less than 70 kilometres (43 mi) West by south of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Canada.

Neither island had visitors until the mid-1850s. Peter Kemp, a British sealer, is the first person thought to have seen the island. On 27 November 1833, he spotted it from the brig Magnet during a voyage from Kerguelen to the Antarctic and was believed to have entered the island on his 1833 chart.

An American sealer, Captain John Heard, on the ship Oriental, sighted the island on 25 November 1853, en route from Boston to Melbourne. He reported the discovery one month later and had the island named after him. Captain William McDonald aboard the Samarang discovered the McDonald Islands close to Heard Island six weeks later, on 4 January 1854.

No landing was made on the islands until March 1855, when sealers from the Corinthian, led by Captain Erasmus Darwin Rogers, went ashore, at a place called Oil Barrel Point. In the sealing period from 1855-1880, a number of American sealers spent a year or more on the island, living in appalling conditions in dark smelly huts, also at Oil Barrel Point. At its peak the community consisted of 200 people. By 1880, most of the seal population had been wiped out and the sealers left the island. In all, more than 100,000 barrels of elephant seal oil was produced during this period.

There are a number of wrecks in the vicinity of the islands.

The islands have been a territory of Australia since 1947, when they were transfered from the U.K.^[9] The archipelago became a World Heritage Site in 1997.

The islands are a territory (Territory of Heard Island and McDonald Islands)of Australia administered from Hobart by the Australian Antarctic Division of the Australian Department of the Environment and Water Resources. They are populated by large numbers of seal and bird species. The islands are contained within a 65,000-square-kilometre (25,000 sq mi) marine reserve and are primarily visited for research. There is no permanent human habitation.^[10]

From 1947 until 1955 there were camps of visiting scientists on Heard Island (at Atlas Cove in the northwest, which was in 1969 again occupied by American scientists and expanded in 1971 by French scientists) and in 1971 on McDonald Island (at Williams Bay). Later expeditions used a temporary base at Spit Bay in the northeast, such as in 1988, 1992–93 and 2004–2005.

There is no indigenous economic activity; the Australian government allows limited fishing in the surrounding waters.^[11] However, the islands have been assigned the country code HM in ISO 3166-1 (ISO 3166-2:HM) and therefore the Internet top-level domain .hm.

Visit the Australian government image gallery of Heard Island and McDonald Island for high quality limited copyright images.

• Australian Antarctic Territory
• Birds of Heard and McDonald Islands
• List of islands of Australia
• Sub-antarctic islands

• LeMasurier, W. E. (1990). Volcanoes of the Antarctic Plate and Southern Oceans. American Geophysical Union. pp. 512 pp. ISBN 0-87590-172-7. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

• Scholes, Arthur. (1949) Fourteen men; story of the Australian Antarctic Expedition to Heard Island. Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire.
• Smith, Jeremy. (1986) Specks in the Southern Ocean. Armidale: University of New England Press. ISBN 085834615X

• Heard Island and McDonald Islands official website
• World heritage listing for Heard Island and McDonald Islands
• "Heard Island and McDonald Islands". The World Factbook (2025 ed.). Central Intelligence Agency.
• Template:Dmoz
• Wikimedia Atlas of Heard Island and McDonald Islands
• Template:Wikitravel
• MODIS satellite image, taken 30 September 2004 and showing a von Kármán vortex street in the clouds, caused by Mawson Peak's effect on the wind
• World Heritage Site entry
• Fan's page with further historical and geographic information and a map

• Islands of Australia
• Sub-Antarctic islands
• World Heritage Sites in Australia
• Uninhabited islands
• Volcanoes of Australia
• Volcanoes of the Southern Ocean
• Complex volcanoes
• Amalgamated placenames
• Volcanic islands
• Heard Island and McDonald Islands
• Volcanic groups

• Pages using gadget WikiMiniAtlas
• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Pages using infobox UNESCO World Heritage Site with unknown parameters
• CS1 errors: unsupported parameter
• Coordinates on Wikidata