What is Heard Island?

Heard and McDonald Islands*
UNESCO World Heritage Site
Heard Island, from NASA World Wind
State Party	Australia
Type	Natural
Criteria	viii, ix
Reference	577
Region	Asia-Pacific
Inscription History
Inscription	1997  (21st Session)
* Name as inscribed on World Heritage List. † Region as classified by UNESCO.

Heard Island and McDonald Islands (abbreviated as HIMI ^[1]) are uninhabited, barren islands located in the Southern Ocean, about two-thirds of the way from Madagascar to Antarctica, or 7718 km due south of Rajapur, Maharashtra. 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 size is 372 km² in area.

History

Neither island had visitors until the mid-1850s, and it is probable that no human had ever seen the island until this time. Peter Kemp, a British sealer (seal hunter), was the first person thought to have seen the island on November 27, 1833, 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 November 25, 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 January 4, 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, and became a World Heritage Site in 1997.

Geography

Heard Island is a 368 km² bleak and mountainous island located at . Its mountains are covered in glaciers and dominated by Mawson Peak, a 2,745 m (9006 ft) high complex volcano which forms part of the Big Ben massif.

Mawson Peak is the highest Australian mountain (517 m 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 km north of Heard Island, consisting of Shag Islet, Sail Rock, Morgan Island and Black Rock. They total approximately 1.1 km² in area.

The McDonald Islands are located 44 km to the west of Heard Island at . The islands are small and rocky and consist of McDonald Island (230 m high), Flat Island (55 m high) and Meyer Rock (170 m high). They total approximately 2.5 km² in area and, as with Heard Island, are surface exposures of the Kerguelen Plateau.

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 the 10th August 2005.^[2]

Heard Island and the McDonald Islands have no ports or harbours.

Administration and economy

The islands are a territory 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 marine reserve and are primarily visited for research.

From 1947 until the 1950s there were camps of visiting scientists on Heard Island (at Atlas Cove) and in 1971 on McDonald Island (at Williams Bay).

There is no economic activity, but they have been assigned the country code HM and Internet top-level domain .hm.

See also

• Sub-antarctic islands
• Birds of Heard and McDonald Islands

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. 

Further reading

• Scholes, Arthur. (1949) Fourteen men; story of the Australian Antarctic Expedition to Heard Island.Melbourne, F.W. Cheshire.

External links

• Heard Island and McDonald Islands official website
• [https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/hm.html CIA World Factbook entry]
• MODIS satellite image, taken September 30, 2004 and showing a von Kármán vortex street in the clouds, caused by Mawson Peak's effect on the wind
• Heard Island and McDonald Islands Marine Reserve page on Department of the Environment and Heritage website
• World Heritage Site entry
• Fan's page with further historical and geographic information and a map

•  • [ e] States and territories of Australia
States and mainland territories	Australian Capital Territory New South Wales Northern Territory Queensland South Australia Tasmania Victoria Western Australia Jervis Bay Territory
External territories	Ashmore and Cartier Islands Australian Antarctic Territory Christmas Island Cocos (Keeling) Islands Coral Sea Islands Heard Island and McDonald Islands Norfolk Island

•  • [ e] World Heritage Sites in Australia

Australian fossil mammal sites at Naracoorte and Riversleigh Blue Mountains Central Eastern Rainforest Reserves Fraser Island Great Barrier Reef Heard Island and McDonald Islands Kakadu National Park Lord Howe Island Group Macquarie Island Purnululu National Park Royal Exhibition Building and Carlton Gardens Shark Bay Sydney Opera House Tasmanian Wilderness Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park Wet Tropics of Queensland Willandra Lakes Region

•  • [ e] Peri-Antarctic countries and overseas territories
Argentina   Australia (Heard Island and McDonald Islands Macquarie Island)   Chile   Falkland Islands   French Southern and Antarctic Lands   New Zealand (Campbell Island)   Norway (Bouvetya)   South Africa (Prince Edward Islands)   South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands
"Peri-Antarctic" (meaning "surrounding the Antarctic") does not include territorial claims on Antarctica itself.

Coordinates: