Macquarie Island

Macquarie Island is a piece of the Earth's interior pushed up into the air. Most ocean crust stays hidden under kilometres of water. Here a slice of oceanic crust and the mantle rock beneath it has been forced above sea level. It is the only place on Earth where rocks from the mantle are being actively exposed above sea level at a mid-ocean ridge. The rocks formed some 27–30 million years ago, but the island itself is young: it rose from the sea only within the last few hundred thousand years. This geology is the main reason it was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1997.

The island is long and narrow, about 35 km by 5 km, and lies roughly halfway between Tasmania and Antarctica, some 1,500 km southeast of Tasmania. Its beaches carry one of the great wildlife gatherings of the Southern Ocean. The entire world population of royal penguins comes here to breed. More than 80,000 southern elephant seals haul out on its shores, and about three and a half million seabirds of thirteen species breed here, several kinds of penguin among them.

Sealers found the island in July 1810, when the Australian captain Frederick Hasselborough came upon it while looking for new hunting grounds. For more than a century seals and then penguins were boiled down for oil, until some populations were close to vanishing. The hunters also brought rabbits, rats and mice, which stripped the vegetation. After a seven-year eradication campaign, the island was declared free of these pests in 2014. It was the largest successful island eradication attempted up to that time. Australia's Antarctic program keeps a research station on the narrow isthmus at the northern end, with a small year-round crew.

Getting there

The island is part of Tasmania, and landing requires a permit. The number of visitors each year is kept deliberately small. There is no airport or port. Expedition cruise ships reach it in about three days in good weather, mainly from Bluff or Dunedin in New Zealand, sometimes from Hobart. The season runs from roughly late November to February, and passengers go ashore in small boats. The nearest city is Invercargill, New Zealand, about 1,130 km away, with Invercargill Airport (IVC). Within Australia, the nearest is Hobart, about 1,550 km away (Hobart International Airport, HBA).