Everything about Livingston Island totally explained
Livingston Island is an Antarctic island in the
South Shetland Islands,
Western Antarctica lying between
Greenwich and
Snow Islands. This
island was known to sealers as early as
1819, and the name Livingston has been well established in international usage for over 180 years.
Geography
Livingston is situated in the
Southern Ocean 110 km to the northwest of Cape Roquemaurel on the Antarctic Mainland, 830 km to the south-southeast of
Cape Horn in
South America, 820 km to the southeast of
Diego Ramirez Islands (the southernmost land of
South America), 1000 km due south of the
Falkland Islands, 1600 km to the southwest of
South Georgia Island, and 3000 km from the
South Pole.
The Island is part of the
South Shetlands archipelago, an islands chain extending over 500 km in east-northeast to west-southwest direction, and separated from the nearby
Antarctic Peninsula by
Bransfield Strait, and from
South America by the
Drake Passage. The
South Shetlands cover a total land area of 3687 km² comprising (from east to west)
Clarence Island,
Elephant Island,
King George Island,
Nelson Island,
Robert Island,
Greenwich Island, Livingston Island,
Deception Island,
Snow Island,
Low Island and
Smith Island, as well as numerous smaller islets and rocks.
Livingston is separated from the neighbouring
Greenwich Island to the east and
Snow Island to the west-southwest respectively by
McFarlane Strait and by
Morton Strait.
Deception Island, located barely 18 km southwest of Livingston’s
Barnard Point in the
Bransfield Strait, is a volcano whose crater is forming the sheltered harbour of Port Foster entered by a single narrow passage, Neptunes Bellows.
The Island extends 73 km from
Start Point in the west to
Renier Point in the east, its width varying from 5 km at the neck between
South Bay and
Hero Bay to 34 km between
Botev Point to the south and
Williams Point to the north, with surface area of 974 km². There are many islets and rocks in the surrounding waters, particularly numerous off the north coast. More sizable among the adjacent smaller islands are
Rugged Island off
Byers Peninsula,
Half Moon Island in
Moon Bay and
Desolation Island in
Hero Bay to the north.
Ice cliffs, often withdrawing in the recent decades to uncover new coves, beaches and points, form most of the coastline. Except for isolated patches the land surface is covered by an ice cap, highly crevassed in certain segments, with ice domes and plateaus in the cenrtal and western areas, and a number of valley glaciers formed by the more mountainous relief of eastern Livingston. Typical of the Island’s glaciology are the conspicuous ash layers originating from volcanic activity on the neighbouring
Deception Island.
Apart from the extensive
Byers Peninsula (61 km²) forming the west extremity of Livingston, the ice-free part of the island includes certain coastal areas at
Cape Shirreff,
Siddons Point,
Hannah Point,
Williams Point,
Hurd Peninsula and
Rozhen Peninsula, as well as slopes in the mountain ranges, ridges and heights in eastern Livingston that are too precipitous to keep snow. The principal mountain formations include
Tangra Mountains (30 km long, with
Mt. Friesland rising to 1700 m),
Bowles Ridge (6.5 km, elevation 822 m),
Vidin Heights (8 km, 604 m),
Burdick Ridge (773 m),
Melnik Ridge (696 m) and
Pliska Ridge (667 m).
The coastline of the island is irregular, with the more significant indentations of
South Bay,
False Bay,
Moon Bay,
Hero,
Barclay,
New Plymouth,
Osogovo and
Walker, and the peninsulas of
Hurd (extension 10 km),
Rozhen (9 km),
Burgas (10,5 km),
Varna (12 km),
Ioannes Paulus II (12.8 km) and
Byers (15 km).
The local variety of the
Antarctic Peninsula weather is particularly changeable, windy, humid and sunless; says Australian mountaineer Damien Gildea: ‘Livingston got just about the worst weather in the world’. Whiteouts are common, and blizzards can occur at any time of the year. Temperatures are rather constant, rarely exceeding 3°C in summer or falling below –11°C in winter, with wind chill temperatures up to 5-10°C lower.
Follow the average temperatures of the warmest month, of the coldest month, and annual, and the average annual rainfall; comparative data for some other locations:
Livingston Island (coastal areas): 1.3°C (34.3°F), –7°C (19.4°F), –2.7°C (27.1°F), 800 mm (31.5 inches);
London: 17°C (62.6°F), 3.9°C (39°F), 9.9°C (49.8°F), 611 mm (24 inches).
Cherni Vrah (peak rising to 2,290 m just 6.5 km from Sofia): 8.6°C (47.5°F), –8.1°C (17.4°F), 0.1°C (32.2°F), 1,178 mm (46.4 inches);
Sofia: 20.1°C (68.2°F), –1.1°C (30°F), 9.9°C (49.8°F), 575 mm (22.6 inches).
History
It was only in the
Nineteenth Century that any land was discovered in what today is ‘political’
Antarctica, and that land happened to be Livingston Island. Captain
William Smith in the English merchant brig
Williams, while sailing to
Valparaiso in
1819 deviated from his route south of
Cape Horn, and on 19 February sighted the northeast extremity of Livingston,
Williams Point.
A few months later Smith revisited the
South Shetlands to land on
King George Island on 16 October
1819 and claim possession for
Britain. In the meantime, a Spanish vessel had been damaged by severe weather in the
Drake Passage and sunk off the north coast of Livingston in September
1819. The 74-gun
San Telmo commanded by Captain Rosendo Porlier was the flagship of a Spanish naval squadron. The more than 600 men lost onboard the
San Telmo were the first people to die in
Antarctica. While no one survived, parts of her wreckage were found subsequently by sealers on
Half Moon Beach,
Cape Shirreff.
In December
1819 William Smith returned with his ship to the
South Shetlands once again. This time he was chartered by Captain
William Shirreff, British commanding officer in the
Pacific stationed in
Chile, and accompanied by Lieutenant
Edward Bransfield who was tasked to survey and map the new lands. On 30 January
1820 they sighted the mountains of the
Antarctic Peninsula, unaware that far away to the east and only three days earlier, the Continent had already been discovered by the Russian Antarctic expedition of
Fabian Gottlieb Thaddeus von Bellingshausen and
Mihail Lazarev.
One year later, the Russians had circumnavigated Antarctica and arrived in the
South Shetlands region in January
1821 to find over 50 American and English sealing vessels and 1000 men taking hundreds of thousands of fur seal skins. While sailing between
Deception Island and Livingston (named
Smolensk by the Russians) Bellingshausen met the American Captain
Nathaniel Palmer, yet another pioneer of Antarctic exploration who himself had sighted the mainland in the previous November.
Remains of huts and sealer artefacts are still found on Livingston, which possesses the greatest concentration of historical sites in
Antarctica (excepting
South Georgia). The names of many geographical features on the Island also refer to its early history. Among the commemorated are ship captains such as the Americans Christopher Burdick, Charles Barnard, Robert Johnson, Donald MacKay, Robert Inott, David Leslie, Benjamin Brunow, Robert Macy, Prince Moores and William Napier, the Britons
William Shirreff, M’Kean, John Walker, Ralph Bond, Christopher MacGregor, T. Binn and William Bowles, the Australian Richard Siddons, people like the New York shipowner
James Byers, the American whaling merchants William and Francis Rotch, British Admiralty hydrographer Thomas Hurd, and John Miers, publisher of the first chart of the
South Shetland Islands based on the work of
William Smith, or sealing vessels like
Huron,
Williams,
Samuel,
Gleaner,
Huntress,
Charity,
Hannah,
Henry,
John,
Hero and others.
Some of the place names given by the Nineteen Century sealers are descriptive, such as
Devils Point,
Hell Gates and
Neck or Nothing Passage, hazardous places where ships and people were lost;
Inept Cove,
Needle Peak, or the
Robbery Beaches where American sealers were robbed of their sealskins by the British. However, names like Livingston,
Mount Friesland and
Renier Point also go back to the first few seasons after the discovery of the islands yet their particular origins remain unknown.
Scientific bases
The permanent scientific bases of
Juan Carlos I
(
Spain) and
St. Kliment Ohridski (
Bulgaria) were established in
1988 at South Bay. Other base facilities are the small (or Guillermo Mann,
Chile and the
U.S.A.) on Cape Shirreff since
1991, and the inactive base
Cámara (
Argentina) on
Half Moon Island since
1953.
Occasional field camps support research in remote areas of the Island.
Campamento Byers (
Spain) operates regularly near
Nikopol Point on Byers Peninsula, and the
Camp Academia site situated at elevation 541 m in upper
Huron Glacier,
Wörner Gap area served as a base camp of the
Tangra 2004/05 topographic survey.
Camp Academia is accessible by 11-12.5 km routes from
St. Kliment Ohridski and
Juan Carlos I respectively, and offers convenient overland access to
Tangra Mountains to the south;
Bowles Ridge,
Vidin Heights,
Kaliakra Glacier and
Saedinenie Snowfield areas to the north;
Huron Glacier to the east; and
Perunika Glacier and
Huntress Glacier to the west.
Camp Academia was named for the
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in appreciation of Academy’s contribution to the Antarctic exploration, and has been designated as the summer post office Tangra 1091 of the Bulgarian Posts Plc since
2004.
Protected areas
In order to protect the Antarctic nature heritage, the
Antarctic Treaty system enforces a strict general regime regulating the human presence and activities in Antarctica, and also designates certain protected territories where the access is allowed only for scientific purposes, and with special permission.
There are two such
nature reserves in Livingston Island since
1966, comprising respectively the extensive
Byers Peninsula, and the small peninsula of
Cape Shirreff together with
San Telmo Island and the adjacent waters.
Subject of protection are the fossils demonstrating the link between Antarctica and other austral continents, a variety of abundant flora and fauna including colonies of seals and penguins that are the subject of scientific study and monitoring, as well as numerous historical monuments dating from the
Nineteenth Century.
Tourism
The Antarctic shipborne
tourism was initiated in
1958 in the
South Shetland Islands. Since then the number of tourists in
Antarctica has grown to tens of thousands annually, of whom over 95% tour the
South Shetlands and the nearby
Antarctic Peninsula.
Hannah Point on the south coast of Livingston and
Half Moon Island off the east coast, as well as the nearby
Deception Island and the
Aitcho Islands near
Greenwich Island are among the most popular destinations frequented by
cruise ships, offering walks amidst spectacular scenery and amazing
wildlife.
Further Information
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