Laurie Island
| Laurie Island | ||
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| Waters | Southern ocean | |
| Archipelago | South Orkney Islands | |
| Geographical location | 60 ° 44 ′ S , 44 ° 35 ′ W | |
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| length | 22 km | |
| surface | 50 km² | |
| Highest elevation | Melville Highlands 940 m |
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| Residents | 17 (ward staff) (2010) <1 inh / km² |
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| main place | Orcadas station | |
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Laurie Island is the furthest east and with an area of about 50 km² the second largest island of the Southern Orkney Islands in the Southern Ocean . The island is subject to the Antarctic Treaty , but is still politically claimed by both Argentina and Great Britain .
nature
Several peninsulas of the irregularly shaped island are - in contrast to the interior of the island, which is covered by an ice cap - not glaciated. These are ideal breeding grounds for Chinstrap and Adelie Penguins , of which more than 100,000 pairs have been counted on Laurie Island. BirdLife International has designated eleven areas on the island and offshore islets as Important Bird Areas (Ant080 to Ant090). There is a colony of more than 200 breeding pairs of blue-eyed shags (Ant082) on a rocky island off Cape Davidson in the southwest of Laurie Island, and more than 200 pairs of the giant petrel (Ant086) breed on Cape Geddes on the Ferguslie Peninsula .
history
The island named after the cartographer Richard Holmes Laurie (1766-1858) was discovered in 1821 by the whaler George Powell (1794-1824). In the course of the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition from 1902 to 1904 under the direction of William Speirs Bruce , a building ( Omond House ) was built, which was later renamed " Orcadas " by Argentina . Today the only inhabitants of the island are the crew members of the Orcadas station , maintained by the Argentine military , which has a permanent crew of 17 in the Antarctic winter (October 2010) (45 in the summer).
The Omond House, the Argentine magnetic observatory "Moneta House" built in 1905, an Argentine meteorological hut and a cemetery with twelve graves, the oldest of which dates from 1903, are now under the protection of the Antarctic Treaty as the HSM-42 historic site .
Individual evidence
- ↑ UNEP Islands (English)
- ↑ CM Harris, R. Carr, K. Lorenz, S. Jones: Important Bird Areas in Antarctica (PDF; 11.3 MB), BirdLife International, June 2011, p. 83 (English)
- ↑ HSM 42: Scotia Bay huts in the Antarctic Protected Areas Database on the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat website (English, Spanish, French, Russian), accessed November 16, 2019