Saunders Island, South Sandwich Islands

Saunders Island is a crescent-shaped island 8.8 km (5.5 mi) long, lying between Candlemas Island and Montagu Island in the South Sandwich Islands, a British Overseas Territory in the southern Atlantic Ocean. It is a volcanic island composed of an active stratovolcano, 990-metre (3,248 ft) Mount Michael.

Saunders Island

Saunders Island location
Location of Saunders Island
Geography
Coordinates	57°47′S 026°27′W
Archipelago	South Sandwich Islands
Length	8.8 km (5.47 mi)
Highest elevation	990 m (3250 ft)
Highest point	Mount Michael
Administration
United Kingdom
Demographics
Population	Uninhabited

History

Saunders Island was discovered in 1775 by Captain James Cook, who named it for Sir Charles Saunders, First Lord of the Admiralty.[1] It was charted in greater detail by Bellingshausen in 1819,[2] and in 1930 by DI personnel aboard Discovery II. The island was surveyed in 1964 by HMS Protector after whose captain, Captain Martin S. Ollivant, the westernmost point, Ollivant Point, is named. Carey Point also marks the western extremity of the island.[3] Shackleton sometimes misspells the island's name as "Sanders Island" in his book South.

Features

Mount Michael

• Cordelia Bay
• Mount Michael, a volcano known to have erupted explosively in 1819, and has erupted repeatedly since 2000, most recently in 2005. The 700 m (2,297 ft) diameter summit crater contains a persistent lava lake, one of only eight in the world.[4][5][6]
• Sombre Point
• Yellowstone Crags

See also

• List of Antarctic and sub-Antarctic islands

References

1. Beaglehole, J. C. (2015). The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery : Volume II: The Voyage of the Resolution and Adventure 1772-1775. London: Taylor and Francis. ISBN 9781351543255. OCLC 994714606.
2. Amos, Jonathan (2019-07-03). "Remote British territory hosts persistent lava lake". Retrieved 2019-07-05.
3.  This article incorporates public domain material from the United States Geological Survey document: "Saunders Island, South Sandwich Islands". (content from the Geographic Names Information System)
4. Robin George Andrews (2019-07-12). "A Burning Lava Lake Concealed by a Volcano's Glacial Ice". The New York Times. Retrieved 2019-07-17. The area is often cloudy, and a seemingly constant volcanic plume conceals the lake most of the time. Fortunately, the team collected enough shots of the lake from 2003 to 2018 that clearly showed a crater floor containing a superheated lake 295 to 705 feet across. The lava is also 1,812 to 2,334 degrees Fahrenheit, with the higher end of that range about as hot as lava on Earth seems to get.
5. "Remote Mount Michael volcano hosts persistent lava lake". BBC News. BBC News. Retrieved 3 July 2019.
6. Metcalfe, Tom; July 5, Live Science Contributor |; ET, 2019 08:16am. "Rare Lake of Bubbling Lava Discovered on Remote Antarctic Island". Live Science. Retrieved 2019-07-05.

• "Michael". Global Volcanism Program. Smithsonian Institution.
• LeMasurier, W. E.; Thomson, J. W., eds. (1990). Volcanoes of the Antarctic Plate and Southern Oceans. American Geophysical Union. p. 512 pp. ISBN 0-87590-172-7.
• Volcano World: Mount Michael