Montagu Island

Something interesting always happens when fire meets ice. On Montagu Island, off the Antarctic coast, ice and cold have been a constant—that is, until that day in 2005 when rumblings from below turned up the heat. When Mount Belinda blew its volcanic top, it was a momentous occasion for science—rarely have scientists been able to monitor the effects of a live volcanic eruption under sheets of ice. News reports of the satellite data told of "a large and fast flowing lava flow that is pouring into the sea like a huge waterfall."

It was also a momentous occasion for Montagu Island, which grew a whopping 20 hectares (49 acres) in less than a month as the lava was cooled by the ice and formed a solid mass.

Few people were around to see this phenomenon, however. Montagu is seriously remote and completely uninhabited—not surprising, since it's a supremely inhospitable place: Ninety percent of the island is sheathed in permanent ice. Even the Antarctic fur seals that breed in the waters surrounding the island go elsewhere to hang out; Montagu's slopes are so steep and its surfaces so icy it makes for tough going.

What actually lives on this Mars-like terrain? The South Sandwich archipelago—specifically Zavadovski Island—is the terrain of two-thirds of the world's population of chinstrap penguins, easily recognizable by their narrow black band that closely resembles a helmet's chin strap. In addition, the island has a variety of mosses, lichens, and flowering grasses.

Montagu Island is the largest of the South Sandwich Islands, a British Overseas Territory some 2,000km (1,243 miles) from the Antarctic continent. Mount Belinda, at 1,371m (4,498 ft.), is the highest point on the island archipelago. The South Sandwich Island chain is an arc of 11 emergent volcanoes, most of which are active.

Captain James Cook spent most of his career cruising the sun-dappled South Pacific, naming the Hawaiian islands the Sandwich Islands after his friend and patron John Montague (1718–92), the Fourth Earl of Sandwich. But it's clear that Cook got around: In his search for the "South Continent," he headed into colder, rougher seas and discovered these wind-swept, glaciated volcanic islands off the coast of Antarctica (read more) in 1775; he named them "Sandwich Land." The archipelago Cook deemed "the most horrible coast in the world" was eventually called the South Sandwich Islands.

Bleak and forbidding as they are, the South Sandwich Islands are an increasingly popular draw for cruise ships (those chinstrap penguins floating on blue icebergs make for great photo ops). Montagu, however, is nearly impossible to explore by boat; it has no harbor to speak of, and moorings are extremely difficult along its rocky coast. A handful of scientific research stations have been set up on neighboring islands in the past, but the monitoring of volcanic activity is done largely through satellite imagery.

Poet Robert Frost once pondered whether the world would end in fire or ice. On Montagu Island, however, the marriage of fire and ice shows us how the world begins.