Paulet Island
Paulet Island announces itself with sound before anything else — a low, continuous roar rising from roughly 100,000 breeding pairs of Adélie penguins packed onto a volcanic cone in the Weddell Sea. The pink-orange stain of guano covers the lower slopes. Snow petrels cut overhead. Leopard seals haul out on the ice below with an indifference that is either serene or predatory, depending on what you are.
This is a small island with an outsized history and a wildlife density that makes the place feel almost hallucinatory. The geothermal heat of a volcano active within the last thousand years keeps parts of the ground bare year-round, which is partly why the penguins are here in such numbers, and partly why a group of shipwrecked men once survived a winter on it.
How Paulet Island came to be
James Clark Ross reached and named the island during his 1839–1843 British expedition, recording it for Captain Lord George Paulet of the Royal Navy. Sixty years later, the island entered the history of polar survival. In February 1903, the ship Antarctic — carrying Otto Nordenskiöld's Swedish Antarctic Expedition — was crushed and sunk by pack ice off the coast. Captain Carl Larsen led the survivors ashore, where they built a stone hut and settled in for a winter that killed one of their number, Ole Christian Wennersgaard, whose grave remains on the island today.
The cairn the survivors raised on the highest point to signal rescuers still stands. Together with the hut and the grave, it is designated Historic Site and Monument 41 under the Antarctic Treaty. Ernest Shackleton's Endurance crew intended to reach the island's cached supplies in 1916, but the ice had other plans and carried them east toward Elephant Island instead.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Austral summer — January through March — brings the most accessible conditions, with temperatures hovering between roughly -3°C and 2°C and enough sea-ice breakup to allow landings. Weather shifts fast in the Weddell Sea; wind is a constant, and a calm morning can turn within the hour.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.