Ross Island
Ross Island sits at the end of the world in a way that feels literal rather than poetic. Two volcanoes — Erebus, still active at 3,795 metres, and the extinct Terror — anchor an island that fewer than two hundred visitors reach in any given year, and of those, only a handful actually set foot on land. What draws people here is not comfort or convenience but a particular kind of gravity: the wooden huts at Hut Point and Cape Evans still stand, still hold their original tins and rope and sledging equipment, unchanged since the Edwardian expeditions that made this place the departure gate for the most consequential journeys in polar history.
The island is roughly 75 kilometres across and ringed by the Ross Sea, which freezes hard each winter and releases reluctantly. When the pack ice finally opens, icebreakers cut a channel south to McMurdo Station — the largest Antarctic base, with up to 1,100 people in summer — and for a few weeks in January and February, the island briefly becomes, by Antarctic standards, reachable.
How Ross Island came to be
Sir James Clark Ross sailed into these waters in 1841, naming the volcanoes for his ships — Erebus and Terror — before moving on. It was Robert Falcon Scott's British National Antarctic Expedition of 1901 to 1904 that established the island as an island rather than a peninsula, and gave it Ross's name. The expedition built Discovery Hut at Hut Point in early 1902, the first prefabricated structure erected in Antarctica for overwintering. Ernest Shackleton followed with his own camp at Cape Royds in 1907, and Scott returned in 1910, building the larger Cape Evans hut — 25 men wintered inside it across 1911 and 1912 — before departing for the South Pole. He reached it on January 17, 1912, and died on the return trek.
The mid-1950s brought a different kind of presence: the United States established McMurdo Station in 1955, New Zealand's Scott Base followed in 1957, and the island shifted from a staging ground for exploration into a permanent site of scientific operations. Greenpeace ran its own World Park Base here from 1987 to 1992, monitoring environmental compliance across the continent.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
January and February, the only viable visitor months, bring mean temperatures around -18°C, though readings below -30°C on the Ross Sea are not unusual even in summer. Storms can arrive without much warning and turn the air to near-zero visibility with winds that have been recorded above 150 mph on the ice shelf — layers and patience are not optional.
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.