Stazione di ricerca di Macquarie Island

About the place

The Macquarie Island Station, commonly called Macca, is a permanent Australian subantarctic research base on Macquarie Island, situated in the Southern Ocean and located approximately halfway between Mainland Australia and Antarctica, managed by the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD). The station lies at the base of Wireless Hill, between two bays on the isthmus at the northern end of the island. The island and its surrounding waters are administered as a nature reserve by the Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service. In 1997, the island was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as a site of major geoconservation significance, being the only place on Earth where rocks from the Earth's mantle are actively exposed above sea-level. In August 2026, the Australian Antarctic Division announced that they would be withdrawing all personnel from the Macquarie Island Station, because of the expected arrival of the H5N1 bird flu virus and the prospect of mass mortality in the colony of 2,500 elephant seals adjacent to the base. The withdrawal of personnel from Macquarie Island was to avoid the predicted psychological effects of living for an extended period within a mass mortality event.

Source: Wikipedia · CC BY-SA