You sail your ship into the volcano. Deception is a horseshoe about 79 square kilometres across whose middle is a flooded caldera, Port Foster, entered through a gap 500 metres wide called Neptune’s Bellows. The American sealer Nathaniel Palmer named it in 1820 for exactly that: what looks like an ordinary island turns out to be a ring around a drowned crater. A Norwegian and Chilean company put a whaling station at Whalers Bay in 1906 and the industry collapsed there by 1931; the boilers and the tanks are still standing. The volcano is not finished, and eruptions in 1967 and 1969 destroyed research stations and forced evacuations. Argentina and Spain run bases seasonally, over 15,000 visitors a year come for the penguins and the geothermal springs, and no country owns it. South Shetland Islands.
South Shetlands, Antarctica
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