The most remote island in the world.
May 23, 2007 6:25 AM   Subscribe

Thinking about getting away from it all? Bouvetøya (Bouvet Island) is located at 54°26′S, 3°24′E in the South Atlantic. It is the most remote island in the world. Covered with ice, it has no ports or harbors, no arable land, it is uninhabited, and fair weather is extremely rare. Although a territory of Norway, you can register a patent in Bouvetøya via WIPO (country code BV) or (someday) a URL: Bouvetøya has the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) ".bv" (unfortunately not currently in use). Ham Radio operators visited visited this vacation paradise in 1990 and made over made almost 50,000 QSOs (morse code conversations). Ready to book your trip? A Google Search returns 1,180,00 results for Bouvet Island travel. (previously)
posted by three blind mice (17 comments total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
made over made

Doh. Jessamyn? Cortex? Little help?
posted by three blind mice at 6:35 AM on May 23, 2007


also..visited visited? More help is in order.
posted by winks007 at 7:08 AM on May 23, 2007


The most remote thread in the world.
posted by swift at 7:23 AM on May 23, 2007


Isn't that Cthulhu's summer place?
posted by Mister_A at 7:30 AM on May 23, 2007


Hey! You forgot the Wikipedia link link!

I was wondering if it had a water source till I remembered that it's covered by a glacier which is ice which is frozen water. Now all I'd need is a heat source to melt it with (such as a magnifying glass), a machete to cut ice for an igloo, a OLPT p00ter with a super-duper WiFi card, and a pizza chain that delivers to subantarctic islands. I could be a KING!
posted by davy at 8:15 AM on May 23, 2007


A Google Search returns 1,180,00 results for Bouvet Island travel.

If I owned Google I'd take all those sites spewing empty content for Bouvet Island Travel and permanently blacklist them.
posted by rolypolyman at 8:28 AM on May 23, 2007 [1 favorite]


Ready to book your trip?

I'm sure Kattullus will be. Since I've known him, he's been talking about how he wants to go to Kerguelen. I think it comes from being from a godforsaken hell of a rock.

(The thing about the Google results reminds me of when I was living in Iceland and gMail kept spewing out "relevant ads" for traveling to Iceland and every single day I screamed at the machine to do a better frickin job of spying on me because I fucking LIVED in Iceland so I couldn't very well travel there now could I? It should have been advertising "Travel OUT of Iceland.")
posted by grapefruitmoon at 8:37 AM on May 23, 2007


Hey! You forgot the Wikipedia link link!

Nope. I ignored it.

Sorry about the terrible grammar in the FPP.
posted by three blind mice at 9:02 AM on May 23, 2007


Isn't that where the secret evil fortress is supposed to be?
posted by Thorzdad at 9:11 AM on May 23, 2007


Bouvet Island is so isolated you can explode a nuclear bomb there in 1979 and still have people guessing. The Vela incident is the name for a suspected nuclear weapon test near Bouvet by South Africa, maybe with help from Israel. The US picked up a flash on a satellite and some evidence of fallout, but that's about all that is publically known.

How many "Cape Circumcision"s are there in the world? I'm assuming it's named after a Christian holiday and not a seaman ritual?
posted by Nelson at 9:17 AM on May 23, 2007


That's awesome! Surely a superb setting for the sequel to Smila's Sense of Snow.
posted by Joe Invisible at 9:55 AM on May 23, 2007


I love that place. Because of the TLD, most websites out there have "Bouvet Island" listed as a possible country when you're inputting your address. As far as most every site that has nag registration is concerned, I'm a Bouvet Islander.
posted by xthlc at 10:14 AM on May 23, 2007 [1 favorite]


From the second link:

A lifeboat and supplies were discovered on the island in 1964, but their origin could not be determined.

Hmmmm......
posted by LooseFilter at 10:59 AM on May 23, 2007


Hey Nelson, back in 1984-86 I worked as a planner/analyst on support for a successor to the Vela satellite program, and a couple of people on my time had moved over from Vela support when that program was retired. One of those old-timers had been on duty monitoring telemetry when that flash came through. It caused a bit of consternation, to say the least.
posted by Araucaria at 11:09 AM on May 23, 2007


Ah-aaaah-Ah!
*cue bass riff from Immigrant Song*
posted by Smedleyman at 2:27 PM on May 23, 2007


Araucaria,
That's awesome. Can you spill the dark secrets behind it? Bomb test? Alien landing site? Dimensional rift? Some guy dropped his flashlight? That must have been a really interesting job.
posted by Sangermaine at 7:02 PM on May 23, 2007


This is the second mention of Bouvet Island I've seen in two days. The other was in a sublime series of love letters to the islands of the sub-Antartic, including Bouvet Island. A Yale design project by Eric Nevin.
posted by philoye at 1:32 AM on May 24, 2007


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