* Astronomy

This image of the Kerguelen Islands was taken on February 15, 2007, by NASA’s Terra satellite.
The Kerguelen Islands are located in the southern Indian Ocean roughly midway between Africa, Australia, and Antarctica.
At of about 49 degrees South, the islands lie in the path of the “Furious Fifties,” a belt of westerly winds that whip around the Southern Hemisphere, mostly unimpeded by land.


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Credit NASA

Latitude: 49.58°S Longitude: 69.50°E

The islands were formed over millions of years by a series of lava flows. The perimeter of the large island is carved by fjords, and the rocky landscape is very sparsely vegetated with grasses, mosses, and a plant in the cabbage family. Glaciers are scattered across the island. The largest is Cook Glacier, in the west. The highest point on the island is Mount Ross, which has an elevation of 1,850 metres; it is also thought to be the youngest volcanic peak on the island. An active fumarole field is related to a series of Holocene trachytic lava flows and lahars that extend beyond the icecap. The last major eruptive event on the Kerguelen Archipelago was around 6,000 ±3000 years ago.

In a handful of fjords, the water appears greenish. The colour is probably due to very fine sediment ground down by the enormous friction the glaciers generate as they scrape over the land. Rivers and streams flush this sediment out to the coast.