Antarctica Has One Place Where Ships Can Sail Directly Into The Center of an Active Volcano

Squatting at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, the horseshoe-shaped “Deception Island” fools humans into believing that it is untouchable, unreachable. The island is a gash, or a caldera, left over by a volcano that erupted violently nearly 10,000 years ago. At first glance, it looks like a solid block of land bordered by steep cliffs. But this picture is just like a mirage of an oasis in a desert. A closer look reveals that there’s an opening in the caldera’s rim, known as “Neptune’s Bellows.” Within this opening bubbles a massive lagoon, flowing secretively, deceiving even the most watchful explorers.

Formed by the flooding of the caldera, this lagoon is a one-of-its-kind passage that allows people to sail their boats right through the mouth of one of the most aggressive volcanoes located in one of the harshest continents in the world. It “is one of the only places in the world where ships can sail directly into the center of an active volcano,” NASA Earth (@NASAEarth) described in a Facebook post while sharing a satellite image of the mysterious location.

Thousands of years ago, NASA explained, a massive volcano in the South Ocean blasted enormous quantities of magma and rock into the sky. As the volcano’s magma chamber drained out, the sudden pressure drop caused its mouth to collapse and form a crater, otherwise known as a “caldera.” While the entire event unfolded, it molded the volcano into the strange, deceptive appearance that it holds even to the present day. Nobody was able to crack its deceptive appearance until the explorer Nathaniel Palmer visited the island in 1820. Palmer decoded that the island actually had a narrow slit where the caldera was filled with floodwater.

Deception Island is really an alias for one of the two active volcanoes in Antarctica. Despite getting counted as one of the South Shetland Islands, this island is bizarrely unique and all the more mysterious than the others. According to Live Science, the 9-mile island is located somewhere in the middle of the Drake Passage, the deadly “iceberg graveyard” that travelers are scared to navigate.

“Deception Island revealed itself to be something of a time capsule of Antarctica's two centuries of human history, holding tales of explorers and whalers, scientists and dreamers. Like a polar Pompeii, it was virtually abandoned overnight with buildings now frozen in a bygone era,” a BBC reporter who visited the island described it in a feature. Given its backstory and cunning deceptive appearance, the island, at first, may seem to be inhospitable and bleak. But when looked closely, it is actually throbbing with life. Dotted with black-sand beaches whose waters are “as warm as afternoon tea,” the island nowadays is visited by tons of travelers who sail on cruise ships to enjoy the warm volcanic mud baths and geothermal jacuzzis.

Colonies of chinstrap penguins, big-nosed elephant seals, and seabirds like pinnipeds, storm petrels, and sheathbills call this island their home. Not to forget that the island also hosts an array of research stations punctuated throughout its territory. It might have been untouchable in the ancient days, but now, it is a photographer’s dreamland, touched only by the somber breeze that rises from the fleet of ships that dock in its harbor and by the subtle stench of gassy bubbles that lift from the swollen bellies of dead whales’ carcasses.