There’s a tiny island in the Southern Ocean where beaches are packed with penguins, elephant seals lounge in the surf, and the ground beneath your feet once sat miles below the seafloor. And yet somehow, that’s not even the strangest part.
Welcome to Macquarie Island, a 21-mile-long sliver of Australian territory approximately 930 miles southeast of Tasmania, halfway to Antarctica.
In an insightful and fascinating new Astrum Earth video, narrator James Stewart calls it “a tiny island that shouldn’t exist.” Check it out below.
The reason? You can walk on rocks from Earth’s mantle.
“You don’t need to drill to find the mantle,” Stewart explains, because those rocks are already at your feet.
According to UNESCO, Macquarie is the only place where mantle rocks are being actively exposed above sea level. Typically buried roughly four miles beneath the ocean floor, these ancient formations were pushed upward as the Indo-Australian and Pacific tectonic plates squeezed together.
It’s not a volcano, either. Instead, the uplift has exposed ancient seafloor lava alongside rocks formed deep inside the planet.
UNESCO calls the setting an “outstanding spectacle of wild, natural beauty.”
Set in the aptly named “Furious Fifties,” the island gets hammered by relentless Southern Ocean winds and storms. Sheer green cliffs rise over boggy coastal terraces, while a plateau dotted with lakes disappears into mist.
Related: Could the World’s Biggest Wave Be Hiding at the Most Remote Island on Earth?
Then come the animals.
Tasmania’s Parks and Wildlife Service estimates around 3.5 million seabirds visit annually to breed or moult, most of them penguins. UNESCO lists more than 850,000 breeding pairs of royal penguins, found nowhere else outside the island and nearby islets, along with enormous king penguin colonies.
Add roughly 80,000 elephant seals, nesting albatrosses, fur seals, and passing orcas, and the shoreline becomes an extraordinary wildlife spectacle.
It’s also a place with a dark human history. Sealers slaughtered wildlife for oil, while introduced rabbits and rodents devastated its vegetation. A massive eradication campaign eventually removed the invasive mammals, allowing the ecosystem to recover.
Recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997, Macquarie remains protected, with visits requiring permission.
Forget tropical perfection. This place is wild, beautiful, and almost unbelievable.
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