Macquarie Island

Macquarie Island

Macquarie Island, subantarctic island, Tasmania, Australia, lying about 930 miles (1,500 km) southeast of the main island of Tasmania. Macquarie, a volcanic mass with an area of 47 square miles (123 square km) and a general elevation of 800 feet (240 metres), measures 21 by 2 miles (34 by 3 km) and has several rocky islets offshore. Recognized as the only place in the world where rocks from Earth’s mantle are actively exposed above sea level (a result of geologic activity), the island is an exposed portion of the seabed, the Macquarie Ridge, where the Pacific and Indian-Australian plates meet. Earthquakes occur there about once per year. Rounded hills rise some 1,200 to 1,400 feet (365 to 425 metres), and the coast falls steeply away. Although the island is treeless, there are a variety of native vegetation types, including grasses and many species of moss. There are a few small glacial lakes.

The island was sighted in 1810 by Frederick Hasselborough, an Australian sealer, who named it for Lachlan Macquarie, then governor of New South Wales. Hasselborough noted at the time the presence of a wrecked ship “of ancient design,” presumably Polynesian. The island was a centre for seal hunting until 1919. It has no permanent human population, but a meteorologic and geologic research station has been maintained on the island since 1948, and many botanists and biologists have studied the local flora and fauna.

Macquarie was created a nature reserve in 1933, and it was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1997. The island is the only known breeding ground of the royal penguin, one of some 25 bird species that breed there. It has a colony of fur seals, reestablished in 1956 after their near extermination in the 1830s. Albatross and petrels also have breeding grounds on Macquarie. The island’s unusual plant species include an orchid of the genus Nematoceras. Since humans began visiting the island, both the introduction and the eradication of nonnative species have had serious consequences for its ecosystem. Rabbits were taken to the island as a food source in the 1870s but proliferated to the extent that a century later their grazing was destroying the native vegetation. In the late 1970s authorities attempted, as in Australia, to control the rabbit population by introducing the deadly Myxoma virus. This reduced the number of rabbits by about four-fifths by the 1980s, but it deprived the island’s feral cats, another introduced species, of much of their food supply. The cats turned to feeding on native seabirds. A cat-eradication program was carried out from 1985 to 2000, but, without the cats, the rabbit population again exploded. By the early 21st century much of Macquarie’s native vegetation was gone. The national and Tasmanian governments subsequently instituted a more holistic strategy for the simultaneous eradication from Macquarie Island of several interdependent species of nonnative animals.