Ardley Island is an island long, lying in

Maxwell Bay Maxwell Bay is a waterway in Qikiqtaaluk Region, Nunavut, Canada. It lies off the southern coast of Devon Island in the eastern high Arctic. Like Croker Bay to the east, it is an arm of Lancaster Sound and Barrow Strait. Maxwell Bay was named b ...

close off the south-west end of King George Island, in the

South Shetland Islands The South Shetland Islands are a group of Antarctic islands with a total area of . They lie about north of the Antarctic Peninsula, and between southwest of the nearest point of the South Orkney Islands. By the Antarctic Treaty of 1 ...

Antarctica Antarctica () is Earth's southernmost and least-populated continent. Situated almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle and surrounded by the Southern Ocean, it contains the geographic South Pole. Antarctica is the fifth-largest cont ...

. It was charted as a peninsula in 1935 by

Discovery Investigations The Discovery Investigations were a series of scientific cruises and shore-based investigations into the biology of whales in the Southern Ocean. They were funded by the British Colonial Office and organised by the Discovery Committee in London, ...

personnel of the '' Discovery II'' and named for Lieutenant R.A.B. Ardley,

Royal Naval Reserve The Royal Naval Reserve (RNR) is one of the two volunteer reserve forces of the Royal Navy in the United Kingdom. Together with the Royal Marines Reserve, they form the Maritime Reserve. The present RNR was formed by merging the original Ro ...

, an officer on the ship in 1929–31 and 1931–33. Aerial photography has since shown that the feature is an island with Braillard Point being the headland forming the northeast end of Ardley Island. It has been designated an Antarctic Specially Protected Area (ASPA 150) because of the importance of its

seabird Seabirds (also known as marine birds) are birds that are adapted to life within the marine environment. While seabirds vary greatly in lifestyle, behaviour and physiology, they often exhibit striking convergent evolution, as the same enviro ...

colonies In modern parlance, a colony is a territory subject to a form of foreign rule. Though dominated by the foreign colonizers, colonies remain separate from the administration of the original country of the colonizers, the '' metropolitan state'' ...

Gentoo penguins on Ardley Island, Antarctica

Birds

The island has been identified as an Important Bird Area by BirdLife International because it supports a breeding colony of about 4,600 pairs of

gentoo penguin The gentoo penguin ( ) (''Pygoscelis papua'') is a penguin species (or possibly a species complex) in the genus ''Pygoscelis'', most closely related to the Adélie penguin (''P. adeliae'') and the chinstrap penguin (''P. antarcticus''). The ea ...

s, as well as smaller numbers of Adélie and chinstrap penguins, southern giant petrels, Wilson's and black-bellied storm petrels, Cape petrels,

brown Brown is a color. It can be considered a composite color, but it is mainly a darker shade of orange. In the CMYK color model used in printing or painting, brown is usually made by combining the colors orange and black. In the RGB color model us ...

and

south polar skua The south polar skua (''Stercorarius maccormicki'') is a large seabird in the skua family, Stercorariidae. An older name for the bird is MacCormick's skua, after explorer and naval surgeon Robert McCormick, who first collected the type specimen. ...

s, and

Antarctic tern The Antarctic tern (''Sterna vittata'') is a seabird in the family Laridae. It ranges throughout the southern oceans and is found on small islands around Antarctica as well as on the shores of the mainland. Its diet consists primarily of small fis ...

s. A 2016 study examined lake guano sediments and studied penguin population dynamics over 7,000 years. Three of five population growth phases were terminated by a sudden crash, due to volcanic eruptions from the active volcano of

Deception Island Deception Island is an island in the South Shetland Islands close to the Antarctic Peninsula with a large and usually "safe" natural harbor, which is occasionally troubled by the underlying active volcano. This island is the caldera of an acti ...

, 120 km to the southwest.

Research Stations

Ballvé

There are also two Argentinean buildings in the area that make up the Ballvé Refuge, set up in 1953, approximately 50 meters east of Ripamonti I. An Argentinean radio beacon facilitates navigation, looking towards Maxwell Bay (Fildes Bay). All the structures described remain in the area year-round. The scientists come from King George Island for their expeditions

Ripamonti I

There are two Chilean semi-permanent summer-only research shelters. Julio Ripamondi Base, Ripamonti I (62°12’ S; 58°53’ W) was established in 1982.

Ripamonti II

In the northern coast of Ardley, and Ripamonti II (former Alfred Wegener Institute hut, ceded to Chile by Germany in 1997) lies almost 100 metres southwest from Braillard Point on the south-eastern part, inside the penguin breeding colonies.

References