Eagle Island is one of several islands around the peninsula known as

Graham Land Graham Land is the portion of the Antarctic Peninsula that lies north of a line joining Cape Jeremy and Cape Agassiz. This description of Graham Land is consistent with the 1964 agreement between the British Antarctic Place-names Committee an ...

, which is closer to

South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere at the northern tip of the continent. It can also be described as the sout ...

than any other part of that

continent A continent is any of several large landmasses. Generally identified by convention rather than any strict criteria, up to seven geographical regions In geography, regions, otherwise referred to as zones, lands or territories, are areas t ...

. It is an island in the continent of

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 ...

, separated from the Antarctic mainland by the 1.77 km wide

Aripleri Passage Aripleri Passage ( bg, Проток Ариплери, Protok Aripleri \'pro-tok a-ri-'ple-ri\) is the 1.77 km wide passage between Eagle Island and Yatrus Promontory on the south coast of Trinity Peninsula in Graham Land, Antarctica. The passa ...

. It is volcanic in origin, having been K-Ar dated 1.7 ± 0.2 and 2.0 ± 0.2 million years old. It forms part of the

James Ross Island Volcanic Group The James Ross Island Volcanic Group is a stratigraphic unit of Cenozoic age distributed on James Ross Island and Vega Island of the James Ross Island group, the Tabarin and Trinity peninsulas of Graham Land and surrounding islands in the Princ ...

. During the Southern Hemisphere summer of 2019-2020 three melting events occurred on Trinity peninsula, in November 2019, January 2020, and particularly February 6- February 11, 2020, during which 106 millimeters of snow melted, forming

melt pond Melt ponds are pools of open water that form on sea ice in the warmer months of spring and summer. The ponds are also found on glacial ice and ice shelves. Ponds of melted water can also develop under the ice. Melt ponds are usually darker th ...

s on Eagle Island. The nine day heatwave in early February 2020 melted about 20% of the island's snow cover.

Map

Trinity Peninsula.
Scale 1:250000 topographic map No. 5697. Institut für Angewandte Geodäsie and British Antarctic Survey, 1996.

References

Islands of Trinity Peninsula Volcanic islands Pleistocene volcanoes {{TrinityPeninsula-geo-stub

Map

See also

References