I had the great privilege of travelling to the Antarctic peninsula in december 2012 and visited Port Lockroy which is located
at 64°49’ S 60°30’ W.It is a natural harbour on north-west shore of Wiencke Island in Palmer Archipelago of the British Antarctic Territory. It was discovered in 1904 and named after Edouard Lockroy, a French politician and Vice President of the Chamber of Deputies, who assisted Jean-Baptiste Charcot in obtaining government support for his French Antarctic Expedition. The harbour was used for whaling between 1911 and 1931. During World War II the British military operation Tabarin established the Port Lockroy base (Station A) on the tiny Goudier Island in the bay, which continued to operate as a British research station until 1962.
During Operation Tabarin in 1941, the British set up two bases in the Peninsula area to keep an eye on enemy shipping and destroy old fuel dumps. They chose Port Lockroy as an important anchorage and imaginatively named their base “A”. Its counterpart, the equally imaginative Base B, was built at Whalers Bay, Deception Island.
This photograph shows how immense Antarctica and nature is and how tiny and vulnerable are the human bases-which you can spot in the foreground
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