Heard Island and McDonald Islands-CIA WFB Map

Elephant Spit is a 9 km long sand spit at the eastern end of subantarctic Heard Island, in the

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...

n territory of Heard Island and McDonald Islands, lying in the Southern Ocean on the Kerguelen Plateau about 450 km south-east of the

Kerguelen Islands The Kerguelen Islands ( or ; in French commonly ' but officially ', ), also known as the Desolation Islands (' in French), are a group of islands in the sub-Antarctic constituting one of the two exposed parts of the Kerguelen Plateau, a large ...

. The name refers to southern elephant seals, also known as sea elephants, which breed in large numbers on Heard Island and formed the basis for commercial sealing for oil there during the 19th century.

Description

Elephant Spit is long, thin, straight and conspicuous, giving the island a distinctive shape as seen from space. It borders Spit Bay to the north and west and is formed of sediments derived from the glacial erosion of volcanic material from eruptions by

Big Ben Big Ben is the nickname for the Great Bell of the Great Clock of Westminster, at the north end of the Palace of Westminster in London, England, and the name is frequently extended to refer also to the clock and the clock tower. The officia ...

which have made the seabed south-east of the island relatively shallow. Heard Island is isolated, uninhabited and rarely visited. When the island was visited in 2002 and 2003 by scientists from the Australian Antarctic Division, the spit was intact. However, a following visit in late 2008 found that a section of the eastern end of the spit had become inundated by the ocean, forming a 2-km-long island.

References

External links

Map of Heard Island’s proposed Ramsar wetland areas, including Elephant Spit
Landforms of Heard Island and McDonald Islands Spits of Antarctica {{Subantarctic-geo-stub