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That’s a summer beach scene in Antarctica, taken on the shores of the ring-shaped caldera that is Deception Island.

And here’s a video–too short, as are most penguin videos.

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A somewhat longer video focuses on this remote volcanic island’s surprisingly busy human history (there are also some eruption shots from the 1960s):

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So, is anyone keeping an eye on the volcano, whose eruptions in the past have been huge?

Yes, the Spanish and others.

. . . Because the Spanish seismologists spend around three months each year on Deception Island (generally between Late November and late February), which also corresponds to the major period of human activity on the island, they also provide volcanic warnings to the island’s visitors including masters of vessels intending to arrive at the island and pilots of aircraft flying near the island. The warnings are colour-coded and come through bulletins from either Gabriel de Castilla Station (Spain) or from a spokesperson from one of the other national Antarctic programmes such as the Argentine Antarctic Institute, British Antarctic Survey or National Science Foundation.

— from Robert Brears’s interesting overview of the island’s volcanic history.

Per the volcano’s Global Volcanism Program page, observers raised the alert level to yellow for a few days in 2015 because of inscreased seismicity and deformation.

Also, Argentina has a Deception Island Observatory page (Spanish). Here is more observatory information in English.

And here, via Google Translate, is some information from Spain’s University of Cadiz on an earlier volcanic crisis at Deception Island around the turn of the century.

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Featured image: Christopher Michel, CC BY 2.0

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