Rothschild Island

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The Rothschild Island (English Rothschild Iceland ) is a largely ice-covered island in the Antarctic. It lies about 80 km east of Charcot Island and 8 km west of the northern part of Alexander Island. The oblong island is about 39 km long and is crossed by the west-north west to east-southeast of the Desko Mountains, reaching the peak in Enigma 1000 meters altitude.

The island is located in the Bellingshausen Sea, which is covered in large parts of ice all year; the Wilkins Ice Shelf closes south of the island. The ice cover in this area of ​​the Bellingshausen Sea increased in the last decades, however, decreases significantly.

The mountains of the island were spotted in January 1821 from a distance of the expedition Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen Stockhausen. 1909 sighted Jean -Baptiste Charcot Island on his second Antarctic expedition again. He named it after the banker Édouard Alphonse James de Rothschild (1868-1949), a member of the Rothschild family. The island was first visited in 1976, when a team from the British Antarctic Survey was flown to build a topographic station. BW Care spent here in the austral summer 1976/77 five weeks with geological investigations.