Macquarie Island

Leaving that world in its own natural state was the most important thing to do here.

Macquarie Island in the Southern Ocean was once an extraordinary ecosystem with seals and penguins and seabirds and unusual sub-Antarctic vegetation.

And then human beings discovered it in the early 19th century and began to settle on the island.

And these settlers introduced cats and rabbits and mice, sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally.

It's halfway between the southern tip of New Zealand and Antarctica.

It's called Macquarie Island.

It's a little tiny speck that humans aren't allowed by law to live on.

There's a research station there that gets visited every so often.

Yeah, sure, sure.

Oh, Macquarie, Macquarie.

Macquarie Island, yeah.

Should write that down.

holy fuck big kitties god damn yeah jesus christ that's a cat i was not even expecting that large of a cat

so failing some kind of breakthrough our best hope is the marsupial prison as i call it um where we basically some of them are just islands like we can we can the science exists with enough investment it's often incredibly expensive to eliminate cats on one island like we've done it in a few places kangaroo island we've eliminated most of the feral species there there are a few other places in macquarie island where we've managed to remove ferals entirely But failing that on the mainland, our best hope is to build a big prison and put the marsupials in it.

That's what we got.

And you have these kind of specially designed fences to prevent cats from climbing them.

Three bases were established.

Macquarie Island served as a scientific station and radio relay.

Commonwealth Bay became the main base under Mawson's leadership.

A western base was established under Frank Wilde.

Oh, and I should mention, it's also covered in penguins.

This is Macquarie Island.

So how does a piece of the Earth's mantle end up as a remote island in the Southern Ocean? What can it tell us about why the inside of our planet is just as important as the outside? And why are there so many penguins here? All the important questions.

I'm James Stewart, and you're watching Astrum Earth.

Welcome to the MRC, or Macquarie Ridge Complex, a 1,500-kilometer-long underwater mountain range sitting at the boundary of the Indo-Australian and Pacific tectonic plates, just south of New Zealand.

It's part of the 40,000-kilometer-long Pacific Ring of Fire, responsible for 90% of the world's earthquakes and home to 75% of our active volcanoes.

Macquarie Island is where the MRC peeks above sea level, but the plates beneath the ocean are really what matters.

To the north is the Puysegur Trench, a six-kilometer-deep submarine valley in the South Tasman Sea.

Physical checks of the handwritten archives confirmed the 1867 entry was wrong.

So the Bureau's been copying and pasting as well across 17 weather stations across this country, ranging from tropical Queensland to sub-Antarctic Macquarie Island.

The audit identified 50 major duplicate block events.

Crucially, 31 of these involved copying a block of temperature readings from one calendar month into a completely different month, artificially injecting warm season biases into cool months or vice versa.

I spoke to Charlotte when the book came out last year.

It turned out the fictional island she was writing about was actually modelled on Macquarie Island.

And Charlotte took a research trip there.

It was this huge adventure, especially with some very precious cargo in tow.

We were gifted with the most amazingly calm weather because it's notoriously rough down there.

It's a two-week voyage.

You make it down to Macquarie Island and pile into a zodiac, an inflatable boat, and head over to this...

this unbelievably dramatic sort of landscape in front of you, mountainous, green, rich, the black sand beach you climb out onto.

We can't support a blank check for political censorship.

Bird flu has been officially detected on Tasmania's Macquarie Island.

The Tasmanian Government has confirmed that samples from a southern elephant seal and a kelp gull on the remote World Heritage-listed island have returned positive results.

The island, around fifteen hundred kilometers southwest of Tasmania, is home to large elephant seal populations, which experts say are particularly susceptible to the H5 strain of bird flu.