Bouvet Island Is the Loneliest Place on Earth, and a Soviet Lifeboat Once Showed Up on It

Bouvet Island is the loneliest piece of permanent land in the oceans. It is a 49-square-kilometer subantarctic island in the South Atlantic at 54°25′S, 3°22′E, with no permanent population and almost no shoreline that isn't ice cliff. Approximately 93 percent of its surface is glaciated. The nearest land is the uninhabited coast of Queen Maud Land in Antarctica, 1,700 kilometers south. The nearest inhabited speck is Tristan da Cunha, 2,260 kilometers north. South Africa, the nearest mainland, is over 2,500 kilometers away. The French explorer Jean-Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier sighted the island on January 1, 1739, and was so confused by his own sextant readings that no one was able to relocate the place for almost a century.

Norway claimed it in 1927, and it formally became a Norwegian dependency on February 27, 1930. The dependency status hasn't given the place much to do. There are no buildings except a small unmanned automated weather station, occasional Norwegian scientific expeditions arriving by helicopter from supply ships, and a brief 1979 South African Air Force scientific party. The internet country code domain .bv was assigned to Bouvet by IANA on August 21, 1997, and has, to date, never been used to register a single domain name.

The island's strangest story is the lifeboat. In April 1964, a British scientific landing party investigating a small ice-free lagoon on the eastern side of the island found a wooden lifeboat sitting in the lagoon, in good condition, with paddles, a copper tank, and supplies of food. There were no human remains and no markings on the boat that immediately identified its origin. A 1978 reanalysis suggested the lifeboat had probably belonged to a Soviet research vessel, the Slava, that had passed through the area in the 1950s. No one has ever fully accounted for it.