8 of the World’s Most-Remote Islands

The Kerguelen Islands are a group of windswept Indian Ocean islands filled with glaciers, mountains, rocky outcrops, and vast plains of tussock grasses and mosses. With a daily mean temperature ranging from 2.1 to 8.2 ⁰C (35.8 to 46.8 ⁰F), the Kerguelen Islands are not the first choice for human settlement, but the islands are a haven for seals, albatrosses, terns, and four species of penguins.

With an area of 39,044 square km (15,075 square miles), Spitsbergen is the largest island of the Svalbard archipelago, and it is also Norway’s largest island. Given its location some 830 km (about 516 miles) east of the coast of Greenland and about 950 km (about 590 miles) north of the coast of Europe, it is no surprise that the island is covered in snow and ice and harbors a sizable population of polar bears. The island’s main settlement is Longyear city, or Longyearbyen, which sits less than 3.2 km (2 miles) away from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault—a secure facility built into the side of a mountain intended to safeguard the seeds of the world’s food plants in the event of a global crisis.

This small volcanic island in the South Pacific—the only inhabited island of the British overseas territory of Pitcairn, Henderson, Ducie, and Oeno islands—is probably best known as the haven of the mutineers of the British ship HMS Bounty, who settled there in 1790. Today Pitcairn Island is at the center of one of the world’s largest marine reserves, a vast 830,000-square-km (322,000-square-mile) region of open ocean larger than the U.S. state of Texas.

Two large Arctic islands and a handful of smaller islands constitute Novaya Zemlya (“New Land”), a Russian-administered archipelago separating the Barents and Kara seas along Russia’s northwestern coast. The two main islands, Severny (northern) and Yuzhny (southern), are aligned for 600 miles (1,000 km) in a southwest-northeast direction and are separated by a narrow strait, Matochkin Shar, which is only about 1 to 1.5 miles (1.6 to 2.4 km) wide. During the Cold War, Novaya Zemlya was the site of more than 100 nuclear tests between 1954 and 1990.

The British overseas territory of St. Helena, Ascension, and Tristan da Cunha is made up of isolated islands. Tristan da Cunha, the southernmost inhabited island in the territory (along with a wildlife reserve made up of Inaccessible, Nightingale, Middle, Gough, and Stoltenhoff islands), is located approximately 2,100 km (1,300 miles) to the south of St. Helena, the nearest inhabited landmass. Tristan da Cunha itself is roughly circular, with a coastline of 21 miles (34 km) and a central volcanic cone (with a height of 2,060 meters [6,760 feet]) that is usually cloud-covered.

Easter Island, Rapa Nui (“Great Rapa”), and Te Pito te Henua (“Navel of the World”) are names for a small triangular volcanic island in the South Pacific. Located 2,088 km (roughly 1,300 miles) from Pitcairn Island and 3,767 km (2,340 miles) from Santiago, Chile, the government that administers it, Easter Island may be the most-isolated place on the planet. This 163-square-km (63-square-mile) island is famous for its gigantic stone statues—the enigmatic moai—of which there are more than 600, and for the ruins of giant stone platforms (ahus) with open courtyards on their landward sides, some of which show masterly construction.

The island of South Georgia, which is part of the British overseas territory of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, resides in the Atlantic portion of the Southern Ocean, about 1,450 km (900 mi) east of the Falkland Islands and 4,790 km (2,976 miles) west of Cape Town, South Africa. Although the island and its nearby waters abound with animal life, human settlers on the island are few. A small number of scientists and support personnel maintain British Antarctic Survey stations at Grytviken on King Edward Point and at Bird Island, off the northwestern tip of the island, and constitute the island’s only inhabitants. The island periodically served as a base for whaling and scientific expeditions during the 19th century, but it is best known as the site of the final leg of the arduous journey made by British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, who first crossed South Georgia Island in 1916 while in search of aid for his ill-fated trans-Antarctic expedition.

Diego Garcia is a curious v-shaped coral atoll in the center of the Indian Ocean. The island is the largest and southernmost member of the Chagos Archipelago, which is part of the British Indian Ocean Territory. The island serves as a massive air and naval support base for the United States and British militaries, owing to its strategic location between East Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Australia. (While there certainly is a lot of activity on this island, one could argue that Diego Garcia’s quasi-secretive military purpose justifies its inclusion in this list.) The island was once home to more than 1,000 islanders, who were removed from Diego Garcia in 1971 to make way for the island’s militarization and resettled to Mauritius and the Seychelles. These islanders and their descendants continue to sue for the right to return home.