Simon Winchester

By a curious chance of history the islands at both the northern and southern ends of the eight-thousand-mile long Mid-Atlantic Ridge are possessions of the Kingdom of Norway. Jan Mayen Island, at 71 degrees N, is distinguished mainly for having a spectacular mountain, the 8,000 foot Beerenberg.  By contrast Bouvet Island, at 54 degrees S,  although volcanic also, has no peak worthy of mention and is so amply covered with ice that Captain Cook derided its original discoverer - wrongly - for merely having found a stray iceberg. No-one lives on Bouvet, though an automatic weather station there chatters its data incessantly. On Jan Mayen as many as 35 people are to be found there in summer,  half that number of hardy souls who endure the bitter northern winter.