{"id":897,"date":"2016-07-19T05:36:25","date_gmt":"2016-07-19T05:36:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adventuretours.com.au\/australia-outback-yarns\/?p=897"},"modified":"2019-03-12T14:54:35","modified_gmt":"2019-03-12T03:54:35","slug":"australia-just-got-17-brand-new-islands-antarctica","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adventuretours.com.au\/australia-outback-yarns\/australia-just-got-17-brand-new-islands-antarctica\/","title":{"rendered":"Australia just got 17 brand new islands&#8230;in Antarctica"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Nice job, Australian Antarctic Division. Not only do you protect our fair shores from an invasion of tiny penguins and harvest the precious ice with which we cool our drinks, now you have expanded our national borders too, probably with much flag-planting and while striking many noble attitudes.<\/p>\n<p>Yep, you read it right, Australia now officially has 17 brand-spanking new islands. And they&#8217;re all in Antarctica.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_900\" style=\"width: 810px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-900\" class=\"wp-image-900 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/www.adventuretours.com.au\/australia-outback-yarns\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Antarctica-Tak.jpg\" alt=\"Antarctica---Tak\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.adventuretours.com.au\/australia-outback-yarns\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Antarctica-Tak.jpg 800w, https:\/\/www.adventuretours.com.au\/australia-outback-yarns\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Antarctica-Tak-700x394.jpg 700w, https:\/\/www.adventuretours.com.au\/australia-outback-yarns\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Antarctica-Tak-585x329.jpg 585w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-900\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">And you say it was unclaimed? No way! Image c\/o Tak, Flickr<\/p><\/div>\n<p>The new islands are technically already within the Australian Antarctic Territory, a section of the continent that was placed under our <del>authority<\/del> iron-fisted rule way back in 1933. But hey, we&#8217;re still claiming it. The Aussie part of Antarctica is actually already the biggest territory on the continent to be claimed by any one country. The 17 new islands\u00a0upon which we&#8217;ve staked our claim now make a grand total of 2443 official locations stretching over 5.9 million square miles. And they&#8217;re ours, all ours.<\/p>\n<p>As with anything that&#8217;s newly discovered, discussion quickly turned to naming them. Mostly because people like naming things, but also because having 17 very small and very remote icebergs floating around with names like Iceberg #5\u00a0would make people terribly\u00a0uncomfortable. The job was given to the Australian Antarctic Division&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/Seventeen islands and 11 geographical features were christened this week \u2013 the important task of naming the islands was given to the Australian Antarctic Division\u2019s Place Names Committee, who surprisingly didn\u2019t seize the opportunity to name them all Island McIslandface. \u00af\\_(\u30c4)_\/\u00af Instead, the committee, who meet roughly once a year, decided to consider names submitted by scientists and explorers who have visited the area. Many of the islands have been named because of their resemblance to other things \u2013 like the Rhino, Dagger and Crocodile Islands \u2013 and some have been named due to history, geological form or positioning.\">Place Name Committee<\/a>, which is indeed a real thing. Here is a list of some of the names given to our new island brethren:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Dagger Island<\/strong> \u2013 a bit aggressive<\/li>\n<li><strong>Crocodile Island<\/strong> \u2013 Ice Crocodiles, nature&#8217;s most\u00a0deadly predator<\/li>\n<li><strong>The Cauldron<\/strong> \u2013 this one sounds awesome<\/li>\n<li><strong>Uranus<\/strong> \u2013 because scientists like a joke as much as the next person<\/li>\n<li><strong>Complexity Head<\/strong> \u2013 sounds a bit like a bad Channel 7 game show<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>We, for our part, welcome the new islands into the Commonwealth and promise to visit them next time they move much, much closer to anything not resembling a polar wasteland.<\/p>\n<p><em>Feature image c\/o NASA Goddard Space Flight, Flickr\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nice job, Australian Antarctic Division. Not only do you protect our fair shores from an invasion of tiny penguins and harvest the precious ice with which we cool our drinks,&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":898,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[219,221,126,220],"class_list":["post-897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-antarctica","tag-islands","tag-news","tag-polar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adventuretours.com.au\/australia-outback-yarns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adventuretours.com.au\/australia-outback-yarns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adventuretours.com.au\/australia-outback-yarns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adventuretours.com.au\/australia-outback-yarns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adventuretours.com.au\/australia-outback-yarns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=897"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.adventuretours.com.au\/australia-outback-yarns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1685,"href":"https:\/\/www.adventuretours.com.au\/australia-outback-yarns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897\/revisions\/1685"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adventuretours.com.au\/australia-outback-yarns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adventuretours.com.au\/australia-outback-yarns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adventuretours.com.au\/australia-outback-yarns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adventuretours.com.au\/australia-outback-yarns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}