A Sea of Spinning Clouds

Over the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica, winds can whip around the globe relatively unimpeded by land. Intrepid sailors termed these southern latitudes the Roaring Forties, Furious Fifties, and Screaming Sixties on account of the strong prevailing winds.

When those winds encounter a barrier like an island, the disruption in airflow can be beautiful. One impediment, shown here, is remote Peter I Island. This ice-cloaked volcano lies at 68.86 degrees south latitude in the Bellingshausen Sea, some 400 kilometers (250 miles) off the coast of West Antarctica and more than 1,800 kilometers (1,100 miles) from Cape Horn, Chile.

On an austral summer day in 2026, the Landsat 8 satellite captured this image of von Kármán vortex streets downwind of the island. These counterrotating spirals form as flowing air is deflected, slows, and spins into eddies. A stiff, but perhaps not quite “screaming,” wind was likely blowing that day. Wind speeds typically need to be 18 to 54 kilometers (11 to 34 miles) per hour for vortices to form. With stronger gales, the eddies cannot maintain their shape. The following day, vortex streets appeared within a complex array of cloud types near the island.

Where the clouds parted around the island, some of its icy edifice became visible to the satellite. A 100-meter-wide circular crater sits at its summit, 1,640 meters (5,380 feet) above sea level. The Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program describes the island as a “shield-like volcano,” but there are no records of recent eruptions.

Scientific research on Peter I Island has been limited due to its remote location and the challenging ice conditions surrounding it. The island was discovered in 1821 by the Russian explorer Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and named for a tsar, but no one landed on it until 1929. The relatively few studies since have focused on geology, biodiversity, and the climate history recorded in its ice.

NASA surveyed the island during an Operation IceBridge campaign in 2011. This airborne science mission collected a suite of measurements over Earth’s polar ice in the period between the ICESat and ICESat-2 satellite missions to sustain the record of observations in these regions. While NASA’s DC-8 aircraft flew back to Chile from Antarctica, where teams spent the day measuring the Getz Ice Shelf and Thwaites Glacier from the air, the crew on board caught a rare glimpse (above) of the remote island.

NASA Earth Observatory image by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Photo courtesy of Christopher Shuman, UMBC (retired). Story by Lindsey Doermann.

References & Resources

• Jackson, M., et al. (2025) The Biodiversity of Peter I Island—The Most Remote Island in the World. Ecology and Evolution, 15(11), e71634.
• NASA Science, IceBridge. Accessed May 6, 2026.
• On Thin Ice (2011, November 4) The fragile fringe of West Antarctica. Accessed May 6, 2026.
• Smithsonian Institution Global Volcanism Program, Peter I Island. Accessed May 6, 2026.
• Thomas, E. R., et al. (2024) The first firn core from Peter I Island – capturing climate variability across the Bellingshausen Sea. Climate of the Past, 20(11), 2525–2538.