Heard & McDonald Islands

Heard Island and the McDonald Islands are about as close as the map gets to nowhere — a pair of ice-covered, volcanic specks in the Southern Ocean, roughly two-thirds of the way from Africa to Antarctica. Heard Island's Big Ben volcano is still active beneath its glaciers, and the McDonald Islands only became visibly volcanic in the 1990s after millennia of dormancy. No one lives here and there is no infrastructure of any kind; the only visitors are occasional scientific expeditions studying seabirds, seals, and one of the most pristine ecosystems left on Earth.