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Livingston Island (historical Russian name ''Smolensk'', ) is an Antarctic island in the South Shetland Islands, Western Antarctica lying between Greenwich Island and Snow Islands. This island was the first land discovered south of 60° south latitude in 1819, and the name Livingston, although of unknown derivation, has been well established in international usage since the early 1820s. ==Geography== Livingston is situated in the Southern Ocean to the northwest of Cape Roquemaurel on the Antarctic mainland, to the south-southeast of Cape Horn in South America, to the southeast of the Diego Ramirez Islands (the southernmost land of South America), due south of the Falkland Islands, to the southwest of South Georgia Islands, and from the South Pole.〔 The island is part of the South Shetlands archipelago, an islands chain extending in east-northeast to west-southwest direction, and separated from the nearby Antarctic Peninsula by Bransfield Strait, and from South America by the Drake Passage. The South Shetlands cover a total land area of comprising (from east to west) Clarence Island, Elephant Island, King George Island, Nelson Island, Robert Island, Greenwich Island, Livingston Island, Deception Island, Snow Island, Low Island and Smith Island, as well as numerous smaller islets and rocks. Livingston is separated from the neighbouring Greenwich Island to the east, Deception Island to the south and Snow Island to the west-southwest by McFarlane Strait, Smolensk Strait and Morton Strait respectively. Deception Island, located barely southwest of Livingston’s Barnard Point in the Bransfield Strait, is a volcano whose caldera forms the sheltered harbour of Port Foster entered by a single 540 m wide passage known as Neptune's Bellows.〔 The island extends from Start Point in the west to Renier Point in the east, its width varying from at the neck between South Bay and Hero Bay to between Botev Point to the south and Williams Point to the north, with surface area of .〔L.L. Ivanov. Antarctica: Livingston Island and Greenwich, Robert, Snow and Smith Islands. Scale 1:120000 topographic map. Troyan: Manfred Wörner Foundation, 2010. ISBN 978-954-92032-9-5 (First edition 2009. ISBN 978-954-92032-6-4)〕〔Ivanov, L. and N. Ivanova. Livingston Island. In: ''Antarctic: Nature, History, Utilization, Geographic Names and Bulgarian Participation''. Sofia: Manfred Wörner Foundation, 2014. pp. 16–20. (in Bulgarian) ISBN 978-619-90008-1-6 ((Second revised and updated edition ), 2014. 411 pp. ISBN 978-619-90008-2-3)〕 There are many islets and rocks in the surrounding waters, particularly off the north coast. More sizable among the adjacent smaller islands are Rugged Island off Byers Peninsula (which also contain a small freshwater lake named Basalt Lake), Half Moon Island in Moon Bay, Desolation Island in Hero Bay and Zed Islands to the north. Ice cliffs, often withdrawing during recent decades to uncover new coves, beaches and points, form most of the coastline. Except for isolated patches, the land surface is covered by an ice cap, highly crevassed in certain segments, with ice domes and plateaus in the central and western areas, and a number of valley glaciers formed by the more mountainous relief of eastern Livingston. Typical of the island’s glaciology are the conspicuous ash layers originating from volcanic activity on the neighbouring Deception Island.〔López Martínez, J., Ed. 1992. ''Geología de la Antártida Occidental''. Simposios T3. Salamanca: III Congreso Geológico de España y VIII Congreso Latinoamericano de Geología. 358 p.〕 Apart from the extensive Byers Peninsula () forming the west extremity of Livingston, the ice-free part of the island includes certain coastal areas at Cape Shirreff, Siddins Point, Hannah Point, Williams Point, Hurd Peninsula and Rozhen Peninsula, as well as slopes in the mountain ranges, and ridges and heights in eastern Livingston that are too precipitous to keep snow. The principal mountain formations include Tangra Mountains ( long, with Mt Friesland rising to ), Bowles Ridge (, elevation ), Vidin Heights (, ), Burdick Ridge (), Melnik Ridge () and Pliska Ridge () in the eastern part of the island, and Oryahovo Heights (, ), and Dospey Heights (, ).〔 The coastline of the island is irregular, with the more significant indentations of South Bay, False Bay, Moon Bay, Hero, Barclay, New Plymouth, Osogovo and Walker, and the peninsulas of Hurd (extension ), Rozhen (), Burgas (), Varna (), Ioannes Paulus II () and Byers ().〔 The local variety of the Antarctic Peninsula weather is particularly changeable, windy, humid and sunless. Says Australian mountaineer Damien Gildea: ‘Livingston got just about the worst weather in the world’. Whiteouts are common, and blizzards can occur at any time of the year. Temperatures are rather constant, rarely exceeding in summer or falling below in winter, with wind chill temperatures up to lower. Below are the average temperatures of the warmest month, coldest month, yearly average, and the average annual rainfall of Livingston Island.〔Labajo, A. 2008. (Updated Information on Spain’s Antarctic and Sub-Antarctic “Weather-Forecasting” Interests. ) For ''The International Antarctic Weather Forecasting Handbook'': IPY 2007-08 Supplement.〕 ==History== (詳細はAntarctica, and that land happened to be Livingston Island. Captain William Smith in the English merchant brig ''Williams'', while sailing to Valparaiso during 1819 deviated from his route south of Cape Horn, and on 19 February sighted the northeast extremity of Livingston, Williams Point. That was the first land ever discovered south of 60° south latitude, in the present Antarctic Treaty area.〔Headland, R. 2009. ''A Chronology of Antarctic Exploration: A Synopsis of Events and Activities From the Earliest Times Until the International Polar Years, 2007-09''. London: Bernard Quaritch. 722 pp.〕 A few months later Smith revisited the South Shetlands to land on King George Island on 16 October 1819 and claim possession for Britain. In the meantime, a Spanish vessel had been damaged by severe weather in the Drake Passage and sunk off the north coast of Livingston in September 1819. The 74-gun ship ''San Telmo'' commanded by Captain Rosendo Porlier was the flagship of a Spanish naval squadron. The more than 600 persons killed when the ''San Telmo'' sank were the first recorded people to die in Antarctica. While no one survived, parts of her wreckage were found subsequently by sealers on Half Moon Beach, Cape Shirreff.〔 During December 1819 William Smith returned with his ship to the South Shetlands. This time he was chartered by Captain William Shirreff, British commanding officer in the Pacific stationed in Chile, and accompanied by Lieutenant Edward Bransfield who was tasked to survey and map the new lands. On 30 January 1820 they sighted the mountains of the Antarctic Peninsula, unaware that three days earlier the continent had already been discovered by the Russian Antarctic expedition of Fabian Gottlieb Thaddeus von Bellingshausen and Mihail Lazarev. One year later, the Russians had circumnavigated Antarctica and arrived in the South Shetlands region during January 1821 to find over 50 American and English sealing vessels and 1000 men taking hundreds of thousands of fur seal skins. While sailing between Deception Island and Livingston (named Smolensk by the Russians) Bellingshausen met the American Captain Nathaniel Palmer, yet another pioneer of Antarctic exploration who is alleged to have sighted the mainland himself during the previous November. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Livingston Island」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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