The station is administrated by the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Directorate: Antarctica and Islands. Although Gough Island is a British possession the land the station is built on is leased to South Africa on contract and is treated as part of the magisterial district of Cape Town.
The position
Gough Island is a volcanic island in the central South Atlantic Ocean, about 2700 km (1700 miles) south south-west from Cape Town and over 3200 km (2000 miles) from the nearest point of South America. It lies at latitude 40° 20' South and longitude 9° 54' West. Two hundred and thirty miles north north-east are the three islands of Tristan da Cunha, Inaccessible and Nightingale and Gough is best thought of as an outlying member of the Tristan group.
All four islands rise from the Mid Atlantic Ridge, which is a submarine
mountain range running down the centre of the Atlantic, roughly equidistant
between the Americas and Africa and Europe. Most of the ridge is covered
by water between 12,000 and 6,000 feet in depth, but the mountain masses
of Iceland, the Azores, St. Paul's Rocks, Ascension, the Tristan-Gough
group and Bouvetøya have built up sufficiently vast volcanic cones
to break the surface.
The origin
Nightingale Island, the smallest of the four Tristan-Gough islands, is also the oldest and it contains rocks that have been dated as up to 18 million years old. Inaccessible Island, the next smallest has rocks up to 8 million years old, while Gough Island, considerably larger, has no rocks known to exceed 6 million years in age. The high conical island of Tristan da Cunha itself, the only member of the group with the shape of a typical text-book volcano, has no rocks dated at over one million years, and is the only island known to have erupted within recent times.Gough Island has had a long and complicated volcanic history. Five major phases of activity have left distinctive rock masses. Numerous different centres helped to build up the land mass that now exists, and some of them continued activity into comparatively recent tines; the most recent minor eruption probably took place about 2300 years ago. No activity has been recorded since men began to visit the island.
A lost neighbour
Thompson Island was reportedly last seen in 1893 about 70 km north north-east of Bouvet Island and was gone in 1898, possibly as a result of an undetected volcanic eruption. The exact location of the former island and the confirmation of the existence of a submarine volcano awaits more detailed bathymetry. The Global Volcanism Program has more information on this and other volcanos around the world.
