On February 2, 1775, during Captain James Cook’s second Pacific voyage, the explorer laid eyes on two rugged volcanic islands in the South Atlantic Ocean. He named the larger one after the Christian holiday Candlemas, the day of its discovery. The smaller one later gained the moniker Vindication, after a 1930 expedition vindicated Cook’s original, though doubted, report that two closely spaced islands existed there.
The specks of land are part of the South Sandwich Islands—a chain so far-flung that one would have to sail more than 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) to reach them from South America or Antarctica. The area is as cloudy as it is remote. This image, acquired with the OLI-2 (Operational Land Imager-2) on Landsat 9 on November 18, 2022, is one of the clearest captured by any Landsat satellite in the past decade. Neighboring Candlemas and Vindication islands appear amid icy waters, their volcanic foundations heavily eroded by snow, ice, and the fitful South Atlantic.
The oddly shaped Candlemas Island initially formed as two separate islands, estimated to have merged several hundred years ago. The larger, southeastern portion is much older and consists of an eroded stratovolcano draped in glacial ice. The northwestern part of the island contains lava flows radiating from cinder cones such as Lucifer Hill. Reports from 1823 and 1911 described dark brown clouds and white steam erupting from this volcanic dome, while sporadic reports throughout the 20th century noted other volcanic activity.
Vindication Island was als …