Commandante Ferraz Station King George Island

Brazil’s Commandante Ferraz Station on Admiralty Bay, opened in 1983–84, is located between an old whaling station and the site of the abandoned British Base G (removed in 1996). Ferraz’s distinctive orange-roofed, pine-green buildings accommodated 66 people, but a fire started by an overflowing fuel tank in 2012 killed two people and gutted the station. In 2017 the Brazilian government began building a new US$100-million base, with a projected completion date of 2018. Mt Cross lies behind the station, and a small cemetery contains several graves and memorials. Circumnavigate the sensitive bed of lichens nearby, whose boundaries are marked in stone. Also nearby is a composite whale ‘skeleton’ on a moss bed, which contains the bones of no fewer than nine whale species.