South Sandwich Islands

Declared part of the British territory's nature reserve in 2012, the South Sandwich Islands form a chain of eleven active volcanic islands, extremely remote even by subantarctic standards, among them Mount Michael on Saunders Island, with a permanent lava lake in its crater, and Mount Curry on Zavodovski Island, which erupted in a documented event in 2016. Despite their hostile volcanic origin, they support one of the largest chinstrap penguin colonies on the planet, estimated at several million birds spread across the archipelago.