Bouvet Island 247 years after its discovery. The Norwegian Polar Institute established a research station, made of shipping containers, at Nyrøysa in 1996. On 23 February 2006, the island experienced a magnitude 6.2 earthquake whose epicentre was about away, weakening the station's foundation and causing it to be blown to sea during a winter storm. In 2014, a new research station was sent from Tromsø in Norway, via Cape Town, to Bouvet. The new station is designed to house six people for periods of two to four months. In the mid-1980s, Bouvetøya, Jan Mayen, and Svalbard were considered as locations for the
Dassen Island shipwrecked here. Dassen Island Dassen Island is an uninhabited South African island in the Atlantic Ocean. It is situated about west of Yzerfontein and north of Cape Town. The flat and low-lying island measures about long northwest-southeast and wide, with an area of . It is a proclaimed nature reserve. In Dutch "das", the plural being "dassen", is a badger (Meles meles). In Dutch/Afrikaans the word "dassie" means "rock-hyrax" or "rock-badger" and the island is named after the colonies of hyraxes (Procavia capensis) encountered there by the discoverers. Named Ilha Branca ('white island') by the early Portuguese mariners, it was