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
Thompson Island (South Atlantic) Thompson Island (South Atlantic) Thompson Island was a phantom island in the South Atlantic. According to the Global Volcanism Program, it was thought to be about north-northeast of Bouvet Island, a small Norwegian dependency between South Africa and Antarctica. The island was first reported and named by whaling ship captain George Norris in 1825. The last reported sighting was in 1893. When, however, the German survey ship "Valdivia" fixed the position of Bouvet in 1898, it then looked for Thompson, but did not find it. If Thompson ever existed, it is probable that it disappeared in a volcanic eruption sometime