The zodiac nudges onto obsidian sand, and you feel heat rising through your boots—an unsettling sensation this far south. Fumarole Bay occupies a crescent inside Deception Island's collapsed caldera, where the volcano's restless core warms pockets of shoreline to temperatures that fog your sunglasses. Penguins patrol the tide line, indifferent to the steam vents hissing a few meters upslope, while rust-stained cliffs frame the bay in tones of burnt sienna and charcoal.
“The only beach on Earth where you can bathe in geothermally heated Antarctic waters while penguins nest on volcanically warmed sand.”
White cliffs over a desert beach
You can dig a shallow pool in the sand and watch seawater mix with geothermal runoff, creating a makeshift hot tub where the temperature swings wildly with each wave. The beach smells faintly of rotten eggs—hydrogen sulfide from the vents—and the sand crunches underfoot, a mix of volcanic glass and pulverized basalt. Whalers' oil drums corrode slowly near the waterline, relics from the station abandoned after the 1969 eruption.
Visiting requires an expedition cruise during the brief Antarctic summer, typically December through February. You'll have perhaps ninety minutes ashore, enough time to test the thermal pools, photograph the colony of chinstraps nesting on the upper beach, and absorb the strangeness of standing where fire and ice negotiate an uneasy truce. The bay's warmth is localized and fickle; step two meters in the wrong direction and you're back in polar seas that numb skin in seconds.
