Île Amsterdam
— — a green island the sea forgot to take back.
Not only on a wall.
“A volcanic speck of green a thousand kilometres from any other land, holding a tiny French research base and the last breeding colony of the Amsterdam albatross. The cliffs come straight up out of the Southern Ocean. The wind never quite stops. A handful of scientists overwinter at Martin-de-Viviès each year, counting birds and watching the weather come across an empty sea. There is no harbour, no airstrip, no visitors. The supply ship from Réunion comes four times a year, and otherwise the island belongs to the albatross.
Île Amsterdam, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Île Amsterdam is a volcanic island of about 55 square kilometres in the southern Indian Ocean, roughly equidistant from Madagascar, Australia, and Antarctica. It is part of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands (TAAF), administered from Saint-Pierre on Réunion. The high point is the Mont de la Dives caldera rim at 867 metres. The Martin-de-Viviès base, established in 1949, is the only permanent settlement, staffed year-round by around twenty-five researchers and technicians. The whole island sits inside one of the largest marine protected areas on earth.
There is no tourism here, no airstrip, no village. The Marion Dufresne supply ship calls roughly four times a year out of Réunion, three thousand kilometres to the north. Between calls the island is held by westerly winds that average over thirty kilometres an hour and a low ceiling of cloud that the locals call the casquette. The radio room at Martin-de-Viviès is the closest thing to a town square. The rest is grass, basalt, and the long quiet that surrounds every austral outpost.
The cliffs of the Entrecasteaux coast on the south side fall almost vertically four hundred metres to the sea, and hold the last breeding population of the Amsterdam albatross, a species reduced to a few dozen pairs by the 1980s and slowly recovering under TAAF protection. Subantarctic fur seals haul out on the western beaches; southern right whales pass offshore in winter. The waters around the island became part of the Réserve naturelle nationale des Terres australes françaises in 2006 and a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2019.