What If You Were Stranded on the World's Most Remote Island?

this video is made possible by micro center get a free 128 gigabyte flash drive and 128 gigabyte micro sd card when you follow the link down in the description below if you're watching this video and you live in a city it might be hard to grasp how utterly remote the world's most remote island actually is let me put it this way there are nearly 8 billion people living their lives in our world today which is a really really huge number that's more than triple the number of people who existed as recently as 1950 while by and large most of us today are congregating ever more into the same few places today over 56 of all 8 billion of us live within cities and in less than 30 years from now by 2050 that share is estimated to increase up to 68 of us and those are just the worldwide figures in developed countries like the united states the concentration of people living within cities is even higher at about 83 while in the netherlands it's even higher still at an overwhelming 92 of the population largely because of that despite there being nearly 8 billion of us worldwide a lot of the world is still pretty empty this is the united states and the spots colored in green are the more than four million census block areas where not a single person currently lives nobody watching or commenting on this video lives within any of these green locations and every other large country in the world has a pretty similar trend this is canada which is overwhelmingly empty of people this is brazil which is also pretty overwhelmingly empty of people while this is the united kingdom which also has a lot of areas in scotland and wales where there just aren't any people currently living there are a lot of empty and desolate places across the world that would be horrible to find yourself stranded and lost in far away from any civilization or people who could offer any help but the absolute worst place on the entire planet to be stranded on without a doubt is in norway well not this part of norway but this part this tiny little island far away from all of us in the south atlantic called bouvet to say that bouvet is remote would be a vast understatement first of all nobody lives here it's completely uninhabited second of all it's quite literally the most isolated piece of land anywhere on earth meaning that it is the piece of land that is the furthest away from any other land the nearest other land mass is 1700 kilometers away to the south and that's just antarctica besides that it's 2 250 kilometers away across ocean from the nearest actually inhabited land mass and that's just the tiny speck that is tristan de cunha island population only 250. besides that it's 2600 kilometers away to the nearest inhabited continent in southern africa this means that if you draw out a circle with a radius of 2 000 kilometers with bube island right in the center and you are located on bouvet you would be the only human within that entire circle and the circle would have an area roughly equivalent to the entire european continent imagine being the only human in europe and that's the level of isolation that you feel here alone and this is all besides the point that bouvet itself is incredibly tiny only 49 square kilometers in total area which is only about half the size of disney world in orlando but unlike disney world 93 of bouvet is covered by a thick icy glacier and temperatures only average throughout the entire year at about negative one celsius it is a desolate empty isolated and frozen wasteland in the middle of nowhere that for some reason belongs to norway the island is so remote that no human eyes ever even witnessed it until 1739. when a french ship sailed by it on an expedition but didn't land nearly a century went by until another group of humans even saw it again in 1808 this time a british ship but once again they failed to actually land the first 100 confirmed landing on the island took place in 1825 when a group of british sailors landed and claimed it for great britain but then after they left nobody came back to visit the island again for another 68 years throughout the entire 19th century there may have only been four ships who ever visited the island and only one of those actually landed the norwegians finally arrived to the uninhabited and almost unvisited island only in 1927 when they built a hut raised a flag and claimed it for themselves as the british had once done a century earlier back then in 1927 the british initially disputed norway's claim to the island but after giving it a second thoughts they decided that bouvet was a tiny b didn't have any harbors for ships and didn't really have any resources and c was in the literal middle of nowhere that wasn't nearby to anything of even the most remote strategic importance and so the british relented and allowed the norwegians to claim it and today bouvet island is norway's only real overseas dependency despite being located nearly 13 000 kilometers away from the capital of oslo and as you'd expect there isn't really anything that ever goes on here since the island is so far out of the way from any inhabited location on earth ships sailing over the seas and airplanes flying above rarely if ever pass by it the area is so absurdly remote and far away from any human civilization that you could probably even detonate a nuclear bomb here and nobody would ever hear or know about it i say that because it probably literally already happened back in 1979 an american satellite flying above the area detected a double flash of light in the ocean nearby to bouvee island the classic signature of a nuclear explosion but nobody in the decades since has ever claimed any responsibility for the detonation to this date the information regarding the incident is classified by the united states government but most researchers believe that the detonation was a secret undeclared nuclear weapons test conducted jointly by apartheid era south africa and israel although both governments continue to deny any and all involvement to this day but even just getting to bouvet island in the first place is a massive challenge since the island and the waters around it are protected as a nature reserve by the norwegian government you need strict permission to ever be allowed to visit and those permissions are rarely ever granted but let's pretend for a moment that right now as you're watching this video you were somehow teleported directly to the island as you currently are and just told good luck how would you find your way to escape what would you do to survive and would it all even be possible well there obviously isn't any cell service or wi-fi to be heard of on bouvet so your phone's gonna be pointless with the average temperature being negative one degree celsius the first thing you're going to need to do is obviously find warmth but there aren't any trees and there isn't any wood to build any fires with and you probably don't even have anything to start a fire with in the first place so that's going to be difficult maybe you think your best option would be to attempt to build a raft or a boat and simply row your way out towards civilization there are unfortunately multiple problems with this idea first of all as mentioned previously 93 of the island is covered by a glacier and beneath that glacier is an active volcano the sides of the island are therefore almost entirely sheer vertical icy cliffs and the island doesn't really have any beaches for you to launch a ship or a raft off of so even if you do somehow acquire a raft what are you gonna do toss it off a cliff and then jump off the cliff yourself into the freezing antarctic waters further how are you going to build a raft like i said there aren't any trees on bouvet island and that means there isn't any wood by some miracle if you manage to find a perfectly seaworthy raft that somehow washed up on the shoreline where are you going to even row to tristan de cunha is a tiny island and the odds of you successfully hitting it are just slim to none so if you decide on rowing in the direction of south africa instead and if you could somehow manage to row even at an olympic level it would still take you more than six consecutive days of non-stop continuous rowing without any breaks whatsoever to get there so in all reality it would really take you several weeks if not even months to actually row to south africa and that's just assuming you even make it there without dying of exhaustion thirst hunger or from the elements first okay so escaping on your own from bouvet is most likely a bad idea and probably not even possible so what about just bunkering down on the island surviving and hopefully just waiting it out until someone else shows up well this strategy probably isn't that much better the island's harsh freezing climate has seriously limited the amount of food that's available the only non-animal life to speak of are restricted to fungi and moss and they mostly grow in the few and far between snow-free areas of the island the problem here is that most of the snow-free areas and therefore most of the fungi and moss are located on land that is so steep they're subjected frequently to the threats of avalanches so good luck not getting crushed or buried on the flip side though animal life itself is rather plentiful the island is one of the most important breeding colonies for several species of penguin and there are often tens of thousands of them present on the island at a time there are hundreds of thousands of other bird species present and tens of thousands of seals as well so if you can master hunting and are okay with eating birds or seals you can have plenty of food to survive off of the biggest problem for you though is that there's just no telling how long you'll need to survive doing all of this for ships and planes rarely ever travel by and the odds of them seeing you when they do are slim to none and the island is pretty often covered in fog so when a plane flies overhead they're probably just not ever going to see you your best bet would be to hold off and wait for an actual intentional trip to the island itself but those are carried out very rarely weirdly enough there are actually three planned expeditions to bouvet island led by the norwegian government in each of the next three years in 2022 23 and 24 but that's generally not the case usually there could be many many years in between expeditions where no human is coming to visit at all meaning that depending on when you become stranded the next people coming to visit could be up to a year or many years away from visiting in fact so few people have ever visited the island that it's estimated only about a hundred people have ever actually been there throughout all of human history to put that in a perspective there are more than five times as many humans who have been to space than have been to bouvez island it's an insanely difficult place to get to and if you ever reach it you can join one of the most exclusive groups of people who have ever existed as an example this guy named charles valey visited the island back in 2003 and is widely acclaimed to be the world's most well-traveled person in order to reach bouvier it took him a journey of 72 full days that culminated with a dangerous helicopter ride from his boat through freezing temperatures dense fog and 50 knot winds it was literally only by a stroke of luck that he was even offered the trip in the first place aboard a south african research vessel that agreed to take him there while on their way to fix a nearby weather system the point of all of this is that bouvet island is the world's most hardcore and extreme remote location it's probably the singular most difficult location on the earth to visit and if you're unfortunate enough to get stranded there escape is almost completely impossible so uh probably don't ever go there alone and if you do you're probably gonna want to take something with you to keep you occupied for the months or years it'll take until somebody comes to rescue you like i don't know a super duty editing or gaming pc well that may actually be pretty tough since there isn't any electricity and there isn't any internet but you know what isn't very hard actually building your own pc with microcenter a lot of people have asked me how i got started creating my youtube videos here and it honestly all began with saving up enough money to build my own beefy editing computer that could handle all of the animations and footage that i wanted to splice together very much unlike bouvet island microcenter is one of the best places in the world to shop for all your technology needs whether you want to get started creating your own animated youtube videos or you just want something to handle all the games that you're playing microcenter's got everything you need from desktops to pc parts to monitors and they've got 25 stores across the united states so the odds are there's one pretty close by to you and if you're really serious about building your own pc you should really check out the micro center custom pc builder to spec out exactly what you want it's super convenient because it automatically guarantees that all the parts you're selecting are compatible or not it'll then find the parts at your nearest micro center and can arrange same day pickup and for a fee you can even check the box marked same day pro assembly to have micro center themselves build your creation for you but best of all micro center is offering up a ridiculous deal when you follow the link that's down in the description below or click the button that's on screen now new customers will receive a completely free 128 gigabyte flash drive and a 128 gigabyte micro sd card you don't even need to purchase anything it's totally 100 free and you just have to go to one of micro center's 25 stores in the country to claim it and as always thank you for watching

Channel: RealLifeLore

Views: 1,175,483

Rating: 4.8995509 out of 5

Keywords: real life lore, real life lore maps, real life lore geography, real life maps, world map, world map is wrong, world map with countries, world map real size, map of the world, world geography, geography, geography (field of study), facts you didn’t know, bouvet island, bouvet island documentary, bouvet, most remote island in the world, most remote island

Id: nv8Mf3tvfSY

Length: 14min 16sec (856 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 31 2021