Part of Antarctica has been named after the Queen as a Diamond Jubilee gift from the Foreign Office.
The area now to be known as Queen Elizabeth Land, which was previously unnamed, is around 169,000 square miles, making up just under a third of the whole land mass of the British Antarctic Territory.
The name will now be used on all British maps but as Antarctica is uniquely covered by an international Treaty that suspends territorial sovereignty, it is for other countries to decide whether or not they will officially recognise this name.
Foreign Secretary William Hague said: "As a mark of this country’s gratitude to The Queen for Her service, we are naming a part of the British Antarctic Territory in her honour as ‘Queen Elizabeth Land’."
Queen Elizabeth Land is bounded on the North side by the Ronne and Filchner ice shelves, to the North East by Coats Land, on the East by Dronning Maud Land and extending on the West side to a line between the South Pole and Rutford Ice Stream, east of Constellation Inlet.
This is not the first time that land in Antarctica has been named after The Queen. Princess Elizabeth Land in East Antarctica, which was discovered in 1931 by the Australian Sir Douglas Mawson, was named by him after Her Royal Highness Princess Elizabeth (now Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II).
In 2006, an unnamed mountain range in the Antarctic Peninsula was named The Princess Royal Range, in recognition of Her Royal Highness’s work to support environmental and heritage protection work in Antarctica.
