Patriot Hills

Antarctica / Sector claimed by Argentina/Chile/UK / General San Martin - permanent station of Argentina /
 mountain, hills

The Patriot Hills is a line of rock hills 5 nautical miles (9 km) long, located 3 nautical miles (6 km) east of the north end of Independence Hills in Horseshoe Valley, Heritage Range, Western Antarctica.
It is located south of the Patriot Hills base, the only private seasonally occupied camp in Antarctica.

The hills were mapped by United States Geological Survey (USGS) from ground surveys and U.S. Navy air photos, 1961-66. The name was applied by Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names (US-ACAN) in association with the name Heritage Range.
In 1987, the Patriot Hills Base Camp was built here by the Adventure Network International (now Antarctic Logistics and Expeditions, LLC; ALE). The camp, used only in the Antarctic summer months, was the only privately operated camp on the Antarctic continent. In 2010, they moved operations to the Union Glacier Camp.

During the Antarctic summer of 1998, a team of scientists at Carnegie Mellon University, NASA Ames Research Center and the University of Pittsburgh opened for a few weeks their camp near the Patriot Hills. They tested the robot Nomad, which was built to investigate and identify autonomous rocks and meteorites in polar regions. Since there had been no meteorite impacts in this region, the researchers scattered meteor scattered for testing.
Coordinates:   80°19'46"S   81°27'41"W
This article was last modified 10 years ago