Situated off the coast of Tasmania, the Isle of the Dead served as the final resting place for thousands of convicts and military personnel during the brutal era of the Port Arthur penal colony. Between 1833 and 1877, this small, windswept island acted as a segregated cemetery, with convicts buried in unmarked graves on one side and free men buried on the other. Beyond its macabre history as a dumping ground for the deceased, the island holds a bizarre scientific legacy. In 1841, the explorer James Clark Ross and Thomas Lempriere carved a tidal measurement marker directly into the island's rock face to track sea level fluctuations. Today, this notch, chiseled into the side of a convict grave site, provides one of the world's oldest and most important longitudinal references for climate change studies. It is a striking juxtaposition between the Victorian obsession with penal discipline and the cold, empirical observation of rising oceans.