The Crozet Islands were discovered on 24 January 1772, by the expedition of French explorer Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne, aboard Le Mascarin.

His second-in-command, Julien-Marie Crozet, landed on Île de la Possession, claiming the archipelago for France.

[3] The expedition continued east and landed in New Zealand, where Captain Marion and much of his crew were killed and cannibalized by Maoris.

The British sealer, Princess of Wales, sank in 1821, and the survivors spent two years on the islands.

A castaway wrote 'The land affords no shelter whatever, there being neither tree nor shrub, and the weather is at most times extremely wet, and snow frequently on the ground'.

They tied a note to the leg of an albatross, which was found seven months later in Fremantle, Western Australia, but the crew was never recovered.

They perform meteorological, biological, and geological research, and maintain a seismograph and a geomagnetic observatory (IAGA code: CZT).

The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization has listening equipment on the island and it was disclosed that two of its stations, the other being on Ascension Island, detected what is believed to be an underwater, non-nuclear explosion off the coast of Argentina and believed to be the fatal accident of the ARA San Juan submarine in 2017.

[11][12] The islands lie on the Antarctic Plate, roughly between the Kerguelen hotspot and Madagascar and southern Africa.

This is a very rare behaviour, most often seen in the Patagonia region of Argentina, and is thought to be a learned skill passed down through generations of individual orca families.

Introduction of foreign species (mice, rats, and subsequently cats for pest control) has caused severe damage to the original ecosystem.

A 2012 French film, Les Saveurs du Palais, begins and ends with scenes in the Crozet Islands.

In the 1978 novel Desolation Island, the fifth book in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey–Maturin series, the fictional naval vessel HMS Leopard is severely damaged by a collision with an iceberg in the southwestern Indian Ocean.

In Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, the Pequod sails near the ‘distant Crozetts’, ’a good cruising ground for Right Whalemen’ in Chapter 52, ‘The Albatross’.