South Georgia Island — Local services in South Georgia

to Salisbury Plain, a long pebbled beach full of king penguins. Like 150.000 pairs!! There is a rockery with the chicks and a plain with non-reproducing birds and seals. The view of all these penguins together is very impressive: a sea of them! There chicks are molting and some still have their full brown down, while others are looking pretty unkept with tuffs of down interspersed by adult feathers. This seems to itch them because they all peck and groom constantly. In the rockery most penguins look filthy with mud and poop, but a short dip in the water and they are "spick and span" clean. The white thoracoabdominal feathers of the king penguins in particular have a beautiful iridescent sheen under the right light incidence. There are also a bunch of skeletons on the beach, both penguins and seals. I like to check the bones with their differences to human bones. Elephant seals have a synostosis of the tibia-fibula, and their femoral head is on a very short neck. The skulls are harder to compare. One pup was cream colored ("Blondy") a rare variation (1/614) and we took a lot of pictures of him. Apparently their are very few adults with this coloration, either because they are preferentially killed because of poor camouflage, or passed over by the female in a form of...

This little island is ready to welcome the beautiful A23a. A23a is the world's largest iceberg, breaking free from the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in Antarctica in 1986. It's been stuck, moved, and trapped in a vortex, but is now drifting north in the Southern Ocean.

Size and location: As of January 2025, A23a was about 3,500 square kilometers in area, which is roughly the size of Rhode Island It's located north of the South Orkney Islands

History: A23a was stuck on the seafloor for over 30 years It began moving north in 2020 It was trapped in a Taylor column, a rotating column of water that kept it spinning in place for months It broke free from the vortex and is now drifting north again

Future: A23a is expected to enter the Atlantic Ocean, where it will break up and melt Scientists are monitoring it for potential collisions with South Georgia Island, which is home to...

South Georgia (Spanish: Isla San Pedro) is an island in the southern Atlantic Ocean that is part of the British Overseas Territory of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. The main settlement is Grytviken. South Georgia is 167.4 kilometres (104 mi) long and 1.4 to 37 km (0.9 to 23.0 miles) wide. It is about 830 km (520 mi) northeast of Coronation Island and 550 km (340 mi) northwest from Zavodovski Island, the nearest South...