Follow Ernest Shackleton's Legendary Trek on Google Street View [Video and Slide Show]
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Eric Wehrmeister, videographer with Lindblad Expeditions, documented large colonies of king penguins that reside on South Georgia Island. Kings are the brightest of all penguin species except as juveniles, when they are covered in a thick brown down coat. Credit: Lindblad Expeditions
Prion Island only sees about 2,500 human visitors a year but many more elephant and fur seals, who come primarily to breed in this sheltered spot off South Georgia’s northeast coast. Scientists are wondering whether the presence of seals might discourage some of the island’s bird species such as wandering albatross and blue petrels from nesting nearby. Credit: Lindblad Expeditions
South Georgia’s 30 million breeding birds vastly outnumber its human occupants—a handful of government officers, museum staff and researchers with the British Antarctic Survey. Credit: Lindblad Expeditions
King penguins and elephant seals share the beach at Right Whale Bay in South Georgia, named for the right whales which were hunted extensively here from the 17th to 19th centuries. Right whales provide large amounts of oil and baleen as compared with other species and—handy for whalers—their thick blubber makes them float once killed. Credit: Lindblad Expeditions
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Through the Trekker Loan Program scientists, nonprofits and universities can borrow Google’s backcountry camera and photograph areas of the world that are unreachable by car. The Grand Canyon was the testing ground for this technology, and the first natural wonder it imaged. Credit: Lindblad Expeditions
Ernest Shackleton died near South Georgia and was buried at this grave site in Grytviken. He published an account of his ill-fated expedition on the ship called Endurance and his trek across land and sea to save his crew. He died of a heart attack during his next mission, on January 5, 1922, while attempting to circumnavigate Antarctica. Credit: Lindblad Expeditions
A century ago Sir Ernest Shackleton and his 27-member crew set sail from Argentina to Antarctica with ambitions of being the first to cross the coldest continent on foot. Partway through the journey south, however, winter sea ice froze their ship in place. The explorers first stayed close and camped on the surrounding ice but their ship, crushed by shifting ice, broke up and sank after 10 months. Then, Shackleton’s crew set out in small boats to reach nearby but uninhabited Elephant Island. From there Shackleton and five of his crew again set sail to find help while the others awaited rescue. In 16 days the six men crossed 1,300 kilometers of open ocean to South Georgia, a far-flung island off the tip of Argentina. They found help at a whaling station there and returned to rescue the entire crew.
Google set out in March 2014 to make Shackleton’s adventure accessible to anyone with a browser. The company sent Eric Wehrmeister, a videographer from a tourism company called Lindblad Expeditions, to South Georgia and the nearby Falkland Islands with the 19.5-kilogram Google Trekker strapped to his back. The Trekker has 15 cameras that poke up from a backpack like a periscope. The cameras were controlled by built-in software that snapped a photo every 2.5 seconds. In the end Google uploaded more than 10,000 images of the islands to Google Street View and made them available on October 23.
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