Resurrection Island

National Geographic Magazine, December 2009
South Georgia rises sheer and stark from the sea, a hundred-mile arc of dark Antarctic peaks, ice fields, and hanging glaciers. From the deck of a ship, the island makes a startling apparition, like the Himalaya just emerged from the Flood. For a polar outpost so solid and austere, covered half by permanent snow and ice and half by bare rock and tundralike vegetation, South Georgia is strangely chimerical. More »