The waters once ran red with whale blood – now South Georgia is a conservation success story
Technically, the hundred-mile-long, 20 mile-wide British overseas territory of South Georgia is uninhabited.
Only a few visiting scientists and government fisheries inspectors occupy the island all year round.
But from a wildlife perspective, it’s anything but.
Its shores are home to the largest number of marine birds and mammals on the planet.
The impact of the world’s biggest iceberg
Lying 800 miles east off the Falkland Islands and a thousand miles north of Antarctica, it’s one of the few fragments of land between that vast frozen continent and the rest of the world.
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How big is the world’s largest iceberg compared to London?
The part of the South Atlantic in which it sits is one of the most food-rich oceans in the world, fed by powerful circulating currents, and it’s full of shrimp-like Antarctic krill.
“Krill feeds the blue whales, humpback whales, fin whales. It also feeds the gentoo penguins, macaroni penguins, chinstrap penguins and the fur seals,” says Martin Collins, a scientist with the British Antarctic Survey, and former head of the South Georgia government, speaking to me from his office at King Edward Point on the island.
The island also has some of the largest and most significant populations of elephant seals, king penguins and several species of albatross and petrel – the hardiest of ocean-going seabirds.
The island has been in the headlines after the world’s largest iceberg, A23a, ran aground off its south-west coast.
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Sky News to fly over world’s biggest iceberg
Concern over impact of iceberg on island’s wildlife
There’s a concern it could impact wildlife on the island – but the timing is fortuitous, says Mr Collins.
“It’s the end of the breeding season now, which means the impacts on penguins at that part of the island will be lessened.
“There may be a little bit of impact, particularly on gentoo penguins, which still forage around the island during the winter.”
From a wider conservation point of view, South Georgia is one of the world’s stand-out success stories.
Gentoo penguins are part of the island’s rich wildlife
Until the 1960s, it was a major hub for whaling. Thousands of whales were caught off its coasts and processed at a number of whaling stations – the scale of the slaughter such that the bays around the island were red with whale blood.
The whalers introduced reindeer for food that nibbled and trampled unique plant life that sustained many of the island’s endemic wildlife.
Stowaway rats plundered the eggs and chicks of penguins and other ground nesting birds (there are no trees).
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World’s largest iceberg on collision course with South Georgia
Whales returning in large numbers
The South Georgia pipit, the world’s most southerly songbird, was driven to the brink of extinction.
But before the abandoned whaling stations have even rusted away, whales have begun returning to South Georgia in large numbers.
A campaign of air-dropping poisoned bait across the inaccessible island has eradicated the rats and the pipits are booming.
The seas around South Georgia were once heavily fished. The worst for wildlife were long-line vessels trying to hook high-value Chilean seabass.
File pic: PA
Call for outright ban on fishing
Albatross and petrels would dive for the bait and be caught and drowned.
Since 2012, the government of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands have policed a 500,000 square-mile marine-protected area around the islands where most fishing is now banned.
A few vessels are licensed to catch shrimp-like krill and seabass but only in winter when most predators are absent and under strict controls.
Some conservationists are calling for fishing to be banned outright.
However, the South Georgia government argues it’s the income from limited fishing licences that allows them to protect and monitor the exclusion zone.
Crucial at a time when funding from central government is scarce and unlikely to increase.
The key threat now is the rapidly changing climate around South Georgia.
“There’s evidence that the distribution of krill is moving a little further south gradually over time,” says Mr Collins.
“We need to be really mindful of that changing climate.”
But he’s optimistic too. Despite warmer oceans, numbers of some species are booming. Especially whales and fur seals.
“I’ve just had two king penguins walking past the windows as we were talking,” he says.
“When I first came here in the late 1990s, there were no fur seals in this area at all. And now they’re everywhere around us”.
The Donald Trump peace plan is nothing of the sort. It takes Russian demands and presents them as peace proposals, in what is effectively for Ukraine a surrender ultimatum.
If accepted, it would reward armed aggression. The principle, sacrosanct since the Second World War, for obvious and very good reasons, that even de facto borders cannot be changed by force, will have been trampled on at the behest of the leader of the free world.
The Kremlin will have imposed terms via negotiators on a country it has violated, and whose people its troops have butchered, massacred and raped. It is without doubt the biggest crisis in Trans-Atlantic relations since the war began, if not since the inception of NATO.
The question now is: are Europe’s leaders up to meeting the daunting challenges that will follow. On past form, we cannot be sure.
Vladimir Putin, President of Russia. Pic: Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov via Reuters
The plan proposes the following:
• Land seized by Vladimir Putin’s unwarranted and unprovoked invasion would be ceded by Kyiv.
• Territory his forces have fought but failed to take with colossal loss of life will be thrown into the bargain for good measure.
• Ukraine will be barred from NATO, from having long-range weapons, from hosting foreign troops, from allowing foreign diplomatic planes to land, and its military neutered, reduced in size by more than half.
Donald Trump meeting Vladimir Putin in Alaska in August, File pic: Reuters
And most worryingly for Western leaders, the plan proposes NATO and Russia negotiate with America acting as mediator.
Lest we forget, America is meant to be the strongest partner in NATO, not an outside arbitrator. In one clause, Mr Trump’s lack of commitment to the Western alliance is laid bare in chilling clarity.
And even for all that, the plan will not bring peace. Mr Putin has made it abundantly clear he wants all of Ukraine.
He has a proven track record of retiring, rallying his forces, then returning for more. Reward a bully as they say, and he will only come back for more. Why wouldn’t he, if he is handed the fortress cities of Donetsk and a clear run over open tank country to Kyiv in a few years?
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US draft Russia peace plan
Since the beginning of Trump’s presidency, Europe has tried to keep the maverick president onside when his true sympathies have repeatedly reverted to Moscow.
It has been a demeaning and sycophantic spectacle, NATO’s secretary general stooping even to calling the US president ‘Daddy’. And it hasn’t worked. It may have made matters worse.
A choir sing in front of an apartment building destroyed in a Russian missile strike in Ternopil, Ukraine. Pic: Reuters
The parade of world leaders trooping through Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, lavishing praise on his Gaza ceasefire plan, only encouraged him to believe he is capable of solving the world’s most complex conflicts with the minimum of effort.
The Gaza plan is mired in deepening difficulty, and it never came near addressing the underlying causes of the war.
Read more:
Ukraine war latest: Putin welcomes peace plan
Trump’s 28-point Ukraine peace plan in full
Most importantly, principles the West has held inviolable for eight decades cannot be torn up for the sake of a quick and uncertain peace.
With a partner as unreliable, the challenge to Europe cannot be clearer.
In the words of one former Baltic foreign minister: “There is a glaringly obvious message for Europe in the 28-point plan: This is the end of the end.
“We have been told repeatedly and unambiguously that Ukraine’s security, and therefore Europe’s security, will be Europe’s responsibility. And now it is. Entirely.”
If Europe does not step up to the plate and guarantee Ukraine’s security in the face of this American betrayal, we could all pay the consequences.
World
Ukraine and Europe cannot reject Trump’s plan – they will play for time and hope he can still be persuaded to desert the Kremlin
“Terrible”, “weird”, “peculiar” and “baffling” – some of the adjectives being levelled by observers at the Donald Trump administration’s peace plan for Ukraine.
The 28-point proposal was cooked up between Trump negotiator Steve Witkoff and Kremlin official Kirill Dmitriev without European and Ukrainian involvement.
It effectively dresses up Russian demands as a peace proposal. Demands first made by Russia at the high watermark of its invasion in 2022, before defeats forced it to retreat from much of Ukraine.
Ukraine war latest: Kyiv receives US peace plan
(l-r) Kirill Dmitriev and special envoy Steve Witkoff in St Petersburg in April 2025. Pic: Kremlin Pool Photo/AP
Its proposals are non-starters for Ukrainians.
It would hand over the rest of Donbas, territory they have spent almost four years and lost tens of thousands of men defending.
Analysts estimate at the current rate of advance, it would take Russia four more years to take the land it is proposing simply to give them instead.
It proposes more than halving the size of the Ukrainian military and depriving them of some of their most effective long-range weapons.
And it would bar any foreign forces acting as peacekeepers in Ukraine after any peace deal is done.
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Is Moscow back in Washington’s good books?
The plan comes at an excruciating time for the Ukrainians.
They are being pounded with devastating drone attacks, killing dozens in the last few nights alone.
They are on the verge of losing a key stronghold city, Pokrovsk.
And Volodymyr Zelenskyy is embroiled in the gravest political crisis since the war began, with key officials facing damaging corruption allegations.
Read more from Sky News:
Witkoff’s ‘secret’ plan to end war
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Ukrainian support for peace plan ‘very much in doubt’
The suspicion is Mr Witkoff and Mr Dmitriev conspired together to choose this moment to put even more pressure on the Ukrainian president.
Perversely, though, it may help him.
There has been universal condemnation and outrage in Kyiv at the Witkoff-Dmitriev plan. Rivals have little choice but to rally around the wartime Ukrainian leader as he faces such unreasonable demands.
The genesis of this plan is unclear.
Was it born from Donald Trump’s overinflated belief in his peacemaking abilities? His overrated Gaza ceasefire plan attracted lavish praise from world leaders, but now seems mired in deepening difficulty.
The fear is Mr Trump’s team are finding ways to allow him to walk away from this conflict altogether, blaming Ukrainian intransigence for the failure of his diplomacy.
Mr Trump has already ended financial support for Ukraine, acting as an arms dealer instead, selling weapons to Europe to pass on to the invaded democracy.
If he were to take away military intelligence support too, Ukraine would be blind to the kind of attacks that in recent days have killed scores of civilians.
Europe and Ukraine cannot reject the plan entirely and risk alienating Mr Trump.
They will play for time and hope against all the evidence he can still be persuaded to desert the Kremlin and put pressure on Vladimir Putin to end the war, rather than force Ukraine to surrender instead.
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