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For the past 50 years we’ve been sharing the planet’s most wild and interesting places with curious, intelligent travelers. Now, we’re collaborating with Google to further promote understanding and conservation of beautiful, fragile places—in this case, the remote island of South Georgia.

Lindblad Expeditions’ staff members, Bill Kinzie (Senior Media Producer) and Eric Wehrmeister (Video Chronicler) were trained to operate the 43-pound Street View camera at Google headquarters. As part of the Trekker Loaner Program, one of the cameras made the trip to South Georgia during an expedition on the 148-guest National Geographic Explorer. Wehrmeister hiked South Georgia, the camera’s 15 lenses snapped shots every 2.5 seconds. Over 10,000 panoramas were collected, added to Google Maps, and now, for the first time ever, anyone with an Internet connection can go on a virtual South Georgia expedition via Google’s Street View technology. You can get up close with huge colonies of penguins, nesting albatross, enormous elephant seals lolling on the beach, the final resting place of legendary polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, and much more. On Google Maps you can see the South Georgia Street View and Falklands Street View. 

The images preserve for the future the scope of wildness in South Georgia in 2014, and they can be used as one tool in measuring the effectiveness of ongoing conservation efforts. This is the very first Street View collection on South Georgia and the first Google Street View collaboration with Lindblad—it’s one more way that Lindblad Expeditions brings you the world through 21st-century exploration.