Edinburgh, the Royal Navy's last remaining Type 42 destroyer, returned to Portsmouth from her final deployment last week. The 30 year old warship has spent the past 6 months patrolling the Atlantic and over the years has been in several assignments in the Falkland Islands and South Georgia.
Sailors onboard the South Atlantic patrol Royal Navy HMS Argyll saved the life of a Japanese fisherman who had suffered a serious head injury off the coast of Africa. Approximately 20 miles off the Cape Verde coast she received news that a fisherman onboard the trawler Wakashio Maru No 82 had been seriously hurt in an accident 24 hours earlier.
The Government of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands (GSCSSI) has announced the completion of the first phase of the eradication of reindeer from the island of South Georgia.
January was the busiest month of the tourist season for South Georgia with 13 visits from cruise ships; in the second week of the month seven cruise ships visited. There were also visits by the Fishery Patrol Vessel, research vessels, and a large motor yacht, reports the latest editions of the South Georgia Newsletter.
The South Atlantic Environmental Research Institute (SAERI) announced a new program: the South Atlantic Information Management System and GIS Centre, which officially brings together the UK South Atlantic Overseas Territories in SAERI’s South Atlantic scope that ranges from the equator down to the ice. The Centre is funded by the FCO via the UK’s Joint Nature Conservation Committee.
The Foreign Office said that the UK is striving to ensure that all fishing undertaken in the Southern Ocean is carefully managed and sustainable and that the current FCO focus is supporting international work to establish a network of Southern Ocean Marine Protected Areas.
The Royal Navy frigate HMS Argyll left on Monday from Devonport for the West African region and the South Atlantic to undertake a range of tasks in support of British interests worldwide. She replaces in her South Atlantic tour HMS Edinburgh, ‘Fortress of the Seas’ which is to be decommissioned next June.
An expedition replicating Ernest Shackleton's 1916 perilous crossing of the Southern Ocean from Antarctica in a small boat has made landfall after a 12-day journey. Led by renowned adventurer Tim Jarvis, the team of six reached Peggotty Bluff on rugged South Georgia, where they landed their vessel in the same place Shackleton and his men beached the James Caird nearly 100 years ago.
Argentina claimed at the CELAC summit in Chile that the UK has converted the Falkland Islands into one of the “most militarized territories in the world” with the sole purpose of exploiting the natural resources of the Islands and control access to Antarctica.
The United Kingdom Minister for the Overseas Territories Mark Simmonds welcomed the announcement of a set of additional measures to safeguard the sustainable-use Marine Protected Area (MPA) around the South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands.