South Georgia is a huge, wildly spectacular ice mountain massif. It soars out of the icy depths of the Southern Ocean 1,000 miles east of the southern tip of South America. A rugged spine of glacier-covered peaks, South Georgia is cold, wet and racked by ferocious winds. The tiny island is in the direct track of deep atmospheric depressions that roar through the Drake Passage between Terra del Fuego and Antarctica. Average annual temperature is near freezing and snowfall and rain of four inches a day is common. Millions of fur seals, tens of millions of penguins and other birds, and hundreds of thousands of sea lions inhabit its shorelines.