The last continent: how deadly bird flu travelled the world before landing on a remote Australian beach

The H5N1 virus has now reached every continent on the planet. What does it mean for some of the world’s unique species? This article contains images of dead wildlife. Reader discretion is advised It was a rough five-day sail from the Falkland Islands and, as the science expedition approached the South Georgia coast, they found fur seal carcasses floating on the water. “There were these moments when it would hit us,” says Dr Jane Younger, remembering the expedition to the British subantarctic territory six months ago. Younger, an ecologist at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania, was with scientists from the United States, France, South Africa and the Falklands to check on the spread of the H5N1 variant of bird flu. The disease has cut a devastating and traumatising swathe across the planet, killing millions of birds and mammals since it took hold in Europe in 2020. More than 200 million poultry birds in the United States have been culled and tens of thousands of seals in South America have died. The H5N1 strain was detected in migrating seabirds in the subantarctic in late 2023 and in South Georgia’s seal population in early 2024. “We were ho