arctic-tern

The longest animal migrations ranked: Arctic terns, sooty shearwaters, gray whales, godwits, and leatherbacks, with tracking data and how they navigate.

An Arctic tern chick hatches in Greenland, fledges, and within weeks makes its first 70,000 km round-trip migration to Antarctica — a journey it has never made before, with no experienced adult to follow. By the end of its 30-year life, it will have flown the equivalent of three trips to the Moon and back. The mechanisms behind this feat involve quantum physics, internal clocks, and a navigation system more sophisticated than anything human engineers have yet replicated.