The ridge that ends at Gedser Odde is a terminal moraine - the line where the last ice sheet stopped and dropped everything it had been carrying. It runs across Falster from Idestrup through Skelby to Gedser, part of the maximum glaciation line that crosses the island from Orehoved in the north to Gedser in the south. The moraine does not actually end at the stone. It continues underwater for another eighteen kilometres to the south-east as Gedser Rev, a shoal that has been a hazard to shipping for as long as there has been shipping in the western Baltic. Denmark's southernmost point, in other words, is the last place a glacier put down its load before the meltwater took over.

The coastal cliff at Gedser Odde is almost always exposed, which makes it unusually easy to read. The ice-age strata are plainly visible: moraine clay studded with boulders, dumped by the melting glacier. Look for traces of pink, which come from red sandstone the ice plucked from the floor of the Baltic and carried here. Lower down are lake sediments, laid bare as the terrain subsided. In the postglacial layers are the fossils of freshwater snails and mussels - hard evidence that the Baltic went through a freshwater phase, a lake before it was a sea. Few places let you see the argument laid out so plainly in a single face of clay.

Migration funnels here, and windy days are the best days. Common eiders pass the point in numbers that are difficult to credit - from late March into early April, and again in autumn, forty thousand in a day is not unusual. Common scoters are around all year in flocks of up to three thousand. Autumn brings geese in their thousands. Red-throated loons, pomarine skuas, long-tailed jaegers and great skuas cross the area, and Gedser Odde is probably the best place in the country for little gulls, with up to a thousand a day in both spring and autumn. Between the point and Gedser Marina the raptors come through: rough-legged buzzards, western marsh harriers, common buzzards, and red kites that often fly very low. Smaller birds cross too - western yellow wagtails, meadow pipits, chaffinches and bramblings. Then there is the rarity list, which is what really brings people with telescopes: little egret, black stork, Steller's eider, short-toed snake eagle, Blyth's reed warbler, great reed warbler, eastern olivaceous warbler, barred warbler, rock bunting.

Denmark's southernmost lighthouse, Gedser Fyr, stands twenty metres tall about 700 metres north-west of the point, carrying a light and a racon - a radar beacon that answers a ship's radar pulse with a coded return, useful when the reef offshore is invisible and the coastline is this low. Beside it is Marinestation Gedser, a radar station built during the Cold War to watch a stretch of Baltic that mattered a great deal when the far shore was East Germany. The 2023 storm surge damaged it. Submarine cables leave the point running north-east, south-east and south-south-east, and Falster's east coast is protected by a dyke for about sixteen kilometres north of here. Gedser itself is a small place - 610 residents at the start of 2026 - kept in business by the Scandlines ferries that have run to Rostock since 1995.

In 1957, a few kilometres from the south stone, the engineer Johannes Juul put up a wind turbine that changed the industry. It had three blades on a 24-metre rotor and produced 200 kilowatts of alternating current, and it combined electromechanical yawing, an asynchronous generator, and stall-regulated blades with aerodynamic tip brakes for emergencies. That combination was cheap, safe and unglamorous, and it became the template the world eventually settled on as the Danish design - three blades, upwind, turned to face the weather. The Gedser turbine ran from 1957 to 1967, was refurbished in 1975 for a few more years, and was taken down in 1992. Its nacelle and blades were reassembled in 2006 at the Energimuseet near Bjerringbro in Jutland. Denmark's southernmost farmland is where the modern wind turbine was first got right.