The changing landscape of the Antarctic – in pictures

08 07 2019 | 07:47

The changing landscape of the Antarctic – in pictures

An Antarctic fur seal is seen on a large iceberg.

 

Sam Edmonds, an Antarctic tour guide and photographer, took these images from a helicopter along the Eastern coastline between Cape Adare and the Cooperation Sea during summer. The continent’s vastness and the scale of the climate challenge it faces is palpable from up above. Across both polar regions, ice cover has become an important way to measure the impact of global warming, and the risk and logistical complications of operating aircraft around the Antarctic mean that perspective is both rare and valuable

All photographs: Sam Edmonds

Sat 6 Jul 2019

 

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Driven by currents more than winds, an iceberg drifts along the edge of the pack ice.

 

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Snow accrued on a glacier for hundreds of years and rolled downhill for thousands of years to deliver this iceberg to the sea but the tide and waves don’t care and eat away at the berg with their warmth and motion.

 

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Multitudes of iceberg bits and brash ice are pulled by currents and pushed by winds along the edge of the pack edge, the margin separating open water from the treacherous reaches of unconsolidated ice.

 

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Disintegrating icebergs present a fractal landscape, each fragment shattering again and yet again until the smallest remnants of the former crystal leviathan melt away.

 

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A lone Adelie penguin wanders along an iceberg.

 

 

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