Photography courtesy of Santiago Vanegas

It’s been seven months since I returned from Antarctica and I still can’t fathom that I was there. It’s like going to another planet. Not that I’ve been to another planet, but I can imagine that this is the closest I’ll ever get to one. Ironically, being in Antarctica has probably been the closest I’ve felt to Earth. The experience of being there has generated a series of extreme opposing images. First, there’s the scale: massive landscape, tiny human. And then there’s the sobering inverse: towering human threat to nature, delicate and vulnerable, polar (global) ecology. There was also the unforgiving Drake Passage crossing, our 240-foot ship at the mercy of thirty- to fifty-foot waves. Life, death. The list goes on. It’s humbling. People ask me, “Why go to Antarctica?” There are many reasons. Some of which I have yet to discover. I wanted to go to Antarctica because soon it will be a different place. Just in the last few years, ice shelves the size of entire countries have broken off the continent and are melting into the ocean. Antarctica is dying. I had to go, absorb, and tell a story. And then, of course, there’s the magnificence of Antarctica. Such an unlikely and complex place. I guess you could say that my reasons for going are Death and Beauty.