Amazing footage of the icy regions of the world by Sebastião Salgado

Sebastião Salgado became famous for his portraits of people struggling to survive in an unjust and violent world. He took stunning photographs of the assassination attempt on US President Ronald Reagan, covered conflicts in Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East and documented the lives of workers and migrants in multi-year global projects.

But after photographing the Rwandan genocide, Salgado fell into depression and retreated to his family farm in Brazil. Appalled by the environmental destruction he found, he began restoring the Atlantic rainforest there, which eventually inspired him to return to photography. The Genesis followed by a project to capture “what was intact and not destroyed” on the planet, as Selgado said in 2024 interviewfrom the mountains of Alaska to the indigenous people of the Amazon. Those trips made him an environmentalist, Salgado said in another interview.

glaciersreleased this month after Salgado’s death last year, collects 65 black-and-white shots of glaciers and other ice that the photographer took for Genesis. The images are seemingly timeless, frozen snapshots of the large and small movements of the coldest regions. A procession of penguins plunges from an iceberg into the rolling sea off the South Sandwich Islands in the main image. Seabirds swoop low near the ice tower in the same area in the shot below.

But of course, the images are not timeless, because the Earth is losing 1000 glaciers every year and their number is increasing. On our current warming trajectory, about four-fifths of the glaciers will disappear by 2100, including nearly all in western Canada, the US and the Alps.

Above is Salgado’s photo of a massive glacier moving through the mountains of Kluane National Park in Canada. Below, clouds shroud the ice mushroom atop Patagonia’s Cerro Torre.

Finally, the image below shows a glacier breaking away from a rocky coastline in Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park, both surfaces roughened by the ice flow.

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