World-Renowned Photographer Documents Most Remote Ecosystems on Earth

By Andrea Kavanagh
World-renowned photojournalist Paul Nicklen, who has been documenting the polar regions and their native wildlife for more than 20 years, is motivated by more than the quest for a great shot.
He is on a mission to generate global awareness of the changing environment and threats to wildlife in both the Arctic and Antarctic, a drive he attributes to growing up among the Inuit in Canada and his early career as a marine biologist.
"I want my photos to document some of the most remote and stunning ecosystems on Earth and to show what's at risk if we don't protect our environment," Nicklen said.
He posts images to the 3.2 million followers of his popular Instagram feed of the animals and people he encounters while traveling, and seizes every opportunity to explain the importance of conserving some of the last untouched ecosystems on the planet.
On World Penguin Day, Nicklen provided stunning imagery of the iconic birds, taken during his visits to Antarctica, for a "takeover" of The Pew Charitable Trusts' conservation-focused Instagram feed.
Nicklen said the key to successfully photographing animals in the wild is patience. "You can't disturb your subjects or expect a quick shot. But if you keep watching, the natural world reveals itself in all of its incredible beauty."
Nicklen knows from extensive firsthand experience what is at stake if conservation of the polar regions is delayed.
"If we lose the sea ice, we lose this ecosystem," he observed. "While photographing Antarctica over the past two decades, I've seen [the] changes." Nicklen added that the oceans can be very resilient if humans take action to protect them. The 2016 designation of the world's largest marine protected area in the Ross Sea was a good first step. Now, he said, "we must protect more of these Antarctic ecosystems."
A full network of marine protected areas in the Southern Ocean would not only preserve connectivity among the many unique ecosystems in the region but also allow marine life to migrate between protected areas for breeding and foraging. Other reasons for shielding these areas from unrestrained human activity include how the circumpolar currents help sustain life well outside the region and Antarctica's role as a relatively pristine "living laboratory" for scientists studying climate change.
This October, two proposals for Southern Ocean marine protected areas are up for consideration during the annual meeting of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, the management body established to protect the Southern Ocean's biodiversity. One area would protect the Weddell Sea and the other would safeguard the waters off East Antarctica. If both are designated, the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources's 25 member governments would move closer to fulfilling the commitment they made in 2002 to establish a network of marine protected areas and preserve the intact and biodiverse Antarctic ecosystems for future generations.
Andrea Kavanagh directs The Pew Charitable Trusts' global penguin conservation program.
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The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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