Jamie Hawkesworth: To the Antarctic

The truth is, Antarctica has never been the same. It’s almost unfair to call it the seventh continent, even if that’s how many travelers see it, the last item on a bucket list. Antarctica is more like a second Earth. Photographer Jamie Hawkesworth has captured the landscape and life of Antarctica in an awe-inspiring way.

Antarctica’s forbidding landscape is, in essence, a vast collection of ice in all its shapes, forms and densities, surrounded by water that was either just ice or is about to become ice again. It is a thousand shades of blue, from near pitch-black to the most brilliant turquoise, capped with a hundred shades of white. Depending on the time of year, the sun might never set or never rise. Our tenuous, alien settlements there are still no match for penguin colonies filled with tens of thousands of residents, or the associations of humpback whales whose singing is rivaled only by the howling of the ice itself.

It’s easier to care about a place after you’ve touched it—and easier still after it has touched you. Stand in the middle of all that upheaval and melt, float in a kayak at the source of our rising seas, and you’ll feel less like an agent of change and more like the object of it. You’re the one who will never be the same.