Photographer Sebastiao Salgado says he set out to capture nature in its original state for his black and white series Genesis, which highlights breathtaking scenes of natural majesty. What he also emerged with was a sense of how fragile his subjects were—how such grandeur may disappear with the advent of climate change, leaving perhaps only the photographs behind. More information on Genesis , which is currently on view at the International Center of Photography, can be found here .
Chinstrap penguins in the South Sandwich Islands of the southern Atlantic. Population numbers of these birds are declining on the Antarctic peninsula, where it has warmed by 5 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 60 years. (Image Credit: Sebastiao Salgado/Amazonas – Contact Press Images)
“Since elephants are hunted by poachers in Zambia, they are scared
of humans and vehicles,” Salgado says. “Alarmed when they see an approaching car, they usually run quickly into the bush.” (Image Credit: Sebastiao Salgado/Amazonas – Contact Press Images)
The confluence of the Colorado and the Little Colorado rivers, located in Navajo Nation territory near the East Rim of the Grand Canyon. A proposed 420-acre development called the Grand Canyon Escalade has split the Navajo community, with some eager for the jobs and the economic boost from tourism dollars the development will bring, and others worried about the environmental impact on the East Rim. (Image Credit: Sebastiao Salgado/Amazonas – Contact Press Images)
In Siberia, Salgado followed the nomadic Nenets people, who travel along with their reindeer herds in the Arctic tundra. Climate change is impacting the Nenets in a variety of ways: Icy routes to new pastures aren’t freezing over at the usual time of the year or are melting earlier, and unusual late season snowstorms coinciding with the reindeer birthing season are endangering herds. (Image Credit: Sebastiao Salgado/Amazonas – Contact Press Images)
A whimsically sculpted iceberg between Paulet Island and the South Shetland Islands on the Antarctic Channel. Antarctica as a whole is not warming to the same degree as the Arctic, and in some places sea ice is expanding near the southernmost continent—but Western Antarctica (which contains the Antarctic peninsula) is one of the fastest warming places on Earth. (Image Credit: Sebastiao Salgado/Amazonas – Contact Press Images)
Waura Indians fish in Puilanga Lake, in the Upper Xingu region of Brazil’s Mato Grosso state. Brazil has restored forest rights to many indigenous groups over the past decade, which has slowed the destruction of rainforests and reduced the country’s carbon emissions by 3.2 billion tons. (Image Credit: Sebastiao Salgado/Amazonas – Contact Press Images)
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