Sebastião Salgado’s stunning shots of the world’s icy regions

Sebastião Salgado became famous for his portraits of humans struggling to survive in an unjust and violent world. He took stunning photographs of the attempted assassination of US President Ronald Reagan, covered conflicts in Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East, and documented the lives of workers and migrants in projects that spanned several years and on a global scale.

But after photographing the Rwandan genocide, Salgado fell into depression and retreated to his family farm in Brazil. Appalled by the environmental destruction he saw, he began restoring the Atlantic rainforest, which ultimately inspired him to return to photography. Project Genesis followed, to capture “what was intact and hadn’t been destroyed” on the planet, as Selgado said in a 2024 interview, from the mountains of Alaska to the indigenous peoples of the Amazon. Those trips made him an environmentalist, Salgado said in another interview.

Glacierreleased this month after Salgado’s death last year, brings together 65 of the photographer’s black-and-white photos of glaciers and other ice taken for Genesis. The images seem timeless, freeze frames of small and large movements from the coldest regions. In the main image, a parade of penguins dives from an iceberg into the rough seas off the South Sandwich Islands. Seabirds dive low near an ice tower in the same area as pictured below.

But of course the images are not timeless, because every year the Earth loses 1,000 glaciers and that number keeps increasing. Under our current warming trajectory, about four-fifths of glaciers will disappear by 2100, including across almost all of western Canada, the United States, and the Alps.

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

Finally, the image below shows a glacier separating from the rocky coast of Torres del Paine National Park in Chile, both of their surfaces roughened by ice flow.