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 astonishing 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 labourers and migrants in years-long, globe-spanning projects.

But after photographing the Rwandan genocide, Salgado became depressed, retreating to his family farm in Brazil. Dismayed by the environmental destruction he found, he began restoring the Atlantic rainforest there, which eventually inspired him to return to photography. The Genesis project followed, to capture “what was pristine 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. These travels turned him into an environmentalist, Salgado said in another interview.

Glaciers, published this month following Salgado’s death last year, collects 65 of the black-and-white shots of glaciers and other ice the photographer took for Genesis. The images are seemingly timeless, freeze-frames of the big and small movements of the coldest regions. A parade of penguins dive off an iceberg into the roiling seas off the South Sandwich Islands in the main image. Seabirds swoop low near a tower of ice in the same area in the shot below.

But of course, the images aren’t timeless, as every year Earth loses 1000 glaciers, and the number is rising. On our current warming trajectory, about four-fifths of glaciers will disappear by 2100, including almost all in western Canada, the US and the Alps.

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

Finally, the image below shows a glacier separating from the rocky shore in Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park, both of their surfaces worn rough by the flow of ice.