Melting Away: A Ten-Year Journey through Our Endangered Polar Regions

With Wagnerian starkness, photographer Camille Seaman portrays the grandeur of nature’s ice sculptures in the polar regions. Over a period of ten years this intrepid recorder has captured the massive silhouettes of the glaciers and their birthing icebergs in the arctic and Antarctic. Each of the awesome photographs of the polar regions impresses the eye, but the filmed evidence of the erosive melting of these landmark features emphasizes the damage incurred by global heating. Not only is the pristine terrain dissolving, but with its loss the penguins, skua, polar bears, terns, and too many other species are impacted. Each illustration is affectingly described, noting the mood of the scene and the past explorers of the regions. Interspersed among these photographic treasures are short biographical sketches of this quixotic, determined researcher. Child of an African American–Italian mother and a Native American Shinnecock father, the author developed her own unique set of values. She elegantly relays the message that change is part of nature but that our fragile planet is suffering, and its biotic and abiotic forms should be revered and regarded as an interconnected ecosystem. Both the photos and text impress the reader with their lyrical beauty.