A gentoo penguin in the Antarctic Peninsula, Antarctica, checks that the coast is clear of leopard seals before heading offshore.
Paul Nicklen is a marine biologist, contributing National Geographic photographer and co-founder of SeaLegacy, a collective of some of today’s most renowned photographers, film-makers and storytellers working on behalf of the world’s oceans. He specializes in the polar regions with the aim of generating global awareness about wildlife issues.
A gentoo penguin in the Antarctic Peninsula, Antarctica, checks that the coast is clear of leopard seals before heading offshore.
I’m a photojournalist and conservation photographer and I’ve been working with National Geographic magazine for twenty years. Together with my partner, photographer Cristina Mittermeier (p. 114), I co-founded a non-profit called SeaLegacy to use the power of visual storytelling to drive change for our planet.
My parents were both from farming families in Saskatchewan in western Canada. In their early twenties, they were offered jobs in the Canadian Arctic on Baffin Island (then called Frobisher Bay), now known as Iqaluit. You either fall in love with the Arctic, or you despise it; there’s no middle ground. It’s cold, miserable and isolated and my brother loathed it. I, on the other hand, at four years old, fell in love with the ice, the snow, the landscape, the seascape, the people and the animals. From there, we moved to an even smaller community of 190 Inuit people called Kimmirut, then known as Lake Harbour. We were one of three non-Inuit families, with no television, radio or telephone. Groceries came once a year by a ship, which dropped them off on the shore of Baffin Island.
We lived, travelled and hunted with the Inuit on the land and I witnessed the compelling, true sense of community. Every door in the village was open; it was considered unacceptable (even rude and inappropriate) to knock. Without asking for permission to enter, you could walk in at any time of day, sit down and eat raw caribou or seal meat, then go back outside and carry on with whatever you were doing.
Overnight, a thin layer of ice forms on the surface of the sea surrounding Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago, Norway. By the end of the day, the ice will melt. At the time of photographing it seemed like a good ice year, but in reality the ice was thin and would soon disappear.
As sea ice melts the water turns a darker shade of blue, which holds more of the sun’s energy thus accelerating the melting process. Here, the water drains down a seal hole in sea ice in the Coronation Gulf, Nunavut, Canada.
The Inuit word atakai means ‘following in the footprints of wildlife’ and that’s what we did – we’d follow the tracks of bears and caribou across the tundra and sea ice. Growing up in the Arctic made me tough. I always say that the skill I have that separates me from all of my peers, the thing I’m the best in the world at, is being freezing, hungry, in pain and miserable. If I can’t feel my toes or fingers, I’ll keep working.
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I love being out on the sea ice. It’s so quiet that you feel a roar in your ears, almost like holding a seashell to your ear, but it’s dead silent. At minus forty [degrees Fahrenheit, which is the same in Celsius – minus forty degrees], hearing a crack or the crunching of a polar bear walking across the sea ice is a beautiful thing. From an artistic point of view, when it’s minus forty or fifty degrees, that’s when the polar regions become the most alive. For an artist, that’s when your canvas is the richest; the light is the most beautiful and the mist is coming off the ice and the ocean. If that means being cold and living on the sea ice for two months at a time and waiting for two good hours with the wildlife, it’s worth it. It’s obsession, passion and love that allows me to suck it up when working in those conditions. Based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (a personality assessment tool), I’m a massive extrovert, but even from the time I was young, all of my joy and pleasure in life comes from being alone in nature.
A ringed seal peeks through the glassy, calm surface of its seal hole, scanning for polar bears. Once it is sure that the coast is clear, it will move onto the ice to sun itself. These seals maintain up to five holes as they are constantly playing cat and mouse with polar bears.
During my first year at the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, I was walking back from class one night. I saw an advertisement for scuba diving and I remember being shocked that classes were open to the public. It was my lifelong dream! I had all of [ocean explorer, conservationist, film-maker and co-inventor of the Aqua-Lung] Jacques Cousteau’s books, I had encyclopedias and as my love of wildlife took me more and more underwater, I now had a chance to learn how to scuba dive. That was my defining moment. Once I was underwater, I was like, ‘Now what? I need to show the world what we’re seeing here’. I was working toward my biology degree and all day long, my professors were using chalk to draw pictures of anemone, fish and the mating behavior of animals and I wanted to say, ‘But all those things are right here!’
I bought a cheap Nikonos camera and made a deal with myself that if I maintained a D average, then I could maximize my diving time. Once I got into diving, I bought dry suits and tanks, but I was about to be kicked out of my dorm room because my bed and the scuba equipment smelled like rotten seaweed. I spent very little time studying; in exams, I’d rely on the deal I made with myself and work out what I needed to do to get a D. I didn’t have a car, so I’d put on my drysuit, weight belt and tank, strap my fins to the back of my motorcycle and drive off to my dive sites with 3,000 pounds of compressed air on my back. I would dive at night, in rainstorms, snowstorms and winter: it was dive, dive, dive, all the time. I eventually thought, ‘I’m going to take a photography course’ and once I did, I knew that was the direction I wanted to move toward.
‘This entire ecosystem is connected and it all starts with ice.’
A group of male narwhals perfectly framed by rotting sea ice is captured from an ultralight aeroplane fitted with amphibious floats, allowing it to take off and land on either water or sea ice.
Oil on the outer layer of plumage of a king penguin in Gold Harbour, South Georgia in the southern Atlantic Ocean, protects its feathers from the water.
‘Ice is like soil in the garden. A garden can’t grow without soil and without ice, the polar ecosystems can’t survive.’
I never thought it would be a career; I was diving because I wanted to see things. My whole world was sea life. One day, I was waiting for a friend in our dorm room when I clicked on the TV and saw the Cousteaus in the water with two killer whales. The whales surrounded them, then disappeared into the depths, both returning with sharks in their mouths, showing off. It was at that moment that I thought, ‘I know what I’m doing for the rest of my life – this is it’. It became clear to me that this was the path I had to follow. My priority became finding a way to earn enough money to buy underwater camera equipment and start pursuing that dream.
The next logical step was to become a biologist, so I spent the next four years finishing my degree. After those years of studying, it was a frustrating time in my life. I was twenty-six, working in a government job and I accepted my fate that I was going to become a biologist restricted to turning the beauty of these animals, this nature and their ecosystems, into data points on sheets of paper. My bosses started to get upset with me because I was taking camera equipment everywhere I went on my scientific projects. They eventually gave me an ultimatum: ‘Are you a photographer or a scientist?’ That was when I said, ‘I’m a photographer,’ and I left my job. I’d saved $60,000 and I was ready to take on my photo career, confidently announcing to the world that I was now a photographer. One year later, I was flat broke, having only sold a handful of pictures. I decided at that point to embark on a one-year journey to figure things out. I received a grant to work on a book, climbed into a small Cessna airplane and told the pilot to take me as far away from civilization as he could. I had six hundred pounds [two hundred and seventy-five kilograms] of equipment and he dropped me off in the middle of a barren landscape on the tundra of Canada’s Northwest Territories on a cold spring day. He landed the plane with skis on a frozen lake and I said, ‘If I’m alive, pick me up at the Arctic Ocean three months from now. I need to do this.’ The happiest moments of my life have been when I’m alone in nature. And to be in the middle of nowhere with nobody within five hundred miles [eight hundred kilometres] of me, I felt fulfilled. One of the images from that expedition made it into Canadian Geographic magazine’s ‘photo of the month’ feature and that made me hungrier for more.
An adult king penguin searches for its chick in a crowd of ‘Oakum boys’, the name given to king penguin chicks by sailors because of their resemblance to the Oakum fibres used to seal the gaps between timbers on wooden ships. As they mature the chicks will shed their fluffy brown feathers to reveal beautiful adult plumage, which is adapted to survive the frigid temperatures of the Antarctic Ocean.
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What’s mattered the most to me over the years is this desire to connect people to a world that I love – a world that I see changing before my eyes. As a biologist, I see the data that we collect and I know the science is essential. At the core of my work is art, science and conservation and my images have to be powerful, beautiful and evocative. If I’m using a telephoto lens to take a picture of a bear, wolf or fox, I’m shooting ID [identifying] photos of those animals. But if I’m four feet [one-and-a-quarter metres] away from a huge male Atlantic walrus, on my belly on the sea ice and using a 16mm, ultra-wide lens, then I have elevated the stature of the walrus. I’ve taken an animal that is perceived to be fat, ugly and warty and celebrated him as a charismatic, intelligent, fragile, vulnerable animal affected by climate change. I need to draw people in and art is what starts that conversation. I’m proud of the photograph I made of that beautiful ice face in Svalbard [a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Sea] that has multiple waterfalls pouring off it – and there’s an incredible story behind it (pp. 96–7). It’s in the art where I want people to say, ‘What is that? I need to know more.’ It opens the doors to teaching people that, based on science, we are in the warmest time that’s ever existed. We are losing our annual sea ice and we will see the loss of polar bears in the next one hundred years. And that’s the conversation: that we’re all in this together. Greta Thunberg is out there, starting a movement and she’s basically done what I’ve been dying to do for years, slowly and gently, as a journalist. To see what she has started is a beautiful thing.
The Nordaustlandet ice cap in the Svalbard archipelago, Norway, lies just 6,000 miles [9,600 kilometres] from the North Pole. Yet, at the time of photographing, the temperature was in the high sixties [degrees Fahrenheit, 20 degrees Celsius]. In the next ten to twenty years, the Arctic could become completely devoid of sea ice during the summer months.
I’ve always been around wildlife and after a while, when you spend more time with wildlife than humans, they become your friends. People ask me if polar bears are scary and I tell them that the only time I’ve ever really been scared was when I was attacked in the subway in New York City. I’ve seen 3,000 polar bears and I’ve never had a scary encounter. And yet for animals like polar bears, narwhals and wolves that are so often misrepresented, I am working to give these charismatic megafaunas a voice – to represent them and talk about their vulnerability. People see polar bears as scary and vicious. I want people to see them as vulnerable, fragile animals that are ultimately going to disappear at the hand of man and the lifestyles we’re leading.
To give some context to the habitat of polar bears, multi-year ice is ice that lives for many years; it survives throughout the entire summer and the fall, then freezes again the next winter and gets thicker and heavier. The thinner ice that doesn’t survive the summer is called annual ice. When the sun returns to the polar regions in spring, whether it’s the Arctic or the Antarctic, photosynthesis occurs. If you put a mask below the ice in spring, you’ll see the underside of the ice is entirely green: that’s the phytoplankton growing beneath the ice from the sun’s energy. And there are copepods, arthropods and zooplankton feeding on phytoplankton and millions of pounds of polar cod feeding on all this life – there are 300 species of microorganisms living inside the brine channels of this ice. The birds eat the polar cod. There are beluga whales; narwhals; bearded, ringed and harp seals; and at the top of the food chain, you have polar bears that specialize in eating seals and the odd whale. This entire ecosystem is connected and it all starts with ice. Ice is like soil in the garden. A garden can’t grow without soil and without ice, the polar ecosystems can’t survive. Many people think ice is thick, that it goes to the bottom of the sea – it doesn’t. On top of the ocean, there is a very thin layer of ice, anywhere from six inches [fifteen centimetres] to ten feet [three metres] thick. And because that ice is like topsoil, everything grows from the underside. There are very few polar bears who can survive in open water; the vast majority need ice as a platform to survive and that ice is freezing later every fall and melting earlier every spring. Some polar bears are now staying on land for anywhere from four to seven months, just waiting for any type of ice so they can feed.
A walrus dives from multilayer ice to feed on clams in Foxe Basin, Nunavut, Canada.
In 2017, Cristina and I were up in the Arctic and came across a huge, starving polar bear. He was lying on the tundra, like a blanket. He was so skinny and we thought he was dead. Then he stood up and I began to cry. He was like the walking dead. Scientists say we’re going to lose thirty per cent of the polar bear population by 2050; in just thirty years, we’re going to lose one-third of them. I want people to realize that although science is essential and we need the data, it’s not just data points falling off a sheet of paper – you also need the visuals to say to people, ‘This is what a starving bear looks like.’ I filmed that bear walking towards us, like a ghost. I was crying and trying to get the focus right, to make sure I did that bear justice by getting the shots. When we released that video to the world, two billion people saw it. People were really drawn to that story and they thanked us for putting it out there. You shoot these visuals because you care about these species and the ecosystems. You care about animals, from the top megafauna to the krill, the copepods and the arthropods. You want people to wake up and realize that this is the foundation of all life on earth, not just for these animals. On the other hand, we had a lot of pushback. There were many deniers and a lot of hate. People don’t want to deal with this; they want to attack the messenger and that’s probably one of the hardest things. We’ve got to stop attacking each other and acknowledge that we’re all on the same team. I don’t care who you are or what government you voted for; this is your only home.
An emperor penguin rockets towards the surface as it prepares to launch itself out of the water and onto the sea ice with a bellyful of fish.
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‘Change is happening. A little too late and too slowly, but it is happening and that’s what gives me hope. We know that there’s no other option but to fight for this and I think we are going to win. There is hope everywhere around us.’
As graceful as she is curious and playful, a leopard seal swims in close to inspect the photographer’s camera in the waters of the Antarctic Peninsula. Leopard seals are portrayed as the villain in almost every film that takes place in Antarctica, but are a charismatic, intelligent, vulnerable and misunderstood species.
Leopard seals are remarkable communicators, full of curiosity and display an excess of bravado for the first few minutes of a human encounter.
The most powerful encounter I’ve ever had with a wild animal was working with leopard seals in Antarctica. I’ve never believed that an animal is out to eat or attack humans. They’re often misunderstood – I’ve seen that with every species I’ve worked with – and I thought, ‘I’m going to go to Antarctica and get in the water with as many leopard seals as I can and find out if they are vicious. And if they are vicious, I’m going to report on that, but if they’re misunderstood, then I’m going to report on that.’ I was nervous, but I wanted to get to know this predator. The hardest part of the expedition was getting to Antarctica. We were in a fifty-foot [fifteen metre] boat in fifteen-foot [four-and-a-half-metre] seas and fifty knots of wind. It was miserable; I vomited for days, to the point that my diaphragm was in spasm.
When we finally arrived, I thought, ‘I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know if we’re going to find leopard seals.’ The previous year, the same boat didn’t find a single leopard seal because of the ice conditions. But we put the dinghy in the water and right away, we saw a massive female leopard seal. She was bigger than I had imagined, over 1,000 pounds [450 kilograms] and twelve feet [three-and-a-half metres] long. We were in a twelve-foot long Zodiac and she was longer than the boat. She immediately grabbed a penguin and started smashing it against the hull of the ship, trying to kill it. She moved away from us and started to do a death shake, whipping the penguin back and forth so fast I couldn’t see what was going on. The water was full of blood and guts because she had turned the penguin inside out to get rid of all the feathers. But I knew I had to get in the water. I put on my drysuit, hood, mask and snorkel and slipped over the edge of the boat. The leopard seal dropped the penguin and came over to me. Her head was twice as big as a grizzly bear and she was lunging at me. My head was basically inside her mouth. But I’d made promises to a magazine and you can’t publish excuses. I was thinking that while I was shooting, even though I was inside the mouth of a leopard seal, ‘Half-power on my strobes, F8, ISO 400; I’ve got to get these shots.’
And then she stopped, moved away a bit and then disappeared. I thought, ‘Well, that was amazing – scary, but amazing.’ She returned with a penguin in her mouth and let it go three feet [one metre] away from me. When it swam away, she’d grab it and she did this over and over again. Although I don’t like to anthropomorphize wildlife, I realized she was trying to feed me. When I didn’t accept it, she seemed to realize I couldn’t catch a live, swimming penguin, so she got another one and tired it out until it could barely swim away and ate it. By the second day, she started to bring me dead penguins; at one point, I had five dead penguins floating around my head and she just stared at me, wondering why I wasn’t eating. And then she started to flip penguins on top of my head and poke me in the ribs. By the fourth day, I could tell she was getting sick of it. She was starting to blow bubbles in my face and getting angry. At one point, she rolled on her back and made this deep, guttural jackhammering sound – guk-guk-guk – and I could feel it vibrate through my whole body. I thought she was going to attack me out of frustration. While she was making those noises, I saw something else move and realized another big leopard seal had snuck up behind me. That threat display was for the other seal, who also had a penguin. She chased the seal, grabbed its penguin and brought it back and donated that to me as well. I’d go to bed at night emotionally exhausted. I couldn’t sleep the first few nights, because I had gone from fearing I would fail the story to being force-fed penguins by a seal. It blew my mind.
‘By the second day, she started to bring me dead penguins; at one point, I had five dead penguins floating around my head and she just stared at me, wondering why I wasn’t eating.’
In a seal’s world, you’re either breeding or you’re feeding. Females are thirty per cent larger than males and on the feeding grounds, they are at the top of the hierarchy; they get the prime feeding spots when the baby penguin chicks are coming to sea for the first time and are easy pickings for them. This leopard seal had the best feeding spot and I had jumped right into it. In her mind, I had challenged her and when I didn’t leave after her threat display, I think she got confused and thought, ‘Well, you’re here to feed, you’re not a threat, but you’re not eating penguins, so what do you want?’ She tried to offer me a penguin to see what I wanted: ‘I will feed you a penguin and once you accept it, I will know why you’re here.’ When I didn’t accept a penguin, it drove her crazy. And it made the photography great! After the second day, I was laughing so hard: her whiskers in my face, pushing me in the cheek and my mask filling up with water. It was the best time.
A grizzly bear marks its scent on a tree at Fishing Branch, Yukon, Canada. New research shows that it is mostly males that rub on trees as a territorial claim to an area and as a means of communication.
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It is often the big, tough, macho men who have the strongest opinions on these ‘dangerous’ animals, which they use to justify big-game hunting or the like. Cristina and I have been working with grizzly bears and filming big brown bears and people are killing them from three hundred feet [ninety metres] away. If I said to those people, ‘You have to pull the trigger once that bear reaches three feet [one metre] from you,’ they’d get to know it so well that they could never pull the trigger. We were in the Canadian Arctic and winter was coming; it was minus twenty [degrees Fahrenheit, minus twenty-nine degrees Celsius] and there were brown bears all around us. One day, a big male bear that we called Morris started to chase a chum salmon up the river. Cristina and I were sitting on the edge of the river with our boots in the water and a salmon came right up underneath our feet. Cristina hasn’t spent that much time with bears, but when Morris came running our direction and was suddenly three feet away [ninety centimetres] from us, we sat there looking at him while remaining incredibly calm. When Morris realized we were there, he stiffened up; he was scared and bracing himself for impact because his instinct is to prepare for an attack. He was nervous, but we sat there, relaxed, speaking calmly to him, saying, ‘Hey buddy.’ The fish obviously got away, but Morris seemed to grasp that three feet was a safe distance from us. After that, he kept coming back to be around us and it was a great experience.
A female polar bear and her two seven-month-old cubs stand along the basalt shores of Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago, Norway. Cubs this young are not yet expert swimmers and cannot remain in cold water for long periods of time. The Svalbard archipelago has many glaciers and adult bears can swim far enough out to try and snatch an unsuspecting seal off a piece of drifting glacier or sea ice. But the glaciers are rapidly receding and such ice islands are becoming fewer.
By the time the project was over, all the bears had gone into hibernation. One evening, Cristina was in the cabin and I was down at the river, enjoying the massive scotch on ice that I’d poured for myself. And as I was sitting there, giving thanks for a great shoot, I heard a noise behind me. I looked back, figuring it had to be Cristina coming to join me, but it was Morris. He hadn’t gone into hibernation yet and was standing right behind me. He looked my way before walking right past and down to the river, grabbed a big chum salmon and came back to the bank where I was and sat beside me. And as I sipped my scotch and Morris smacked his lips while eating his fish, I looked up and down the river, thinking, ‘This is one of those life-defining moments.’
‘Right now, we’re sticking band-aids on problems. Every time we shop, every time we eat, every time we pull out our credit card and most of all, every time we vote, we are deciding for the type of planet that we want to occupy. That’s where we have to make real, systemic change, starting with ourselves.’
If we fast-forward one hundred years, we’re looking at the complete collapse of an entire ecosystem. Sea levels are rising and at some point, we’re going to shift from denial to the realization that we’re in trouble and that we need to act now. I think we’ll see a global disorder and a global collapse. It sounds negative, but if we don’t address this now, in one or two hundred years, we’re going to be on the path towards the sixth mass extinction of not just other animals, but human life as well. And we’re heading in that direction quickly. Some people get it; most people don’t. We need to correct our wrongs. Four billion years of evolution could be completely undone in the next fifty to one hundred years. Over one million species will go extinct in the next fifty years, including polar bears and emperor penguins. The only option is for humans to make radical, quick shifts. A movement has begun, thanks to the likes of Greta Thunberg. But will change occur fast enough? We have to prevail and I believe we will. The other option is to disappear and I think we’re too narcissistic to let that happen. But how much damage are we going to do in the process? Right now, we’re sticking band-aids on problems. Every time we shop, every time we eat, every time we pull out our credit card and most of all, every time we vote, we are deciding for the type of planet that we want to occupy. That’s where we have to make real, systemic change, starting with ourselves.
My second big assignment for National Geographic was in 2002 when I went through the Northwest Passage [a sea route that connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago] with some of the world’s top scientists. They were looking at the effects of climate change on sea life and at the biota that lived on the ice and how connected they were. I could not get a single one of those scientists to go on camera and say that climate change was here and it was now. They were all good people, real scientists with integrity, but they were worried about their reputations, their names and their careers if they spoke out openly about climate change. Seventeen years later, we’re all talking about it. Sometimes you have to crawl out from the forest and step out of the weeds to look at the big picture and realize that change is happening. A little too late and too slowly, but it is happening and that’s what gives me hope. We know that there’s no other option but to fight for this and I think we are going to win. There is hope everywhere around us.
With sea ice disappearing at an alarming rate, a polar bear is stranded on land in the Svalbard archipelago, Norway. When bears get hungry, they become inquisitive. This bear triggered an infrared beam and took his own picture while inspecting the photographer’s remote camera.
