The InterDependent

Have you ever tried to imagine what the windiest, coldest and driest places on earth look like?

A United Nations dual photography exhibition through mid-April on the Arctic and Antarctica helps you visualize just how incredibly still and beautiful these two regions are through pictures by two Swedes of both the rough landscapes and active animal life.

“Once Upon a Time … in Antarctica,” by Stig Gustafsson, is a wide-ranging tour of the continent’s dry valleys, glaciers and ice floes as well as a lens on the continent’s penguins. Gustafsson is a wildlife photographer and filmmaker whose images have been featured worldwide in exhibitions and publications and teaches about climate at the University of Gothenburg. He used an Olympus OM4TI in Antarctica, which he described as a land of mountain and snow. He took the photos 10 years ago on an expedition at the end of the continent’s summer (in January and February), on behalf of a Swedish government grant and the European Union.

“Gateway to the Arctic,” by Jens Thuresson, who is also Swedish, presents scenes from the northern netherworld, where as a wildlife photographer he, too, focused on the landscape and native animals -- mostly polar bears -- making trips there from 2000 to 2005. Thuresson’s photos have been displayed throughout Scandinavia; in addition, he has received commissions from the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation and the Swedish Tourist Association and held lectures on how climate change affects the North Pole.

Stig Gustafsson

The Canada Glacier in Antarctica, a small polar glacier that is technically in the continent's desert ecosystem because it receives less than 10 centimeters of snowfall a year.

The lobby exhibition is open to the public during the week and on weekends (from about 9 a.m. to 4:15 p.m.) and is sponsored by the Swedish mission to the UN and the Swedish consulate general in New York and supported by the University of Gothenburg. It coincides with the 100-year-anniversary of the first Antarctic expedition to reach the South Pole, led by Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian explorer. By focusing on Antarctica and the Arctic, regions that more than anywhere else reflect the health of our planet, the show aims to draw attention to the vagaries of climate change and global warming.

The Arctic ice, for one, “is more or less gone,” Gustafsson said in an e-mail interview with The InterDependent. It is an ocean littered with icebergs broken off from glaciers. The sea ice accumulates over several years, while the land ice is in limited spots, the largest being the Greenland ice sheet. The North Pole’s annual mean temperature is zero degrees Fahrenheit.

Antarctica, a far more habitable environment relatively, is “an exceptional place wherever you go – the most beautiful place on earth,” Gustafsson said. Difficult to reach – he was flown by helicopter to most spots -- the continent is “so peaceful, so quiet, you feel like you’re nothing, so small,” he added, noting that the “next step must be eternity.”

Jens Thuresson

Polar bears in the Arctic face challenging conditions that are threatening their very existence. A photo exhibition at the UN on the North and South Poles offers glimpses of these remote locations.

Gustafsson is equally impassioned about the Arctic. “Global warming has brought a disaster to this white land,” he said. “Here, the ice is melting, and ice-water places are everywhere, with floating ice around.”
He added: “The situation is very bad for polar bears in the Arctic, now they even have to hunt from land.”

It has been widely reported in academia and the media that some of the bears’ feeding patterns are changing because of warmer temperatures in the Arctic, leaving them less ice and time to forage for seals, causing them to become thinner and reducing their population.