Antarctica: The Waking Giant

If anyone can transport us into the soul of the White Continent, it’s photographer Sebastian Copeland. A professional polar explorer, Copeland has made several human-powered expeditions in frozen extremes, including the first transcontinental crossing of Antarctica from east to west via two of its poles, traveling on skis with kites for twenty-five hundred miles. Drawing from his on-foot experiences as well as seasons on a scientific research icebreaker, Antarctica: The Waking Giant is more than a decade in the making, and Copeland ground-truthed his pictures the hard way: breaking ribs, losing parts of his toes to frostbite, scuba diving under icebergs. The book holds one hundred fifty staggering photographs, from the vast, otherworldly interior to the wildlife-rich coasts, where whales break the surface and migrating birds and penguins mob the shorelines. In our rapidly changing, melting world, Copeland’s work is both celebration and warning, a potent reminder that no matter the distance, we are all in this together.