The Vanishing Arctic

A renowned wildlife photographer who goes where few would dare has become an indispensable witness to climate change

A renowned wildlife photographer who goes where few would dare has become an indispensable witness to climate change.

Paul NickleN is different from the rest of us. He likes to swim in 29-degree water beneath the Arctic ice, alone, in search of potentially predatory animals. Which can sometimes get him into trouble, like when he was nearly body-slammed by an 7,000-pound elephant seal. “The only thing, almost ever, that can kill you is panic,” he says. “It’s not that I’m willing to die. I think that I’m just not scared.” A marine biologist and wildlife photographer with more than 20 National Geographic assignments and 5.2 million Instagram followers to his credit, Nicklen grew up in Canada’s far-north Nunavut province and lived in the Arctic on and off for 25 years. “Being around big animals and nature and the cold and diving and ice is definitely my comfort zone,” says Nicklen, 50. “To have a 25-foot-long massive male killer whale come within two feet of me in the middle of a feeding frenzy is very calming to me. It’s beautiful.”

A lifetime of seeing the Arctic landscape through the camera lens — for years there was no TV, radio or telephone growing up, but his mom had a darkroom — has also made him a firsthand witness to climate change in the polar ecosystem. “It’s changing very dramatically, very quickly,” he says. The biggest difference is in the disappearance of multiyear ice, which is the backbone of the Arctic and home to a host of species that evolved to hunt and breed on it. Since 1985, 95 percent of it has melted. “I was completely lost in this bay that I’d been to many times,” Nicklen recalls of a recent trip to Svalbard, Norway. “I didn’t recognize it. The ice was gone. Where there used to be glaciers, there was now islands and rocks.”

In 2015, he co-founded SeaLegacy, a nonprofit that uses visual storytelling to raise awareness of ocean-conservation issues. A 2017 video he shot of a starving polar bear sifting through garbage for food did just that — it’s been viewed almost 2 billion times on YouTube. “I use charismatic megafauna like polar bears, leopard seals, orcas to connect people to that ecosystem,” he says. “Everything for me, when I’m in the polar region, at the core of that assignment is climate change.”

And he goes to extremes to do it. Nicklen — who’s been in two plane crashes, including one where he found himself trapped upside down in his cockpit in an Arctic lake — spends up to two months at a time camped out at the floe edge, where the ocean meets the ice, waiting to capture never-before-seen moments in the animal kingdom. “You want to be out there on the front lines of where a bowhead whale might pass by, and you can slip into the water,” he says. “I just want to see things that nobody else has ever seen. And not only see it but capture it on video or still pictures and share that with the world.”

PHOEBE NEIDL

“When I went through the Northwest Passage 20 years ago, we were on Canada’s biggest icebreaker; it was loud, it was aggressive. People are now going through on little homemade sailboats. . . . There’s no ice.”

“These animals dictate the encounters. I never push them. I always act very calm. I rarely make eye contact with them. Before you know it, you’re 30 feet from a polar bear, and that’s a dream situation.”

NATURAL HABITAT A polar bear in Svalbard, Norway. Some scientists fear a third of the species may be gone by 2030.

PERMANENT MELT The Nordaustlandet ice cap in Svalbard, Norway, in the summer. “Ice caps melt in warmer times of year, but everything is accelerated — water is pouring out full speed now,” says Nicklen, who had to postpone photographing polar bears in Svalbard for several years because there was no ice.

THE FROZEN FRONTIER “The first three to four minutes, you lose all feeling in your face, lips, cheeks, whatever is exposed,” says Nicklen, who dives under the ice for up to an hour at a time. “After 20 minutes, you can no longer feel your hands. You can’t feel yourself, but you can hear your camera clicking.”

RARE SIGHTING Narwhals are “incredibly shy and elusive,” says Nicklen, who tried for six years to photograph them before flying an ultralight plane and landing it on a drifting ice pad to get this shot. “It was an incredible moment.”

MARINE HUNTERS Polar bears live primarily on seals and walruses. “I’ve even seen them eat a beluga whale that they caught and dragged on the ice,” Nicklen says. “It was impressive.”

THIN ICE An aerial shot of ice off the coast of Nunavut, Canada. As ice gets thinner, it goes from white to blue and absorbs more of the sun’s heat, which accelerates melting.

FEEDING TIME Currents from beneath glaciers bring nutrients for kittiwake birds to feed on. “It’s all part of this system,” he says, but “100 percent of glaciers are disappearing.”