Written in ice
A documentary photographer and Rotarian captures beauty and fragility in a warming world
Franklin Island, Antarctica, 2017
Franklin Island teems with both life and death. Situated in Antarctica’s remote Ross Sea, this forlorn rock is home to a breeding colony of Adélie penguins. All around and underfoot are clumps of feathers from other penguins that perished in the harsh environment. It’s the whole circle of life: its beauty and its fragility.
Photographing in these boundaries of the known world — the polar regions that are our planet’s barometer — has become my calling: to show people the delicate balance of nature and the urgent need for scientific research and action.
My curiosity and fascination, or obsession, if you would call it that, took hold in 2013 during a trip to the far Arctic reaches of northern Norway. I stumbled upon a mysterious concrete slab with a metal door jutting out of a rocky hillside. The door led to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a safe repository for more than 1.3 million seed samples from around the world. It’s humanity’s last resort in the face of climate change and biodiversity loss. Its existence is a wake-up call.
Through visual storytelling and appearances at UN climate conferences, Rotary clubs, and elsewhere, I seek to show what is at stake — and to reconnect people with nature and its beauty, especially the white magic of terra incognita.
Bellingshausen Sea, Antarctica, 2017
Icebergs can carry signs of climate change. This one I saw had rotated 90 degrees, revealing deep, blue lines that daytime surface temperatures cut into the ice. It’s like an infographic, in scarred ice, showing a record of warmer periods over time.
Longyearbyen, Norway, 2013
The old mining town of Longyearbyen is the largest settlement on Spitsbergen Island in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago. In this photo, you see one of the old coal mines that are part of the area’s industrial heritage. This mine is inactive now, but it dominates the Arctic landscape.
Danco Island, Antarctica, 2017
An Antarctic gentoo penguin wanders past a vertebra of a humpback whale. Many whale species migrate to the Southern Ocean to feed on plankton and krill in the nutrient-rich waters.
Svalbard, Norway, 2014
I really like this photo of a near-whiteout. In a full whiteout, you really can’t see anything, no distance, no horizon. I took this photo in winter. It looks almost graphic because I intentionally overexposed the photo at dusk. You can’t see the snow falling because of the slow shutter speed.
Svalbard, Norway, 2013
Above the clouds you can make out an S shape in the mountain where a glacier — no longer there — had cut into the rocks. In the foreground, you see the ice melt, littered with plastic and other human artifacts. This is how the Arctic looks now. It’s warming four to six times faster than anywhere else in the world.
Ross Sea, Antarctica, 2017
Two Adélie penguins jump from the ice. They’re quite clumsy upon the ice, gliding, slipping, and falling down. In the water, though, they’re like spears, or perhaps ballerinas. They’re really, really fast and great swimmers. They need to be to avoid orcas and other predators.
Christian Clauwers is a member of the Rotary Club of Antwerpen-Oost, Belgium. To see more of his photography, learn about his books, or invite him to speak to your Rotary club, visit clauwers.com.
This story originally appeared in the April 2025 issue of Rotary magazine.