yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Exploring Iceland in Winter | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 10, 2024

Iceland is full of stories. As a National Geographic photographer, I voyage across the circumpolar Arctic, immersing myself in some of the most raw yet beautiful places on the planet. For this adventure, I'm exploring Iceland in winter.

This time of year, the land is covered in darkness. I'm on a journey to find the rare glimpses of light in the midst of that darkness that revealed just how incredible this place is. Thousands of winters are written into Iceland's glaciers, embedded into each layer of ice as it is formed in the low light of evening. I walk deep into the glacier's heart.

I'm traveling through time. The most ancient ice is the clearest and bluest. The color and shape is what draws me in. As the dim evening light turns to complete darkness, I come upon a wrecked DC-3 airplane from decades ago, revealed by the light of the aurora borealis. The darkness recedes just enough to see the landscapes take shape again.

The small northern island, with its fresh volcanic landscape, is full of the push and pull of mighty forces. Mountains rise out of the sea in dramatic shape. And where water touches Earth, it becomes a sculptor, drawing tracks and trails as it cascades across the volcanic rocks.

As the light of the sun begins to appear again, my journey has come full circle. The light that reaches my camera's eye is just a few photons, but those photons are a million years old, and they speak to me. That's just it. The darkness slows me down.

The photographic process slows me down, enough to listen to the stories that the land has to tell. Free of professional kit and lighting and crew, it's just me and the Oppo Find X5 Pro, listening. And when I've learned to listen, each photograph transcends a single moment, a window into the past that illuminates our vision of the future.

More Articles

View All
Why Top Investors are Warning of a 'Lost Decade' for Stocks
A few weeks ago, Goldman Sachs put out this note saying that they believe the S&P 500 during the next 10 years will deliver a real return of just 1% annually. It’s a bit of a dire prediction. As you may have seen in the news over the past few weeks, i…
How to be Stoic in a Crisis
When a crisis is upon us, how can we deal with it in a Stoic way? When we look at Stoic literature, we’ll find some good advice that we can apply during times of hardship. Crises come in many different forms. We can have personal crises on a micro level, …
Indus Valley Civilization | Early Civilizations | World History | Khan Academy
As we’ve talked about in multiple videos, some of the earliest civilizations we have found have been around river valleys, and that is no coincidence. Because some of the first agriculture emerged around river valleys, and the agriculture supported higher…
Restoring the River's Flow | DamNation
Dropped my gear off, schlepped it all out over the fence, drove back down, parked the van, got on my bicycle, rode up there, stashed it. Gl’s canyons near vertical; it’s very steep, it’s dark, it’s a damp slippery dam with a 200t abyss right below. So we’…
Human impacts on the environment | Middle school Earth and space science | Khan Academy
Everything we do has an impact on the world around us that can be a good thing or a bad one. For most of us, that impact can seem pretty small. If you throw an empty can on the ground instead of in the recycling bin, your local park will still be pretty c…
Background of the Carthaginians | World History | Khan Academy
Gustin’s previous videos discuss how Rome became a republic in 509 BCE, but it’s worth noting—and I’ve done this in other videos—that at that point, Rome was not this vast empire; it was really just in control of Rome itself. But over the next few hundred…