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

POLAR OBSESSION 360 | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Eleven years ago was my first trip to Antarctica. I came down here to do a story about the behavior of the leopard seal. My name is Paul Nicklin; it's my job as a photojournalist to capture the importance and the fragility of this place and bring this back to the world. Antarctica is a beautiful place, but it comes at a price. It's the getting there that's the hard part. We have to cross 550 miles of the roughest seas in the world. That's a 90-degree shift, constantly, 24 hours a day. But after four days of being confined to your bunk, it's like you're entering this dream line, and the dream is real.

What I love the most about Antarctica is that nothing is afraid of me. It is not a place where I feel lonely to be floating there in the water and then, like a ghost, a humpback whale comes cruising by, reaches out with a pectoral fin to see what I made of or what I'm doing in their waters. It's like coming back to see my old friend. And then to launch the zodiac and then to cruise alone amongst the icebergs, it's my homecoming in a land that you dream of when you're not there.

You're just a speck in this landscape of beauty. My only job at that point is creating these visuals that I can bring back to the world. I know there are leopard seals in the area, and the water, in a rare moment, is clear. I'm excited if there's a chance to meet a leopard seal in these conditions, but I'm also apprehensive by slipping below that curtain of the surface and looking underwater. I don't know what's gonna come and approach me. Every leopard seal is an individual.

They are a thousand pounds. They are twelve feet long. They are bigger than a grizzly bear. These leopard seals have never seen a human being in their hunting grounds before. The secret to any big wildlife predator is to let it dictate the encounter. They do these big dramatic threat displays, and I love it because, you know, they’re putting on a big show.

When curiosity overrides fear, at that point, you've got the seal, and the seal has you. In this case, I think the leopard seal became incredibly proud to show me how to catch a penguin, how to hold the penguin, and how to survive in this icy world. They are so smart; they want to communicate with you, and that's the beauty of these interactions is that these animals are trying to solve you.

You can watch in their eyes; it looks like they're smiling. They just love to have fun. I need to transport people into this world with the seal and to realize how beautiful it is and yet how fragile its ecosystem, where it lives, is. Their ecosystem is crumbling around them because of the lives that we're leading. The only chance it has for survival is us, as humans, changing our behaviors.

More Articles

View All
Greenhouse effect and greenhouse gases | High school biology | Khan Academy
In this video, we’re going to talk about the greenhouse effect and also the greenhouse gases which cause the greenhouse effect. Now let’s just start with a basic idea. Imagine if Earth had no atmosphere. What would happen? Well, you have the sun, which is…
"Where Love Is Illegal": Chronicling LGBT Stories of Love and Discrimination (Part 2) | Nat Geo Live
I was in Lagos, Nigeria in 2014 when I heard about five young men in the north of the country who faced the death penalty for committing gay acts. They were in the Sharia Law controlled part of the country. So I went up to see them. Fortunately, by the ti…
Warren Buffett's Value Investing Formula (For Dummies)
Value investing, originally coined by Benjamin Graham but popularized by Warren Buffett, is a long-term investing strategy that quite simply boils down to buying high-quality businesses when the stock price represents a solid discount to the business’s in…
What Blue Holes Have to Say About Climate Change | Years of Living Dangerously
We’re getting everything ready aboard this ship, here the, uh, Alucha research vessel. What we’ve got on board Alusia is we’ve got two subs; both subs are TH000 M rated. We probably, on board the ship, do the most thousand M diving in the world at this mo…
Let's talk about Dave Ramsey and why he doesn't like credit cards!
What’s up you guys, it’s Graham here. So, what are the comments I get a lot of on my channel, especially on my videos about getting a credit card and building your credit history? Comments like, “Dave Ramsey would let me show you drunk yet!” He’d have a …
Capturing the Year in an Instant | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic
Uh, the fire is approaching. It’s making this really loud wind, uh, sort of howling. You can hear the fire coming over the ridge line. Uh, just in the last 20 minutes it has become visible, so it jumped the ridge and is getting closer. That’s National Ge…