The discovery arrived as a table of numbers. In May 1985, three British Antarctic Survey scientists, Joseph Farman, Brian Gardiner and Jonathan Shanklin, published a short paper in Nature reporting that springtime ozone over Halley Bay had fallen catastrophically since the late 1970s. The measurements came from a Dobson spectrophotometer that had been operating at the station since 1956, an instrument so unglamorous that the finding was initially hard to credit. NASA had a sa

For thirty-six years the Chisso Corporation discharged methylmercury into the waters around Minamata, a fishing town on the Shiranui Sea in southwestern Japan. The company knew early that its wastewater was destroying local fisheries, and its own testing eventually confirmed heavy metals at concentrations capable of severe harm. Cats convulsed and drowned themselves in the bay. In 1956 the illness was formally identified in humans, and Chisso kept discharging until 1968. Merc

Chris Jordan went to Midway Atoll in September 2009 expecting to photograph a garbage patch. Like most people who had heard of the North Pacific Gyre, he imagined something you could stand in front of, an island of trash the size of a state, visible and therefore photographable. What is actually out there is a thin suspension of degraded plastic spread across an enormous volume of water, largely invisible from a boat and completely invisible from the air. Jordan found the gar

On June 3, 2010, six weeks into the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Associated Press photographer Charlie Riedel reached East Grand Terre Island off the Louisiana coast and found the birds. The frames he made that day are among the most reproduced environmental photographs of the century: a brown pelican on the sand, feathers welded flat under a coat of crude the color and consistency of melted chocolate, wings half-lifted in an attempt to open that the oil will not permit. In an

On the morning of Sunday, June 22, 1969, sparks from a passing train fell onto an oil slick floating on the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland. The slick caught. Fire crews and a city fireboat had the blaze out in roughly half an hour, and the damage, confined to two railroad bridges, ran to somewhere between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars. Cleveland's Plain Dealer gave it six paragraphs, buried inside the next day's paper. There is no known photograph of the fire. It was over

In 2006, National Geographic photographer James Balog set up time-lapse cameras on glaciers across the Arctic, Alaska, Greenland, and Iceland. His instructions to his equipment were simple: take a photograph every hour that the sun is up, for years on end. The resulting archive — eventually millions of images — became the foundation of the Extreme Ice Survey, the most comprehensive photographic documentation of glacial retreat ever assembled. Where climate science had long pr

In 1999, climate scientist Michael Mann and his colleagues published a reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperatures going back nine hundred years. The resulting graph was shaped like a hockey stick lying on its side: a long, nearly flat blade representing centuries of gradual, natural climate variation, and then, at the far right, a sharp and near-vertical rise corresponding to the twentieth century. It was not a photograph. It had no dramatic composition or artful ligh

On December 24, 1968, astronaut William Anders was circling the Moon aboard Apollo 8 when he looked out the window and saw something that no human had ever witnessed: Earth — the entire Earth — rising above a grey lunar horizon. He grabbed his camera. "Oh my God, look at that picture over there!" he told his crewmates. "Here's the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty." The photograph he took in those frantic seconds became one of the most reproduced images in history. But its

There is something uniquely disorienting about this photograph. The sky is clear. The sun is shining. And the streets of Miami Beach are underwater. Taken in November 2014 by Dutch photojournalist Kadir Van Lohuizen during a king tide event, the image shows workers wading through flood water on a bright, ordinary afternoon, checking whether the drainage system is blocked. No storm is visible. No clouds. The flooding has come not from above, but from below — rising through the

Most environmental photography places humans and nature in separate frames. Nick Brandt's ongoing series The Day May Break refuses that separation entirely. In these images, people and animals share the same space — not metaphorically, but literally, photographed together in the same frame at the same moment. A Kenyan family displaced by flooding stands in the fog alongside Najin, one of the last two northern white rhinos alive on Earth. A woman from Zimbabwe, who lost two y

From the air, the image looks almost abstract — six large forms arranged in a loose spiral on dry, ochre earth, their bodies emaciated and intertwined. It takes a moment for the mind to process what it is seeing. When it does, the impact is visceral. Photographer Ed Ram captured this aerial shot on December 10, 2021, at the Sabuli Wildlife Conservancy in Wajir County, northeastern Kenya, while covering the region's devastating drought for Getty Images and the Guardian. The st

There are photographs that inform, and then there are photographs that haunt. Cristina Mittermeier's image of a starving polar bear, shot on Somerset Island in the Canadian Arctic in August 2017, belongs firmly in the second category. When Mittermeier and her SeaLegacy co-founder Paul Nicklen arrived at a remote cove by boat, they initially couldn't even find the bear. Only when it lifted its head from the ground — lying there, Mittermeier recalled, "like an abandoned rug, ne

Between 2021 and 2022, a stark white band appeared along the rocky cliffs surrounding Lake Mead, the massive reservoir on the Nevada-Arizona border that supplies water to 25 million people across the American Southwest. Photographers working for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other major publications captured images of this "bathtub ring"—a chalky white mineral deposit marking where the water's surface had been just two decades earlier. The contrast was jarring:

In August 2019, satellite imagery from NASA and NOAA revealed a sight that seemed almost apocalyptic: vast plumes of smoke from thousands of fires in the Amazon rainforest, so extensive they were visible from space and had darkened the skies of São Paulo—a city over 1,700 miles away—in the middle of the afternoon. The photographs and satellite data, published by major news outlets worldwide, showed bright orange fire hotspots scattered across Brazil's northern states like a r

When climate scientist Ed Hawkins posted a simple graphic on social media in May 2018, he could hardly have anticipated that within months it would appear on the steps of the United Nations, across the front pages of newspapers worldwide, and even on the warming-up jackets of soccer teams. The "warming stripes" or "climate stripes" visualization stripped climate data down to its absolute essence: a series of vertical bars, progressing from cool blues on the left to alarming r

In 2013, a photograph emerged from the rainforests of Indonesian Borneo that would crystallize the global conversation about deforestation in a single, heartbreaking frame. The image, captured by International Animal Rescue during a rescue operation, showed a lone orangutan confronting a bulldozer that was demolishing its forest home. Standing upright on the mechanical arm of the excavator, the great ape appeared to be physically attempting to stop the machine's advance—a ges

To understand why Tuvalu's government would orchestrate such an unusual photo opportunity, you need to understand what's at stake for this small nation. Tuvalu consists of nine coral atolls scattered across the Pacific Ocean, midway between Hawaii and Australia. The entire country covers just 10 square miles of land, with a population of around 11,000 people. And crucially, no point in Tuvalu rises more than 15 feet above sea level. This makes Tuvalu one of the most vulnerabl

Glacier National Park in Montana offers perhaps the most documented case of glacial retreat in North America. When the park was established in 1910, it contained approximately 150 glaciers. Today, fewer than 25 remain, and most of those are mere shadows of their former selves. The repeat photography project at Glacier National Park has produced some of the most striking before-and-after images available. Grinnell Glacier, one of the park's most photographed ice masses, has lo

At 9:30 AM on September 9, 2020, San Francisco photographer Christopher Michel stepped outside to document what seemed impossible: the city was bathed in an apocalyptic orange glow that turned day into a perpetual, eerie twilight. His photograph of the Bay Bridge shrouded in dense orange atmosphere—streetlights still illuminated against what should have been morning sky—captured a moment when climate change transformed one of America's most iconic cities into something from a

On May 10, 2019, photographer Steve Belasco was documenting erosion damage along North Carolina's Outer Banks when he captured the exact moment a beach house in Rodanthe began its final collapse into the Atlantic Ocean. His photograph—showing the modern two-story vacation home tilting precariously as waves consumed its foundation, its deck already twisted and broken—would become one of the most shared climate change images of the year. Unlike distant melting glaciers or abstr