The captain of our small zodiac boat turned off the humming engine with a flourish. “Now, I must ask you to please be very, very silent. No more click-click-click with all your machines. Maybe you can even try not to breathe,” she joked in a heavy Norwegian accent, a touch of Nordic humor playing on her lips. “And just be peaceful… Just listen”. I was grateful to her in that moment, because above everything else that day I had been longing to lose myself in the deafening silence of Antarctica. Suddenly, every whisper was intensified across the tranquil bay – the tinkling of water droplets trickling down icebergs, the gentle bobbing of the boat’s sides against floating glacial ice, the air sharp and pure and bitingly fresh, the sun sparkling warm, bright and clear and the clouds shining pink. And then, a long, long way away, a glacier began to groan, its moans echoing out over the empty abyss as its heaving rivers slowly carved their way through the desolate landscape and poured into the frozen sea.

Antarctica, with her monumental walls of ice and stone, rises out of the clouds like a forgotten mirage. Time and time again, I kept being struck by the primordiality of the land. This is a place that belongs not to humans but to creatures and mountains, to ice sheets and krill, to gale force winds and yawning crevasses which plunge deep into the earth. It has no place nor time for humans. It belongs more to our Earth than we ever will and yet belongs to another Earth entirely. Time, that slippery compass point, seems an absurd and pointless measure here. The stoic wisdom of the dark peaks, the earnest immediacy of the porpoising penguins, the prehistoric songs of humpback whales as they glide like noble giants through the waters – what use have they for our trials and tribulations? As Richard Dawkins says, “Nature is not cruel, or pitiless. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply indifferent to all suffering.”

After our captain turned the motor back on, she meandered our boat through a chessboard obstacle course of ice – pancake ice, sheet ice, all improbable shapes – bright emerald stark blue, their crevasses turning deeper shades of azure that watched us with celestial eyes. I sat for a while on the cool stones after we disembarked on shore (my first hesitant steps on an entire new continent) and observed the seals twisting their puppy-eyed heads and the waddling of the penguins, contemplating their life amongst the silent towers, little soldiers in the sweeping vastness of the land that emptied out behind them. I imaged the scene when we would once again leave, the hubbub of the human just a sigh and ghost.

Despite the warm sun, the crew told us that it was colder than usual for this time of year, and somehow that excited me, the chill in the breeze, the expectancy of danger. There’s a word in Greek, lachesism, which translates as the hunger for disaster, that feeling you get when you see a thunderstorm in the horizon and find yourself hoping it pours over you. A part of our souls long for it. I shivered as it woke inside of me.

A few days earlier, we landed on an island in Mikkelson Harbour which was home to a small red hut worn burgundy by the passage of the seasons, an Argentinian outpost amidst all this unforgiving madness. I laid my hand upon a weathered whale bone, a colossal dorsal fin beached on the shore, other bones scattered across the barren stones. Chinstrap penguins stumbled amongst the remains and the carcasses of their own brothers which were slowly dissolving into the sticky brown clay. The smell was pungent. In the horizon, glaciers rose thick into the clouds, some over two thousand meters in height. And the colors. Your vision into the distance here is infinitely sharp. You would think the Antarctic works with a limited palette – black, white, blue – but with ever-changing clouds it morphs in a second into husky, profound shades of mauve, silver, purple, pink, metallic and pure, otherworldly clean.

There are many kinds of icebergs in Antarctica – tabular, dome, wedge, dry rock, pinnacle. The continent contains about ninety percent of the planet’s freshwater ice and around seventy percent of all the fresh water on earth. But then there’s the wrong kind of icebergs. The ones that shouldn’t be there. The ones that man carved off with a giant invisible chisel from miles away. These are called the Larsen ice shelves and technically aren’t icebergs at all but rather are obscene frozen masses the size of small countries which broke from the mainland over a decade ago due to global warming and rising sea temperatures.

Ice shelves are the gatekeepers for glaciers flowing from Antarctica toward the ocean. Without them, glacial ice enters the ocean faster and accelerates the pace of global sea level rise. As you’re reading these words, a massive crack in the remaining Larsen ice shelf continues to spread, extending for almost a thousand miles, currently hanging on only by a twelve-mile thread. When it finally breaks off and falls into the sea, it will create a massive iceberg larger than Rhode Island.

It’s hard to explain the feeling that comes over you when you are in the presence of these things, floating in the inky crest capped waters, the most ominous hungry cold looking water you’ll ever see. Only one seventh of their mass emerges from the sea; the water they contain could feed entire cities for generations. And they should not have been there. It was chilling. Their silent vastness pointed accusatory fingers at mankind. What have we done? Our frenzied activities and distracted apathy, our insatiable lust for stuff and just more pointless stuff cause massive slabs of ice to calve off at the bottom of the world. A butterfly’s wings can break off mountains. Those shelves looked at us and asked, why? We never hear or feel their cries because we live in sanitised tin cans. Tap those cans though and they sound a little hollow, don’t they…?

As we sailed past this post-apocalyptic scene, I understood that somehow, nature would always be ok and rather it is us humans who will just come and go, specks on the windscreen and trails of dust. But why miss such a glorious opportunity to experience our world this time round?

I had travelled to Antarctica aboard an expedition called 2041 led by the polar explorer Robert Swan, whose aim is to raise awareness about climate change amongst a new generation of conservation leaders and help protect the last wildernesses we have left. In the year 2041, the international treaty which dictates that Antarctica is only to be used for peaceful and scientific purposes will be up for re-evaluation. Under her thick snow and ice lie buried countless minerals, oil, coal, precious stones, receptacles of human greed. We know how these stories tend to turn out. Let’s not be fools yet again.

But this is also a tale of hope. As we sailed away through the Drake Passage, a body of water where the Pacific and Atlantic oceans meet and the equivalent of five thousand Amazonian rivers cause some of the largest swells known to man, we pondered the future of our planet. It can often feel that as an individual, you can’t do much to make a difference. But this isn’t necessarily true. Try to be aware about every little object you hold in your hands, use, throw out – it’s weird, once you kind of flip that switch, you do wake up. Ultimately though, we need to drastically change the underlying conditions in which the world works to incentivise individual behaviours; instead of just ‘managing’ waste, let’s design it out from the start through circular systems thinking and design-led systems change.

We should consider ourselves incredibly fortunate and indeed excited be alive in these times. More than ever, we are witnessing a growing awareness around our responsibility towards the planet and an ever-increasing stream of exponential technologies and innovations which promise fascinating and beautiful new solutions. The Earth is not ours to plunder, and all things are connected. If she suffers, so do we. A wise native American chieftain once said the following words: “Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of the earth. We do not own the freshness of the air or the sparkle of the water. And what is it to say goodbye to our connection with the land? The end of living and the beginning of survival.” We would do well to heed his words.

Scroll to the gallery below for more images… 

(I don’t have the space, nor would pretend to have the necessary expertise, to delve into the immense subject of climate solutions here but if you’re interested to know more, one of the most comprehensive guides to reframing the debate and a list of wonderful solutions can be a found in a book coming out later this month, or be introduced in this video).