“Nobody wakes up in the morning and looks at the long term climate forecast...They ask what the weather is today, where I live, and how it’s going to affect me. That distant future of an Earth best by floods, droughts, wildfires and typhoons isn’t distant anymore.” -TIME Magazine “Midnight Sun” is my expression of how I look back on my Antarctic experience through a present-day lens. Eight thousand miles from home, Antarctica acted as a stepping stone in my progression, cultivating a sense of urgency and providing me the distance necessary to take stock of my achievements and reassess my life goals. My worldview changed as I photographed the complexity of Antarctic life: icebergs calve, penguins migrate, climate changes. It is difficult to emotionally connect with an issue until one sees what is at risk of being lost, and I observed the grim reality that life in Antarctica faces. The idea that this utopic landscape could perish saddens me every day, and my stylistic technique aims to illustrate the rapidly approaching effects of climate change on Antarctica’s frozen terrain. Representing climate change, darkness engulfs the magnificent scenes, leaving a faint sense of hope through the snow’s dwindling luminescence. The black and white filter highlights the exigency of the situation, and I hope that action is soon taken to preserve the unique wildlife and boundless glaciers for future generations to come. As the Paris climate goals near their deadline, global media and the American government need to find more effective ways of connecting the population to the issues that are pulsating in front of their eyes; this disconnect continues to feed a man-made issue that truly affects everyone and everything, artificial and natural. These challenges encompass areas such as Antarctica, where “it has now been established that the Antarctic Circumpolar Current is warming more rapidly than the global ocean as a whole,” and the boundless ice succumbs to the increased temperatures. With almost 98 percent of the continent covered in ice, rising temperatures correlate to approximately 150 billion tons of ice melting yearly. Over time, this accumulated deterioration could lead to Antarctica’s disappearance in as little as 500 years. Calving, the shedding of ice from glaciers and icebergs, destroyed 1.9 percent of the ice shelf in Antarctica, in the past twenty years. Climate change is one of the few ever all-encompassing threats to mankind, calling to question the lack of public response to the continuous destruction occurring worldwide. When the issue becomes tangible and interesting, society will grab on. We are out of time, and humans need to rectify the harm they have done to the planet we were gifted with.