Maria Stenzel

Antarctica houses the mother lode of ice—90% of the Earth’s glacial ice is here. While East Antarctica’s ice sheet seems stable, the coastline of West Antarctica is changing. Warm ocean water is rapidly melting ice shelves along the edge of the Amundsen Sea, and the glaciers which feed into these ice shelves are accelerating. Scientists call the vast area west of the TransAntarctic mountains the “weak underbelly,” because much of the ice sheet sits on bedrock that is below sea level. If this ice were to melt, it could raise sea levels around the world from 6 to 16 feet. Will this process take one hundred years or thousands? Over time, as ice ages come and go, sea level goes up and down. Since the last ice age peaked 20,000 years ago, sea level has risen 400 feet—but the rise has not been constant—sometimes it jumps suddenly. By air and by ship, I traveled to West Antarctica from 2008 to 2010, with glaciologists, oceanographers, and marine biologists funded by NASA, the National Science Foundation and the British Antarctic Survey. These photographs document their investigations into glacial ice, sea ice and the marine ecosystem. Award: Pictures of the Year International (POYi), Global Vision Award Finalist, 2011

Sail six days southeast from the tip of South America through latitudes called the furious fifties and you strike the South Sandwich Islands, guarded by blue icebergs, millions of penguins, and an unforgiving sea. (This photo essay received a World Press Photo Award in 2007.)

With its glacier-carved peaks and fjords, southern Chile remains one of the wildest places on Earth. But that could soon change.

Crossing from Brazil through Peru and over the Andes, the Transoceanica is a controversial highway that would link the Atlantic - and Amazonia - to the Pacific. Many environmentalists are worried. With more than half the nation living in poverty, many Peruvians can't wait. Environmentalists fear that the new road will speed migration down to Peru's Amazon basin. A rush of migrants will bring environmental degredradation on a scale not yet seen in Peru's isolated Madre de Dios province. Already a gold mining boom and illegal mahogany logging have accelerated due to improvements along the road.

From the east to the west, Americans have different notions about what it means to live the American dream.

Around the world it's the same story but with different faces: age old cultures besieged by modern pressures. The faces here are drawn from three distinct peoples on three different continents. In Kenya, Ariaal warriors cling to a nomadic existence. Borneo's Penan face destruction of their rainforest home. And in the high desert of Bolivia the Chipaya persevere in an all but barren land.

Photojournalism projects made by undergraduate and graduate students at the Harvard Extension School and Emerson College. My students research, photograph, edit, write, and design magazine style photo essays.

Crisscrossing the country with truckloads of hives, they put their bees to work making honey and pollinating crops. About half the nation's 2,000 commercial beekeepers migrate with their bees.

Freethinker, patriot, huckster, and revolutionary who declared the body sacred and its appetites worthy of poems, Walt Whitman celebrated a republic of equals, from peddlers to presidents. His masterpiece, Leaves of Grass, was unappreciated in his day, but a century later Whitman’s voice still sings out—as fresh and vibrant as the roar of cities, the boom of surf.

Five centuries after Inca priests sacrificed three children on a high peak in Argentina, archeologists find them frozen to near perfection, accompanied by breathtaking textiles and artifacts.

In Madagascar paleontologists have unearthed some of the most spectacular fossils of dinosaurs and other Mesozoic animals ever found. These discoveries are revolutionizing ideas about life during the age of dinosaurs on the supercontinent of Gondwana.

I've been documenting life at Amherst College, a small liberal arts college in western Massachusetts, since 2016.