From Antarctica To Alaska, Adrift Is Magda Biernat’s Photographic Investigation Into Climate Change

Beyond environmental catastrophe, global warming is also threatening the cultural identity of native peoples. “Along a 35 kilometer stretch of coastline in northernmost Alaska, on the ancient hunting grounds of Piqniq, the Iñupiat Eskimos have hunted for centuries,” Biernat continues, “but as once massive herds of caribou dwindle and bowhead whales, walruses, and seals change their feeding and migration patterns, subsistence hunting has become more difficult. Hunters move to larger towns, leaving cabins which once provided shelter adrift on the thinning ice and shifting tundra.” The pictured hunting cabins of the Iñnupiat are mirrors of the lone ice mountains in the south: “singular polar structures under pressure by a changing ecosystem,” Biernat warns. They are “silent and static witnesses to change.”