By the time I boarded the Greg Mortimer in Ushuaia, Antarctica wasn’t new to me. I had spent the last two seasons chasing the surreal landscapes of the White Continent—icebergs the size of cathedrals, penguin colonies stretching to the horizon, that electric silence that fills your chest when you stand alone on a frozen shore.

I have always felt the magnetic pull of the Arctic—a place where the raw power of nature is on full display, where ice and sea merge in a dance that has shaped our planet for millennia.