Over the past 15 years as a contributor to National Geographic, Maria Stenzel has traveled to the rain forest to photograph indigenous peoples, to Madagascar to document dinosaur digs, and to the Andes in search of an ancient Inca mummy. Like most photographers, she has found one region of the world that keeps calling her back—that place is Antarctica: the frozen underworld of big seas, ice, and a surprisingly large concentration of wildlife.

Stenzel's work in Antarctica began in 1995 with a voyage by Icebreaker to study the winter sea ice of the Southern Ocean with a team of scientists from the National Science Foundation. Her latest story, the South Sandwich Islands (NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, December 2006) earned World Press Photo Award. In praise of this article the American Society of Magazine Editors proclaimed, "After a century, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC managed to do the unthinkable and elevate the level of its own wondrous brand of photography. Never has the magazine's imagery been more relevant and brilliantly used to tell the epic story of our planet," citing Stenzel's "breathtaking images of penguins in the South Sandwich Islands."

The Deep South: Antarctica as Ground Zero for Climate Change
As climate change becomes a global concern Antarctica has become a vast laboratory in which the world's rising temperatures are having observable effects. Stenzel breaks down the facts and figures into something comprehensible for the general public, by introducing us to the beauty and surprising variety of the Antarctic, and showing us the complex web of life that depends upon its stability.