Her out-of-office email reads, “I am traveling between the two poles for scientific expeditions and have very limited or no access to email.”



Such is life for photographer Esther Horvath, who has been on more than a dozen polar missions to document scientists working to better understand the changing polar regions. She has photographed researchers prepping to be trapped in Arctic ice for a year, a science base where life is anything but lonely; and observed how to grow plants in space by visiting the coldest place on Earth.



Most recently, she was aboard the icebreaker (pictured above) off Antarctica that dramatically discovered Ernest Shackleton’s pioneering polar vessel earlier this month, entombed two miles below the