While working on a story about climate change, the climate, well, changed. Photographer Katie Orlinsky, who has been documenting the effects of climate change in Arctic coastal communities for the past few months, was headed to Kotzebue, Alaska, in June to photograph the seal-hunting season for National Geographic News when she found out the seals were gone.

They had migrated nearly seven weeks early because the temperature of the water became too warm, leaving hunters in Alaska surprised, but ready to adapt. So she adapted along with them. Her story was now not about the hunt but about how climate change was, in her words, “transforming the relationship between people, animals, and the land.”

But she also wanted to illustrate