As of November, Sebastian’s North Pole adventure film, Into The Cold–A Journey of the Soul, can be seen on demand on Netflix. The film chronicles Sebastian and partner Keith Heger’s centennial reach of the North Pole to commemorate Admiral Peary and team’s 1909 mission. The film premiered at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival and went on to win multiple awards internationally. The Hollywood Reporter called it one of the five Must-See-Films of the festival. It has been released internationally since.

On October 22, Sebastian appeared on a TV panel for Participant Media’s Take Part Live w/Kevin Hand, Planetary Scientist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, to discuss climate change at the poles.

For some (odd?) reason, Take Part  will not release the full segment. They did however allow this clip. Enjoy!
http://video.takepart.com/previews/18CHzrzf-hZng8bxh

On October 22nd, Sebastian hosted and moderated the European hour for Al Gore’s 24 Hours of Climate Reality, focusing on the cost of carbon in Europe. The hour examined the 500 year flood in Germany in the spring of 2013, the adaptation programs of the Netherlands to rising sea levels, and the 2010 wildfires in Russia that sparked the Arab Spring.

The hour featured short documentaries on rising infrastructural cost from climate related events in Europe and around the globe; it featured a panel on the rising cost of carbon with Dr. Rosina Bierbaum (University of Michigan), Maggie Fox (President & CEO of Climate Reality), Marta Szigeti Bonifert (Environment Committee of the Hungarian Business Leaders Forum), and Cors Beekman (Room for the River, Netherlands) with Sebastian moderating; the hour closed with an address by Vice President Al Gore. You can watch it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDiOc51LLMYCost of Carbon: Europe

The Gagosian Gallery in Berverly Hills teamed up with Sebastian for a special showing of his polar images to benefit the environmental non-profit the NRDC. The gallery show highlighted the threatened polar environment while 100% of the sales went to the NRDC for their advocacy campaigns on climate change.

Joel Reynolds, Western director of the NRDC, gave a short talk about the organization’s work, and Sebastian, a long time board member of the NGO Global Green USA  shared his experiences shooting in the polar regions, and their significance to the health of the planet.

A special limited NRDC edition of 3 was created for this occasion. The image below sold out of its edition. It remains available for private sale in two different sizes.

Sebastian participated in a televised panel on climate change called 24 Hours of Climate Reality. The panel examined climate transformations taking place in the Arctic and their global consequences. Vice president Al Gore, Dr.Stephen Pekar, adventurer Doug Stoup and other joined the panel. You can view the segment here:

http://climaterealityproject.org/24hours2012/live-broadcast/hour-05-the-arctic/

400. That is the symbolic milestone of concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere in parts per million. It is increasing at the rate of 2.5 PPM per year and seems to accelerate. Not in at least one million years has the planet seen such high concentration of carbon dioxide and other heat trapping gases in the atmosphere.
If you wonder what it means, this is the most direct threat to humanity and most living species that have thrived on this planet for the last 65 million years.
We cannot grow in perpetuity in a finite environment. It is time to have less and do more, and do more intelligently with what we have at our disposal.

Read more here: http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/10/us/climate-change/index.html

                                 My new exhibition “A Million Faces Of Ice” has just premiered in Munich at the Bernheimer Gallery. The show is a retrospective of multiple trips to the poles, and features some of the new works from Antarctica. It will be up until the middle of April. If you cannot see it there, you can visit the show here:

http://www.bernheimer.com/photography/en/exhibition/371/antarctica-a-million-faces-of-ice-0

The Chukchi and Beaufort Seas are temporarily saved from devastating drilling as Shell Oil is postponing its plans again for another year, making this the second consecutive postponement for drilling in the region. This after the coast guard found multiple and potentially disastrous violations of safety protocols, and after one of Shell’s platforms run aground. The decision confirms what scientists and environmentalists alike have been arguing for decades: drilling in the Arctic is unsafe, and too hazardous to risk long term devastation for short term gain. This issue has not gone away, but it is a breath into an ongoing battle for life. The solutions to our problems do not lie at the bottom of the Arctic ocean in its stored reserve of greenhouse creating fossil fuels; they exist in the air that we breath, the sun that reaches us, the oceans and the currents: it is time we commit to recycling the power of nature into our energy needs, and a market transformation to a sustainable future.

http://ens-newswire.com/2013/02/27/shell-oil-cancels-offshore-alaska-drilling-for-2013/