12 5. Our ship, the National Geographic Explorer, or as Al Gore called it, “Destination Reality.” The ship was dwarfed by a tabular iceberg — a huge flat slab of sea ice and glacier that has cracked loose and drifted away. A few years ago, a tabular iceberg the size of Rhode Island broke loose from the Antarctic’s Larsen Ice Shelf, which had been stable for the last 22,000 years. Our mission was to experience what’s really happening to the planet, in its remotest reaches, far from Washington, D.C.’s gridlock and industry-funded denials. 6. Christy Wallace and Al Gore. 7. Along with the great variety of seals and penguins were whales, including minke, southern right and this humpback. They no longer have reason to fear people, or Zodiac boats. 8. Leopard seal. One of these guys can eat 16 penguins in a day. 9. We ventured out in sea kayaks, dwarfed by the landscape. It is a great irony of the Antarctic that although it holds 90 percent of the world’s ice and 70 percent of the world’s fresh water (in the ice), it receives so little precipitation that it is classified as the world’s largest desert.