Photographer and science journalist Jean de Pomereu, fascinated by Antarctica’s enormous icebergs, has produced a beautifully bleak series of the icy continent titled, Sans Nom. The series, captured in 2008 at the fourth International Polar Year, is deliberately absent of anything that could give scale to the nameless ice structures. Nameless because unlike mountains, for example, which are around for a long period of time, these icebergs are only present for one season and then they get released — they just disappear.

De Pomereu writes:

Icebergs without names. Totems of the underworld transiting at the frozen interface of water and atmosphere; born of the perpetual transformation of the physical realm. At a time when the vulnerability of the chryosphere is made increasingly apparent by the work of scientists, this series of photographs, Sans Nom, seek to evoke the fragility, as well as the generative power of ice.

The shot with a broad crack splitting the ice plains, is a particular favourite of mine. Demonstrating the fragility of the ice, the beginning of a break up process, the coming of summer.

Photography courtesy of Jean de Pomereu