Frost-flecked and sun-chapped, a hunter braves the cold in Kangerlussuaq, an inlet in western Greenland’s Davis Strait.

Besides hampering the living of hunters there, thinning sea ice along Greenland’s fringes is threatening to capsize an entire ecosystem dependent on the ice—including seals, walruses, and polar bears.

(Photo shot on assignment for, but not published in, “Last Days of the Ice Hunter,” January 2006, National Geographic magazine)