The Arctic in Peril: The Story Behind One of TIME’s Top 100 Photos of 2025

It was an aerial shot of a Porcupine caribou herd traversing an icy river that caught TIME magazine’s attention. The image—captured by photographer Acacia Johnson from a Cessna flying above Alaska’s Coastal Plain—recently earned a spot in the publication’s Top 100 Photos of 2025.

As with most of Johnson’s photographs from a five-day shoot commissioned by NRDC in June, there isn’t a person or town or road in sight. Though humanity isn’t completely out of the picture.

The Gwich’in and Iñupiat, for instance, have been living here for millennia, sustainably hunting caribou as migration season has come and gone. Also here, in a place warming four times faster than the rest of the globe, the mark of anthropogenic climate change permeates the landscape. Melting glaciers and permafrost. More wildfires in the tundra. Less ice in the sea. 

And, confounding logic, there’s been a rash of recent political activity, swirling in and around Alaska’s North Slope, that seeks to expand some of the very same extractive industries that exacerbate this warming. 

This year, the Trump administration once again targeted the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas drilling and revoked rules that would have protected more than half of Alaska’s 23-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve. This included safeguards for Special Areas, such as Colville River and Teshekpuk Lake—regions that are significant, both ecologically and culturally, to the people and wildlife who inhabit them.

Fossil fuels aren’t the only threat here. To the southwest, the Trump administration also approved the construction of a 211-mile-long mining road that would cut through the roadless wilderness of the Brooks Range and Gates of the Arctic National Park, segmenting caribou calving grounds, threatening salmon runs, and beckoning further destructive development. A coalition of Alaska Native Tribes fought the Ambler Road project for years and won. They now must prepare to do so again to protect their lands, food sources, and way of life. 

This vast expanse—dubbed “America’s Serengeti”—shelters hundreds of thousands of caribou, millions of migratory birds from all over the world, and countless other species. All rely intensely on the integrity of the Alaskan Arctic, one of the few remaining undisturbed landscapes on earth.

“It was not lost on me that for many Americans, the idea of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge can seem distant and abstract,” reflects Johnson in her photography blog, which takes readers behind the scenes of her Arctic shoot. “Why, someone might ask, could it possibly be necessary to preserve an area that big?”

The range of life captured in her images, from towering mountains to delicate flowers, makes that answer clear. Still, these rare glimpses of the far north only hint at the enormity of what humanity stands to lose here at the top of the world. 

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