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Renan Ozturk

Unloading equipment on the beach at Saunders Island–home to an array of marine wildlife including chinstrap penguins, elephant seals, and southern giant albatross.

As gusts of wind shake her tent, volcanologist Emma Nicholson carefully melts each snow sample into water and adds a chemical agent to preserve their composition for study back home in the lab.

The team steals a quick rest 300 feet below the summit during the first ascent of Mount Michael. The combination of humidity and wind caused rime, or bits of granular ice, to quickly form on clothing and equipment, and made hypothermia a constant risk.

Mt. Michael’s summit crater. Although scientists have long scrutinized the feature from space, the National Geographic expedition was the first humans to visit the site.

A moment of respite reveals the base camp’s tenuous perch on Saunder’s Island. Maintaining the phalanx of snow walls and keeping tents properly tethered required hours of work each day.

The Australis, a 75-foot steel-hulled motor-sailor vessel, supported the expedition throughout the month-long expedition.

Mountain guide Carla Perez watches from the bow of Australis as waves crash around her. Traveling against the prevailing winds, the 1200 mile return journey from Saunders Island lasted nearly two weeks.

Mt. Michael, an active volcano in the South Sandwich Islands, rises more than 3,000 feet above the southern Atlantic Ocean.

Andy Lewis crosses a slackline high above the valley floor in Moab, Utah. Photographer Renan Ozturk dedicated this photograph to his late friend Dean Potter, who first envisioned a free-solo image like this "moon walk," captured without digital manipulation within a single frame. After missing his first chance at the shot, Ozturk writes that he “stumbled through the night, arriving tired and bloody to the moonset/sunrise location on the opposite side of the towers.”