Freeze Frame: Sights, Sounds And Science From The Bottom Of The World For the next five weeks, we will feature dispatches from NPR science producer Jason Orfanon as he journeys to the Antarctic Peninsula, documenting life on the front lines of climate change research. You can also keep up with him Twitter: "@jorfanon."

By Jason Orfanon
Geographical coordinates: 53 degrees 9' 0" South, 70 degrees 55' 0" West

After three flights and more than 30 hours of traveling, I have arrived in Punta Arenas, Chile. This wind-swept town of some 150,000 people serves as a launching point for National Science Foundation (NSF) research vessels headed south to Antarctica.

The Laurence M. Gould, one of the National Science Foundation's Antarctic research and supply vessels, awaits its cargo of scientists, research assistants and crew at a dock in Punta Arenas, Chile. (Jason Orfanon/NPR)

Pictured above is one of them: the Laurence M. Gould, or LMG. This 230-foot, steel-hulled brute of ship will be my floating home for the next week. My final destination is Palmer Station, Antarctica, one of the most remote permanent research stations on Earth.

Screen grab of Google Maps

I'm here to accompany researchers studying issues related to climate change, ranging from ice and ocean currents, to microbes that feed on penguin poop, and even a possible ancient ecological disaster that could shed light on what's happening to our world today.

And the timing couldn't be better -- the Antarctic Peninsula is warming faster than anywhere else on the Earth. How these changes, and others like, will influence our climate -- and ultimately the future of our planet -- is one of the most pressing questions of our day.

A map shows Punta Arenas, Chile. (Jason Orfanon/NPR)

Coming up next ... a gear-lover's dream: I get outfitted with everything I need to survive Antarctica's icy extremes.

The winners from National Geographic's International Photography Contest will be announced in early December, but viewers have been voting on their favorites for the past few weeks. Here's a selection of a "viewer's choice" photographs. You can see more, or even vote yourself, at the contest page.

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By Claire O'Neill

Tim Burton is probably the only person who could get away with using a monster's mouth as the entrance to an art exhibition. You know him for his films Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas. Of all film director-producers today, Burton probably has the most singular vision: one of whimsy, gothic gore and hallucinogenic fictions.

Tim Burton on the set of Corpse Bride (Derek Frey)

But Burton has been an artist his whole life. Well before Beetlejuice and Batman, he was escaping into illustrated fantasy worlds as a child in Burbank, Calif. To celebrate his career, New York's Museum of Modern Art has curated a major retrospective exhibition, opening Sunday.

The exhibition contains hundreds of creations from throughout Burton's career, including little-known short films, sketches of unrealized projects from his days at Disney and seven new pieces, created just for the show.

MOMA asked Burton to produce a trailer for the retrospective and, in collaboration with Mackinnon & Saunders, the animation and puppeteer firm that helped with Corpse Bride, he produced this little short. Learn about the making of it on MOMA's site.

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By Debbie Elliott

A well-recognized foot soldier in the Civil Rights movement died Wednesday in Birmingham, Ala. James Armstrong marched at the head of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights March. The Army veteran carried the American flag across Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge as state troopers beat back marchers in what became known as Bloody Sunday. The struggle galvanized national support for the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Witnesses said Armstrong dropped to his knees, but never dropped the flag during the clash.

James Armstrong on election day 2008. (David Gilkey / NPR)

Armstrong ran a Birmingham barbershop for more than 50 years, and was instrumental in civil rights activities there. He sued to integrate schools, and helped coordinate sit-ins and demonstrations.

"I was always involved, always going to jail, always in the newspaper." Armstrong told NPR's David Gilkey on election day 2008. (Watch the video above).

"If you want a voice, you want things to be better, you have to vote.....I don't come to work until I vote, makes no difference how long the line is. I vote first." He said he votes because older generations didn't have the chance. "I never heard my Daddy talk about voting. I never heard my Mama talk about voting," he said.

Year after year, Armstrong carried the flag during reenactments of the voting rights march in Selma.

Armstrong was 86. His family said he died of heart failure.

By Claire O'Neill

Has Google joined the ranks of Robert Frank and Helen Levitt? Can Google capture what Cartier-Bresson referred to as the "decisive moment"? Does Google have the cool, objective perspective that photojournalists strive to attain? Jon Rafman might argue so. By scouring the street view offered by Google Maps, he has culled dozens of image that Google can add to its art portfolio.

In 2007, Google dispatched a fleet of cars -- each one bearing a pole with nine cameras -- with the goal of documenting the streets of the world. The images taken by these cameras have been available on Google Maps for a while, but Rafman took it upon himself to find the views worth looking at.

"This very way of recording our world," he wrote in a recent article, "this tension between an automated camera and a human who seeks meaning, reflects our modern experience." Of course the Google camera is completely indifferent to what it sees -- which makes its fleeting images of burning houses or stolen kisses all the more intriguing.

Surprisingly, Rafman remarked, the Google car was met with delight as much as it was with dismay, which may be a testament to our time: we've become habituated to lost privacy and heightened surveillance -- sometimes we even welcome it. Here's NPR; what does your street view look like? Upload it to our Flickr group pool.

Google Street View of NPR

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By Claire O'Neill

How do you think these ghostly photographs were made?

David Maisel is a visual artist who recently completed a residency at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. It was there that he came across the museum's archive of X-rays, used in the process of conserving artwork. "The ghostly images of these X-rays," he writes, "seem to surpass the power of the original objects of art." And so he began to photograph them.

Maisel has photographed and scanned these X-rays to create an eerie body of work. The photos in his series, History's Shadow, explore his recurring themes of memory and excavation. According to Maisel, "They make the invisible visible, and express through photographic means the shape-shifting nature of time itself, and the continuous presence of the past contained within us." View his Web site to learn more.

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There's a crazy landform in Madagascar called a tsingy, which, euphemistically translated from Malagasy, means "where one cannot walk barefoot." It's basically a treacherous forest of limestone spires that could impale anything, and cut straight through ropes and harnesses. It's one of the few places on Earth that, because of its remote location and dangerous landscape, has remained relatively unexplored. And it took National Geographic photographer Stephen Alvarez five days to reach it to shoot the story "Stone Forest" in November's magazine.

Alvarez, like many other National Geographic photographers, is known for photographing extreme, remote places. Much of his time is spent beneath the Earth's surface, exploring some of the most majestic cave systems on the planet. For this story, though, he spent his time above the ground. Way above the ground.

At a recent National Geographic event, Alvarez described the process of moving around this tsingy. He compared it to walking through New York City -- but instead of using the sidewalks, it's like climbing up one side of a building, then back down the other side, over and over again. "We were lucky to cover half a mile a day," Neil Shea writes in the magazine article.

This stone labyrinth, Shea describes, is a type of karst system, formed by porous limestone dissolved by water over time. "The exact processes that carved such an otherworldly stonescape," he writes, "are complex and rare." Only a few landforms like this exist in the world. And, surprisingly, this seemingly inhospitable place is home to rare plants and wildlife still being discovered -- such as the white-furred Decken's sifaka lemur. Fortunately, photographers like Alvarez can do the legwork to bring these surreal, remote landscapes to us with beautiful pictures.

To learn more, check out the article and photos on ngm.com, and view more work by Alvarez on his Web site.

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By Claire O'Neill

For Americans, the days of extreme cultural revolution have arguably subsided. The heyday of rock has come and gone, as have new wave and punk -- even post-punk -- and grunge. So it seems like we've gotten a lot of musical subversion out of our system. But, spin to the Earth's other hemisphere, and the musical revolution has only just begun. According to photographer Matthew Niederhauser, simply listening to rock constitutes rebellion in China.

Niederhauser, a freelance photojournalist based in Beijing, first stumbled into a dive bar called D-22 in 2007. It was there that he happened upon Beijing's underground music scene, and he has been documenting it ever since. His new book, Sound Kapital, shows this burgeoning scene in photos.

As he writes, "For now, China remains in a liminal state between the socialist idealism of old and a calamitous drive for wealth spurred by free-market reforms." And the rockers are rejecting both. It may be a small scene, but it's exploding. NPR's Zoe Chace went to see one of Beijing's rock bands in Brooklyn, and the line wrapped around the door. Tune in to All Things Considered today to hear the story, and check out Niederhauser's Web site to view more of his work.

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Today on All Things Considered, host Melissa Block speaks with National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen about his new book, Polar Obsession. Listen here.

How many people can say with nonchalance, "I've had good friends of mine ... eaten by grizzly bears"? Paul Nicklen can, for one. He's a National Geographic photographer who was raised in Canada's Arctic and has spent the past 20 years documenting extreme polar regions.

Nicklen blends in with the surroundings during a whiteout in East Svalbard

Nicklen had a unique childhood. He grew up in a small and remote Inuit community on Baffin Island with no radio, no TV and no telephone. His idea of fun included lying in blizzards until his body went numb, building sleds and tending pet seals. It was a secluded youth -- and to anyone else, a bit extreme. But to Nicklen, it was as idyllic as childhood gets. "I was taking care of dog teams by the time I was 5," he tells NPR's Melissa Block. "It's just a completely different world, and ... I fell in love with it."

So it makes sense that his idea of fun today includes many of the same things: extreme temperatures, exploration and animal friendships. After a brief stint at the University of Victoria to earn a biology degree, Nicklen made a prompt return to Canada's Arctic, where he began a career as a nature photojournalist. "As I got to be older, as a biologist and photojournalist," he says, "I realized that these are the tools I can now use to protect the place that I fell in love with as a kid."

Polar Obsession (Paul Nicklen/National Geographic)

It's not an easy job. "In pursuit of the photographs I've taken over the past 20 years," he writes in the book's introduction, "I've crashed my ultra light airplane, fallen through the sea ice ... and suffered frostbite... I've also become lost in blizzards and been bitten by fur seals and elephant seals, charged by a grizzly bear, sniffed through the thin fabric of a tent by a polar bear."

All in a day's work. To Nicklen, though, it's worth the risk. "How are people supposed to care about the environment when they're living in a cement jungle?" he wonders in the interview. To make them care, he goes to extremes. Nicklen is on a mission to bring these remote habitats to those of us who may never see them, to make us care about the endangered polar ecosystems and the animals that inhabit them. His photos appear in a new book, Polar Obsession, published by National Geographic.

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By Claire O'Neill

Spirit, our poor little Mars rover, has been stuck in sand for the past six months with a broken front wheel. But NASA has a rescue plan. Joe Palca has the story on All Things Considered today, so be sure to tune in.

The fact that Spirit has even lasted this long is quite the technological marvel. Its mission was designed to last 90 days, but the craft will celebrate its six-year anniversary in January. In that time, Spirit and its twin rover, Opportunity, have captured more than a quarter-million images.

Jim Bell, professor of astronomy at Cornell, was in charge of primary camera photography for the Spirit and Opportunity rover missions to Mars and put many of those photos in a book, Postcards From Mars. He was the first to take on the painstaking task of editing, cropping and processing these images, many of which are larger than 100 megabytes! They provide a unique view of what life is like on Mars, even from a sand trap.

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