Jeff Kerby maps extraordinary life at extremes

Jeff Kerby didn’t know he was looking for an Arctic poppy when he, fellow National Geographic Explorer Brian Buma and a team of researchers climbed to the top of the world to photograph it.

“I was hoping jealously that it was something like a poppy. It's more charismatic than a purple saxifrage.” Though frosted, purple saxifrage blooms lurked on a nearby mountainside on the northern coast of Inuit Qeqertaat—a small island off the northernmost coast of Greenland, and the last stretch of land on top of the earth.

Kerby and team trudged dozens of kilometers through bitter cold hauling gear, food, and even a rubber dingy to a staging camp on Greenland's north coastline. “So much gear,” he recalls. It was July. Kerby managed to snap some photos of the world’s northernmost flower while scouting, with plans to return the following day with his full kit, but the team was hit by a blizzard. Instead, they began hauling their gear back to their rendezvous point.

After nine days of being trapped in a tent, crawling out of a foot-and-a-half of snow, and braving 40 mph (65 kph) winds, they were unable to return to Inuit Qeqertaat on that trip. Kerby hoped that at least the picture of the world’s northernmost flower would be beautiful. 

But the purpose of the Expedition across Greenland’s northern shoreline was more than a photoshoot of the high tundra’s flora and fauna. The research team recorded other signs of life at this latitude with the aim of creating a digital map of the rarely visited region. A clump of mucronate screw moss that surpassed the lone poppy by only a few centimeters claimed the title of northernmost plant. A tiny short-tailed weasel—a stoat—emerged from its home in a pile of rocks along the shoreline and climbed over the crew. The northernmost settled mammal on land. The project was inspired by Buma’s 2017 harrowing trek to locate the world’s southernmost tree.

Identifying species at land’s true edges gives humans a point of reference to track as the planet evolves. “Every species has a northern limit, but we don’t really know where they are. We also know those limits are probably changing as climate change happens,” Kerby says. 

In the Arctic and Antarctica, melting coastal ice exposes more gravelly earth over time, tweaking the boundaries of the geographical record. During the research phase of the project, the team learned that Inuit Qeqertaat was confirmed as the northernmost island in the world the year prior. “As we dug deeper with the Society maps team, we saw that a section of the north coast needed updating based on the satellite imagery we gathered,” Kerby says, resulting in a redrawing of this portion of the official National Geographic Atlas. 

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The latest National Geographic Atlas of the World (2019) includes an island north of Inuit Qeqertaat, but the feature has since been eroded by shifting ice. Both the island and its label have been removed from National Geographic digital map data and the change will be reflected in the next Atlas edition.

Kerby is a trained ecologist, geographer and photographer whose career has largely been centered on a quest to understand nature’s patterns and sharing his discoveries. Phenology, or the seasonal rhythms of plant and animal life cycles, intrigues Kerby — particularly when shaped by climate in extreme environments. 

He spent five summers tracking the arrival and calving of a caribou herd in West Greenland, part of a long-term ongoing project. He’s helped place GPS collars on gazelle populations in Mongolian spring and then followed their search for food by overlaying their movements on satellite images. His interdisciplinary research weaves in narrative photography, satellite imagery and computational analyses derived from long field stays to document and understand Earth’s rhythms.

The poles have beckoned him repeatedly back, as the two most rapidly heating spots on the planet. Earth is warming four times faster at its northernmost latitudes than it does anywhere else, and life is responding.

“Shrubs are getting bigger, bare land is becoming vegetated. These little changes add up across the tundra regions to change the energy balance of the north, and even impact the global carbon cycle,” Kerby highlights.

Over the years he’s become familiar with some of the planet’s harshest environments, their inhabitants and how life thrives in spite of it all. “Whether it’s in the mountains of Ethiopia or the Arctic you see these incredible stories of survival and overcoming challenges,” Kerby says, having set up long-term stays in both, and beyond.

Nature’s patterns

Kerby references a quote from prominent Swedish botanist Olof Hedberg. In Ethiopia, there’s a saying that “it’s summer every day and winter every night.” In the East African country’s highlands, where Kerby bore witness to the reality of this phrase for the first time, one of the world’s toughest monkeys became his neighbor, photography subject and introduction to life’s rhythmic nature.

How he ended up working with gelada monkeys is an unconventional story. Kerby graduated university as a Russian studies major. He had accumulated so many science credits during a temporary pivot to pre-med that he double majored in biology, and in that time, became acquainted with behavioral ecology. He embarked on a field research project under the guidance of Drs. Peter Fashing and Nga Nguyen, anthropologists and founders of a gelada monkeys research and conservation project in Ethiopia.

Within days of his graduation, he boarded a plane to his new home for the next year: a tent pitched at 11,000 feet on a mountain ridge at the edge of the Great Rift Valley that overlooked a chasm of cascading hills pouring down to sea level. 

In retrospect, Kerby reflects that he applied for the post as “a response to failure,” after being rejected from an opportunity to work with seals in Siberia, and deeming himself not quite career-level fluent in Russian. Though he eventually surveyed Arctic greening in Siberia, and can hold conversations with Slavic language-speaking visiting scholars at the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge, where he’s currently based.

During his time in Ethiopia Kerby learned Amharic, too. And he observed the way the world’s only grass-eating primate would substitute invertebrates into its diet when edible forbs were scarce. The cliff dweller primates, also called bleeding heart monkeys for their characteristically bright red chest patches, challenged Kerby’s view of nature as “random and chaotic,” He grew increasingly interested in patterns and rhythms, especially in the foraging behavior of animals. “It’s an observable pattern that might explain more than humans realize,” he asserts.

Kerby has had a hand in studying the dietary adaptability of geladas. His career kickstarted in the Afroalpine ecosystem of the Guassa Community Conservation Area. Led by Dr. Peter Fashing, Kerby and a team of researchers, including fellow Explorer Vivek Venkataraman, found that adaptations in geladas' feeding strategies could provide insights into the dietary evolution of human ancestors, who may have at one point thrived on similar vegetation.

Life in the Ethiopian Highlands is harsh for the geladas. They spend the day foraging for nutrients in grass and forbs without much tree cover to conceal them from predators or shield them from frigid temperatures and rain. And though Guassa community conservation activity has been a boon for gelada prosperity, the monkeys’ future looks uncertain in the face of climate change and other threats. 

Reflecting on the delicate Arctic poppy he found pushing its way through seaside rocks to find the sun, Kerby wonders about life that can thrive in such tempestuous conditions. “What does it say about that plant, living all the way at the edge of land? And how can we all contribute to figuring out the fundamental processes that shape more hidden edges for species across the world?”

Photographs have worked as Kerby’s storytelling tool for the fascinating world of life at extremes. After a series of “mediocre at best” gelada portraits during his first one-year stay, and with return trips supported by Society grants, Kerby refined his use of photography. He adopted a visual language, in which he became so adept he published a magazine-worthy photo essay with National Geographic showcasing his deep connection with the primates. The story was published in the special issue showcasing the 100 greatest photographs of the last century.

He had observed gelada behavior closely. He knew how to spot something special.

When giving birth, geladas often isolate themselves to avoid aggressive behavior from other monkeys and remain silent in an effort to evade predators.

Photograph by Jeff Kerby

“I went over the hill and she was just standing there, being totally silent and usually they’re chatty,” Kerby recalls of a career-defining snapshot. “She started hunching and crunching up and I was like ‘Oh. Oh I think I know what’s about to happen here.’ I built on that biologist background to get a photo that I might’ve missed otherwise,” he acknowledges. “I’m glad I didn't mess up the focus or something silly that a biologist-turned-photographer might do.” 

There are benefits to his artistic eye belonging to a trained scientist. On the last trip to Greenland, “I’m sure Brian could have found a more technical photographer or a vegetation ecologist with a deeper knowledge of taxonomy, but in terms of one person I think I hit the local optimum,” he jokes, “I got to leverage my skill sets and save us a bit of weight on the airplane.” 

This duality cultivates a theme that runs through his photography: the intersection of natural history, ecology and computational analysis to make sense of the world and try to communicate that in a visually interesting way. “That’s a challenge that I struggle with, but it’s a motivator too.”

A collective effort

During the Covid lockdowns Kerby collaborated with a team of Explorers on a Society-funded project to generate an immersive, virtual reality journey through Qikiqtaruk–Herschel Island, a Yukon Territorial Park in northwest Arctic Canada. 

“We had all this existing drone data and couldn’t go into the field, and wouldn’t it be nice to access this environment,” which is not easily accessible even without a pandemic, “without really being there?”

The team partnered with Inuvialuit community leader, Richard Gordon, who narrated the piece, along with scientific collaborator and ecologist Isla Myers-Smith, a National Geographic Explorer. They enlisted the expertise of brain and food scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark to investigate how to indulge more of the senses so as to make the experience more memorable. They linked up with a perfume maker in Brazil to concoct the smell of permafrost. “It was like a dank, but nice perfume,” Kerby recalls. Though they eventually opted for a naturally occurring chemical — geosmin — that gives the earth its fresh forest scent after rainfall, a close match to the smell of thawing permafrost in some areas. 

Before the commercialization of drones, Kerby found a way to achieve a bird’s eye view by attaching a camera to a kite — a hack he learned from an archaeologist employing the low-tech surveying method in Peru. Model airplanes worked too. Both were methods Kerby used to document vegetation conditions at a caribou calving ground in Greenland during his doctoral research, and across many other Arctic regions since. 

The boom in cheap drones has made capturing patterns from the sky easier, which creates a visual bridge between the patterns of nature readily visible on the ground versus those seen from space. Photographs by Kerby and others explore the possibilities from the sky in his book, “The World from Above,” which published in October of this year.

“The drone footage is the thing that ultimately gives you the story of the map,” Kerby says, “something like a satellite image except you can zoom all the way down to an individual flower.” Kerby’s enthusiasm for what’s on the horizon is contagious. 

One observable pattern in humans? The notable collective effort to get things in motion. 

“So many of the projects that I’m working on now are these collective efforts where you have all of these people coming together that have different specialties, different backgrounds, different perspectives, and tackling that complexity to really achieve things that are astonishing.”

Kerby will involve computer scientists, ecologists, storytellers, community members, the local government of Greenland and a broader network of stakeholders whose interests align with his upcoming projects.

“I really appreciate that science happens that way now, and that photography and storytelling are also starting to happen that way now too. And I think we’re all benefiting from it.”

ABOUT THE WRITER
For the National Geographic Society: Natalie Hutchison is a Digital Content Producer for the Society. She believes authentic storytelling wields power to connect people over the shared human experience. In her free time she turns to her paintbrush to create visual snapshots she hopes will inspire hope and empathy.