In the wake of a career spent chronicling the extreme lengths humans must undergo to adapt to a capricious and uncaring nature, Werner Herzog’s latest film travels to his most inhospitable environment yet—the barren depths of the Antarctic. The film documents the bizarre community of scientists living on the South Pole and the icy, fiery depths to which their work takes them. Nominated for an Academy Award, Encounters shows us that even as humans venture beneath glaciers and inside volcanoes, finally making truly inhospitable areas reachable, the landscape they study is quickly disappearing.

Presented as part of the Depth of Field 2009-2010 Series: Adaptology: Natural Selections on Humans & the Environment

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