CARSTEN PETER

Carsten Peter plumbed the depths of caverns in Patagonia for his June 2001 National Geographic article "Deep Into the Land of Extremes." A World Press Photo award winner and regular contributor to National Geographic magazine, Carsten specializes in going to extremes: scuba diving in a glacier on Mont Blanc, crossing the Sahara on a camel, caving in Borneo. He searches for wild places where his survival depends on his wits and his skills as a technical climber, paraglider, caver, diver, and canyoneer. 

Carsten is enthusiastically obsessed with devising innovative photographic techniques to capture never-before-seen images from some of the scariest environments on the planet. His many adventures include braving toxic caverns and acid waterfalls to shoot within the deepest ice shafts on Earth, rappelling into active volcanoes with turbulent lava lakes and superheated thermal caves, and breaking altitude records while flying his motorized paraglider.

In addition to his World Press awards—for his coverage of tornadoes while storm-chasing in the U.S. West and of Hang Son Doong cave in Vietnam—he has received an Emmy Award for his videography from inside an active volcano in the South Pacific. For his work and his intrepid spirit, his peers named him the National Geographic Photographer's Photographer in 2012.