The photographs from the past 12 months reveal a time when severe environmental damage, nature's growing unpredictability and mankind's passion - for causes good and bad - were the dominant forces. Here, Post Magazine presents the year in review.
A new form of tourism has been born this year. The objective is to visit some of the world's renowned destinations before they are changed forever. According to The New York Times, US travel professionals call this 'tourism of doom'. High on the list of threatened hotspots are a trip to Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro before its ice cap melts and the Artic before it is transformed from an ice sheet into a mutinous sea.
Customers for this kind of tourism have a simple way of defining their quest - they want to see important sights that are expected to vanish within a generation.
This year saw a record loss of Arctic sea ice, allowing the Northwest Passage to open up for the first time in more than a century. Sea-ice experts are starting to fear their profession is melting away before their eyes. Several leading climatologists predict that by 2013, Atlantic sea ice will vanish every summer.
The Northwest Passage is expected to be open again next year and some enterprising travel agents have already begun taking bookings for a voyage that has hitherto been impossible for modern cruise ships.
In the midst of this commercial opportunism, 2007 saw large numbers of scientists start to refer to the Earth's climate change as irreversible. The most striking photographs of 2007 reflect this trend. As China's monstrous economic boom engulfed large sections of the nation in throat-searing smog and the United States persisted with its fossil-fuel addiction, the planet seemed to be overwhelmed by a rash of floods, fires and storms.
